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We must be fully convinced that the flight will be a success. It will be more complicated than previous flights, and the preparation will have to be appropriately longer . . . We do not intend to rush our programme. Excessive haste leads to fatal accidents, as in the case of the three American astronauts last January.4

Kamanin’s anxiety presaged disaster. Alexei Leonov says, ‘The first manned test of the Soyuz was assigned to Vladimir Komarov, with Yuri Gagarin as the back-up, and another Soyuz spacecraft was being prepared for Yuri to fly at a later date. He trained very hard for two years, reporting the progress of his training in detail to the State Committee. Then Komarov flew for two days [specifically, 27 hours] and we had a big problem.’

Komarov’s launch was supposed to be followed a day later by another Soyuz with three more crewmen aboard: Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov and Alexei Yeliseyev. The two Soyuz ships were supposed to dock, then Khrunov and Yeliseyev were scheduled to spacewalk into Komarov’s capsule and sit in his spare seats, thus producing another world ‘first’ – going up in one ship and coming home in another. This was designed as a rehearsal for a future moon mission. The Soyuz did not yet include an airtight docking tunnel, so the only way of swapping a crewman between the capsule and a future lunar lander would be to spacewalk him from hatch to hatch.

It seems likely that the Brezhnev administration wanted the docking to take place on or around May Day. The year 1967 had a special significance in the communist calendar; it was the fiftieth Anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The concept of making a ‘union’ between two spaceships collaborating in orbit was highly symbolic, especially for a ruling government obsessed with symbols. In 1982 Victor Yevsikov, an engineer on the Soyuz development team who helped design the heat-shield, admitted from his new safe haven in Canada that heavy political pressure was applied to Vasily Mishin and OKB-1 to get the two Soyuz ships into orbit on time:

Some launches were made almost exclusively for propaganda purposes. An example, timed to celebrate International Solidarity Day in 1967, was the ill-fated flight of Vladimir Komarov . . . The management of the OKB-1 Design Bureau knew that the Soyuz vehicle had not been completely debugged, and more time was needed to make it operational, but the Communist Party ordered the launch, despite the fact that four preliminary unmanned tests had revealed faults . . . The flight took place despite Vasily Mishin’s refusal to sign the endorsement papers for the Soyuz re-entry vehicle, which he considered unready.5

As the deadline for the mission drew near, OKB-1 technicians knew of 203 separate faults in the spacecraft that still required attention. Yuri Gagarin was closely involved in this assessment.6 By March 9, 1967, he and his closest cosmonaut colleagues had produced a formal ten-page document, with the help of the engineers, in which all the problems were outlined in detail. The trouble was, no one knew what to do with it. Within Soviet society, bad news always reflected badly on the messenger. Quite apart from Mishin, as many as fifty senior engineers knew about the report, or had helped draft it, but none of them felt sufficiently confident to go into the Kremlin and do what had to be done: request that Leonid Brezhnev play down the symbolism of the pending launch, so as to allow a decent delay for technical improvements.

The cosmonauts and space bureaucrats eventually adopted an age-old technique. They recruited a non-partisan messenger from outside the Soyuz programme to deliver the document for them: Yuri Gagarin’s KGB friend Venyamin Russayev.

‘Komarov invited me and my wife to visit his family,’ says Russayev. ‘Afterwards, as he was seeing us off, he said straight out, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.” As I knew the state of affairs, I asked him, “If you’re so convinced