 |
| "Poyekhali!" - "Let's go!" - Yury Gagarin said as his rocket lifted off on 12 April 1961. |
As we move into the area
commemorating manned Space flight, there is a splendid film showing early examples of Cosmonaut training, including what
looks like cross-country running in just swimming trunks and trainers; diving
and jumping off the high board into a swimming pool; and Cosmonauts being
whirled round in a centrifuge.
 |
| The type of ejector seat and spacesuit used by Yury Gagarin and all other Cosmonauts in the Vostok programme. This is displayed alongside the Vostok-5 Capsule, flown by Valery Bykovsky for five days in 1963. Displayed in the Museum of Cosmonautics in Kaluga, Russia. |
Alongside the screen is an ejector seat, complete with dummy
dressed in the sort of orange jumpsuit and white helmet which Yury Gagarin
wore for his flight on 12 April 1961. Many visitors were unaware that the first
six Cosmonauts – from Gagarin in Vostok-1 to Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok-6 –
had to eject from the capsule after re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere,
because had they not done so the force with which the capsule hit the ground
would have killed them. So at 7km above the ground the hatch flew open and the
ejector seat was catapulted out. The Cosmonaut was then in free-fall for 3km,
before in another pre-programmed move he or she was separated from the seat,
the parachutes on both Cosmonaut and seat opened and they drifted down to
Earth. For us mere mortals, that sounds like a terrifying experience.
Turning right, we come to a
veritable wall of memorabilia commemorating the first manned Space flight, by
Yury Gagarin. His pilot’s mask and military tunic bearing the stars of a
colonel (left), deliberately point up the empty space left by Gagarin’s sudden death
in 1968 when the jet he was testing crashed. But then the medical student’s white coat painted with the words “КОСМОС НАШ!” (Space is Ours! - Below, right),
actually worn by a student on Red Square to see Gagarin presented to the
Russian people; and the mementoes of his visit to Britain in July 1961, remind
us that he was very much alive and very much a hero in the wake of his flight.
Britain was the first foreign
country to which Gagarin travelled after his historic mission into Space; and
the invitation came not from the British Government, but from the Amalgamated
Union of Foundry Workers, recalling that Gagarin had worked briefly as a steel
worker before he became a test pilot and then Cosmonaut. The solid-gold medal the Union presented to Gagarin as an honorary
member of the Union is on display. However, as one of the photographs shows, below the
“YG 1” number plate from the Rolls Royce in which he was transported while
in England, so great was the welcome for the World’s first Spaceman that the
Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was persuaded to meet him.
And the introductions didn’t stop
there. Gagarin was taken to Buckingham Palace to have dinner with the Queen and
Prince Philip. A signed and framed photo
of the Royal Family at Balmoral which is displayed was presented to Gagarin
as a souvenir of his visit to the Palace. It now bears on each end the stamp of
the Mir Space Station, having been taken there in 1991 by Helen Sharman,
Britain’s first Cosmonaut.
 |
| Statue of Gagarin near the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The statue was presented to London to mark the 50th anniversary of his Space flight. |
Another example of how the
symposium on 5 February added to the Cosmonaut Experience was the snippets of
colourful information provided by Slava Gerovitch in his talk, Cosmonauts inside a Propaganda Machine.
Gagarin, Gerovitch revealed, was shocked by the public reaction to his Spaceflight.
He was amazed at the genuine outpouring of joy and emotion which led hundreds
of thousands to flood onto the streets of Moscow when he returned to the
capital.
The Soviet authorities were
shocked, too. For them, words such as “spontaneous” or “initiative” were
dangerous; “spontaneous demonstrations” involved each factory and place of work
providing a specific number of people to take part in a parade or to line the
route. They carried carefully produced flags and banners displaying the
Communist Party’s approved messages. Thousands of people pouring onto the
streets in a genuinely spontaneous show of emotion, with home-made slogans such
as the “Space is Ours” lab coat described above, made the authorities very
nervous. Fortunately for them, the population of Moscow in 1961 was still
politically naïve and living in the shadow of Joseph Stalin, so it was highly
unlikely that such a public demonstration would have become the sort of political
protest which was to happen in the late 1980’s and was to culminate in the
collapse of the USSR.
