Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [91]
Throughout all his years working to give the Soviets a lead in space, Korolev had never discussed his arrest, torture, beatings and imprisonment under the old Stalinist regime. People thought of him as a burly man, built like a bear, but the truth was that his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries. He could not turn his neck, but had to swivel his upper torso to look people in the eye; nor could he open his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud.
Two days before he was scheduled for surgery he was resting at his home in the Ostankino district of Moscow. Gagarin and Leonov came to visit him with several other colleagues, and at the end of the evening, just as most of the visitors were putting on their greatcoats to leave, Korolev said to his two favourite cosmonauts, ‘Don’t go just yet. I want to talk.’ So his wife Nina fetched some more food and drink, and for four hours, well into the early hours of the morning, Korolev told the story of his early life – a story that Leonov has never forgotten. ‘He told us how he was arrested, taken away and beaten. When he asked for a glass of water, they smashed him in the face with the water jug . . . They demanded a list of so-called traitors and saboteurs [in the early rocket programme] and he could only reply that he had no such list.’ Korolev described how he saw, through puffy eyes, that his captors had pushed a piece of paper between his bruised fingers for him to sign; how they beat him again, and sentenced him to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia. ‘Yuri and I were both struck by the unexpected parts of his story,’ says Leonov.
From a living death in Siberia, Korolev was recalled to Moscow when an old ally of his, the renowned aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, requested him for war work. He would be assigned to a less harsh special prison facility for engineers, which included design offices and better living conditions.6 In fact, Tupolev was himself a prisoner. But no special arrangements were made to transport Korolev to Moscow, and he had to improvise. Cold beyond endurance and hallucinating with hunger, he found a hot loaf of bread on the ground one day, apparently dropped from a passing truck. ‘It seemed like a miracle,’ he told Gagarin and Leonov. He worked as a labourer and shoe repairer to earn his passage back to Moscow by boat and rail. His teeth were now loose and bleeding, because he had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables in a year. Trudging along a dirt track one day, he collapsed. An old man rubbed herbs on his gums and propped his body to face the feeble sun, but he collapsed again. As Leonov vividly recalls, ‘He told us he could see something fluttering. It was a butterfly, something to remind him of life.’
It seems that after so many years’ silence the ailing Chief Designer now wanted to unburden himself to his two favourite young friends. The two cosmonauts were deeply affected by what they heard. Leonov says, ‘This was the first time that Korolev had ever talked about his imprisonment in the Gulag, since these stories are usually kept secret . . . We began to realize there was something wrong with our country . . . On our way home, Yuri couldn’t stop questioning: how could it be that