Kamanin departed immediately, to officially inform the widows Gagarin and Seregin of their loss, while the crash team began the sad business of removing the wreckage from its cold, wet grave.
At Star Town the mood was of complete shock. People stopped and talked, heads shaking. Mothers hushed noisy children. Even Saditsky, never one to show a serious emotion, had red-rimmed eyes when I met him coming back from exercises on Thursday morning. (Only about a dozen cosmonauts showed up, all of them from the Third and Fourth Enrollments.) “This is truly terrible,” he said.
“He must have been a good friend.”
“Yes, but more than that. They talk about how he proved that you could survive a trip into space, and he certainly did that. But he also survived the return — with all the attention, all the booze, the politics. He could have turned into a complete monster, with a big car and a dacha and all the women in the world, but he didn’t. To the very end he was looking out for the rest of us. He was fighting for us.” He put his hands to his eyes for a moment. “And they killed him.”
I could see that Saditsky was upset, not thinking straight. “By pushing him back into the cockpit so soon?”
“No. They took advantage of him. He’d wanted to fly again for years, but the bigshots wouldn’t let him. So when he started fighting them, they had to get rid of him. What better way than a plane crash?”
I remember my father telling me that whenever someone in the military dies under unusual circumstances, it’s always reported as a “plane crash.” Marshal Nedelin, head of the Rocket Force, had been vaporized along with 150 others in an October 1960 explosion at Baikonur. His official obituary said he had died in a “plane crash while fulfilling his duties.”
“I thought the 15 was supposed to be our most reliable aircraft.”
“Every aircraft is reliable, until it fails.”
That was the last I saw of Saditsky until nine P.M., when all of the sixty-some cosmonauts were bused to a facility in northeast Moscow, where the remains of Gagarin and Seregin were cremated. The urns containing the ashes were to go on public display at the Central Army House at nine the next morning.
Unlike every other bus ride I’ve taken with my fellow cosmonauts, this one returning us to Star Town was subdued, almost entirely silent. I sat with Shiborin toward the back, where I quite innocently told him what Saditsky had said, that Gagarin had been killed.
To my surprise, Shiborin reacted as if I had just told him he had a nose on his face somewhere below and between his two brown eyes. “No question. He was getting too powerful. Somebody wanted him dead.”
I don’t know which shocked me more — the automatic confirmation of what seemed, to me, a paranoid fantasy, or the fact that I was hearing it from Shiborin, the world’s purest Communist. “Who? Brezhnev? The Hammer? Artemov?”
“None of them. But somebody around them, absolutely. Look at our pathetic history and tell me that it would surprise you.”
Well, I had long ago accepted the idea that a mysterious someone had probably murdered Sergei Korolev. Accepting the idea that Gagarin could have been killed did not require me to reorder my thinking on a major scale.
However, if you believed that both had been murdered, you had to start wondering if the killings were linked. Who would want to cut the heart out of the Soviet space program?
I pondered this over the next two days, as the normal work of Star Town ceased and we gave ourselves over to public mourning. All of the cosmonauts of Military Unit 26266 took turns standing honor guard at the Central Army House, where the line of mourners was so long we were forced to open the viewing early, and keep it open almost to midnight.
I returned home to find an invitation slipped under my door: “The family and friends of Yu. A. Gagarin and V. S. Seregin invite you to honor the memory of Yuri Alexeyevich and Vladimir Sergeyevich on the day of their funeral, March 30, 1968, at 1600 in the Central House of the Soviet Army (Commune Square, Building 2).”
So, on that Saturday afternoon, with the first hints of spring in the air, with all of the cosmonauts, both military and civilian, in attendance, not to mention Brezhnev, Kosygin, Ustinov, Afanasyev, and a multitude of marshals and generals (among them, Colonel-General Nikolai Ribko), the urns carrying the ashes of Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin were carried from the Central Army House to nearby Commune Square, then down Neglinny Street toward the House of Unions. The streets were lined with mourners, Muscovites of all ages weeping openly.
At the House of Unions the urns were placed on motorized gun carriages as the procession proceeded into Red Square, where the urns were placed in the Kremlin Wall next to Marshal Malinovsky, not far from both Vladimir Komarov and Sergei Korolev. The whole pathetic ceremony was over by three P.M.
At four-thirty, however, we were back at the Central Army House for the memorial speeches. Exhausted, emotionally drained, most of us departed by eight.
I believe some of those speeches are still going on.
As in any military unit, especially one devoted to flight, you mourn the loss of your comrades, you wear the black armband for the appropriate time, then you move on.
That was the air around Star Town as March became April. Of course, all I saw was my own little part of it, that involving the Fourth Enrollment. What was being said by senior cosmonauts such as Leonov and Belyayev, friends of Gagarin, I did not know.
I tried to find some way to link the murder of Korolev with the possible murder of Gagarin, and found nothing. No single person or group that would have benefited from both. I still wasn’t clear who benefited from the death of Korolev, unless it was the Americans. Who, by the way, conducted the second flight of their giant Saturn V-5 rocket on April 4. (I am always able to remember this date, because the great African-American leader Martin Luther King was murdered the same day.)
Unlike the first test, this second Saturn V-5 came close to disaster. During the flight of the first stage, a vicious pogo effect started, in which the spacecraft began to vibrate up and down as many as five or six times a second, with the force of up to ten Gs.
The first stage separated as planned, however, but the more fragile second stage paid the price, losing one of its five engines four minutes into its burn, followed by a second engine moments later. The whole vehicle was in danger of going out of control and having to be destroyed.
The NASA flight controllers showed patience and courage, however, simply waiting to see what might happen. Luckily, the two failed engines were opposite each other, so the overall thrust of that stage remained symmetrical.
Of course, with thrust reduced by forty percent, the three remaining engines were forced to keep burning longer than planned and to a higher altitude. When the second stage shut down and the single third-stage engine took over, the third-stage guidance reacted with alarm to its unusual altitude, so it actually tried to point itself down toward the center of the Earth in order to get back on the proper path!
After a minute or so of that, the third-stage guidance realized it was now too low, so it pitched up, so far that it actually went into orbit backward.
In retrospect, it was almost a comical performance, one that was beyond the capability of any Soviet rocket, which would have destroyed itself with the initial violent pogo effect.
But it showed that America still hadn’t mastered the equipment it needed to land on the Moon. We still had a chance.