Not only was Gagarin not prepared
for such a demonstration, he was also unprepared for being thrust into the
public eye as he was. Even though many people commented – and continue to
comment today – on Gagarin’s handsome face, warm smile and relaxed attitude
which, for example, saw him shakes hands with the British policemen
accompanying his cavalcade in London, he was not a natural public speaker. Why
should he be? Even though he was used to working as part of a team, both as a
test pilot and a Cosmonaut, when it came to the sharp end of the job he was on
his own, both in a cockpit and in the Vostok-1 capsule. So he did not feel
comfortable being forced to stand up and speak in front of an audience or, even
worse, being asked questions at a press conference.
 |
| Official photo of Yury Gagarin. Note the kink in the left eyebrow. |
And even if Gagarin was regarded by
many as a super-man, Gerovitch revealed that he was also…a man. If you examine
photos of Gagarin taken a while after his Spaceflight, (such as the one on the right) you can see that his
left eyebrow has a kink in it, rather like an upside-down “v”. This is due to
an accident he suffered when he jumped off a balcony whilst visiting someone
else’s wife. When he fell, he broke a facial bone and was left with a scar
going through his left eyebrow and up his forehead. The scar was airbrushed out
in official photos, but the kink in the eyebrow remained.
A photo of Gagarin on the bus to
the rocket hints at a more tragic tale, too. For years, the figure standing
behind him on the bus was deliberately blurred to conceal his identity. The
doctoring of photos was often practised in the Soviet Union to remove
individuals who had become political outcasts or alter moments in history (very
much a la George Orwell’s novel, 1984). In 1981, while researching his
book, Red Star in Orbit, an American
writer, James Oberg, came across an example of this which gave a vital clue as
to the identity of the blurred figure. Oberg published two versions of a
photograph from May 1961 taken in Sochi. It was of the leading Cosmonauts from
the first group, and in the original photo there were six Cosmonauts. In a
later version, which he published below the original, there were only five. It
was to transpire that the man missing from the second photograph was the same
one who had been standing behind Gagarin in the photo on the bus to the rocket.
This was Grigory Nelyubov.
 |
| The undoctored official photograph of Gagarin on the bus heading for the launch-pad. Grigory Nelyubov is standing behind Gagarin, in semi-profile. |
Nelyubov had been a candidate for
the first Spaceflight, but when he wasn’t granted that honour he was still expected
to be the third or fourth to go into Space. This all changed after he and two
other Cosmonaut trainees, Ivan Anikeyev and Valentin Filyatev, were returning
to Star City from a weekend away and, possibly drunk, got into a fight with
security officials at the local train station. When it was discovered who they
were, the officials were prepared to ignore the incident; but one officer
insisted that the three Cosmonauts apologise. Anikeyev and Filyatev agreed to
do this; but Nelyubov, who had a reputation for arrogance, refused; he, after
all, was a Cosmonaut, why should he have to demean himself with an apology?
When word got back to the Cosmonaut
Corp Commander, Nikolai Kamanin, all three men were expelled from the
Cosmonauts programme. The other Cosmonauts on the programme were appalled that
Nelyubov had taken two others down with him. Nelyubov was sent back to
Vladivostok as a fighter pilot. Few of those around him there believed his
boasts that he had been a Cosmonaut-in-training. He became increasingly
isolated, and to add to his misery he watched as the other Cosmonauts he had
trained with – and then more junior ones – flew in Space. Depression and
alcoholism took an ever-firmer grip on him; and in the early hours of 18
February 1966, he fell – or jumped – under a train and was killed. The first
that was revealed about this tragic story came only 20 years later, in an
article by a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov. In April 1986, in a series
of articles he wrote to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gagarin’s flight,
Golovanov told Nelyubov’s story. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost – openness – was beginning to
bear fruit.
No comments:
Post a Comment