The exact dialogue between Gagarin and his recruiters is not on record. However, one of his fellow pilots at the Nikel airbase, Georgi Shonin, was assigned for cosmonaut training soon after Gagarin, and his experience of the selection process must have been pretty similar. ‘At first we talked about the usual boring things. How did I like the Air Force? Did I like flying? What did I do in my free time? What did I like to read? And so on. A couple of days later a second round of talks began. This time far fewer of us had been called for. The talks now became more specific.’ Shonin went to Moscow without really knowing why, then came back to Nikel utterly punctured, probed, exhausted, but apparently listed fit by the doctors for whatever new job awaited him. The recruiters sat him down one last time. ‘They asked me, “How would you feel about flying in more modern planes?” And the answer dawned on me.’ At that time some air regiments were switching over to new high-performance fighters and Shonin assumed that the Nikel squadron was about to become one of the lucky ones. But no, the recruiters were not interested in anything so banal as putting him in a new kind of MiG. ‘They asked me, “What if it was a question of flying something completely new?” I immediately cooled off, because I knew a lot of pilots were being transferred to helicopter units.’ Shonin regarded helicopters as complex but unappealing machines with no speed, no style and, above all, no status. ‘I’m a fighter pilot,’ he pleaded. ‘I specially chose a flying school where I’d train for combat jets, and now you want me—’
One of the recruiters interrupted him. ‘No, you don’t understand. What we’re talking about are long-distance flights on rockets. Flights all the way round the earth.’
‘My mouth dropped open in surprise,’ Shonin remembers. But he took the job. Gagarin was recruited ahead of him by several weeks, and although no record exists to prove it, he and Valya must have welcomed a chance to escape from Murmansk with honour intact. He explained to her that he had been selected as a test pilot for new types of aircraft and was to be stationed just outside Moscow. They left Nikel on March 8, 1960, gladly giving away their standard-issue furniture to other families on the base.
On starting his new job, 26-year-old Gagarin found himself in a group of just twenty ‘cosmonauts’ finally selected out of an initial candidate list of 2,200 from all over the Soviet Union. This first squad would become very tight-knit, despite the obvious (if unspoken) rivalry to gain actual space flights. Gagarin’s relationship with fellow recruit Gherman Stepanovich Titov would develop into something much more complicated – an unspoken contest to win the first human flight into space.
To the other cosmonauts, Gagarin came across as an easy-going fellow. By contrast, Gherman Titov seemed proud and aloof, even to his friends, and sometimes rather strange, too. He loved to spout reams of poetry or quote fragments of stories and novels, not just the modern approved works, but real literature from the old Tsarist days. His father, Stepan Pavlovich, was a teacher and had named him Gherman after a character in a story by Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Queen of Spades’.[2]
Titov’s was an intensely self-possessed character. In 1950, at the age of fourteen, he crashed his bicycle and broke his wrist, but instead of running home and pleading for comfort, he pretended that nothing had happened. He nursed his pain in secret, unwilling to admit any weakness because he had already signed up for elementary training in aviation school at the next available opportunity, and he did not want his accident to spoil his chances of selection. When he finally received his papers as a cadet in 1953, he worried that the military medics might investigate his bones and call his bluff. They did not; instead, he called theirs. He took to performing early-morning exercises on a set of parallel bars, until his flawed wrist appeared as good as the other. He trained at the Volgograd Air Station for two years, graduating with distinction, and in 1959 was, like Gagarin, interrogated by mysterious visitors as a potential cosmonaut. The space doctors took Titov apart with greater rigour than the Air Force, but still they failed to find anything amiss in their X-rays, and he was selected to be part of the first group of twenty cosmonauts, along with Gagarin. Long after it was too late, the medical examiners told him that if they had known about his old wrist injury, they would never have sanctioned his recruitment.
While Gagarin’s face was open and quite easy to read, Titov’s eyes were hooded and dark, his nose set stern. His mouth often seemed to narrow in disapproval, so that his expression could verge on arrogance. He was quick-tempered and was not afraid to speak his mind. He wore his uniform smartly, and his glossy, brown wavy hair helped create the impression of a bourgeois cavalry officer; as did his personal pride, too much poetry and a suspicion of class (just because he had read a few books and his father was a schoolteacher). Titov was not the sort of man who would easily prosper in an egalitarian workers’ and peasants’ paradise – except for one valuable saving grace. He had proved himself excellent in one of the few realms of Soviet life where individual excellence was encouraged: up in the air, protecting the Motherland in a MiG.
Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was another important figure in Gagarin’s new life as a cosmonaut. Born in May 1934, Leonov was almost exactly the same age, although his well-rounded, happy face and slightly thinning hair gave him a more middle-aged appearance. As a young man he considered becoming an artist, and in 1953 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Riga, but almost at once he had a change of heart, applying instead to the Air Force school at Chuguyev. There he became a talented parachutist and qualified as an instructor. His chunky features belied a super-fit condition, and he trained with intense self-discipline as a fencer and runner, almost always finding time in the early morning for a four-kilometre workout. When the space recruiters came to Chuguyev in 1959 he soon got himself a new posting.[3]
Leonov’s sense of humour was infectious, often mischievous, and as long as he was not thwarted or irritated, he was a genuinely lovable man, although in keeping with all his cosmonaut colleagues he was fiercely determined to succeed in his new profession. When it came to work and training he could be cold-blooded at times, but by and large his humour and professionalism won him many allies. He always retained his fascination for art, taking sketchbooks everywhere he went (including into orbit) and eventually becoming one of the leading Soviet space artists. He became Gagarin’s closest friend from the earliest days of their cosmonaut training. ‘I quickly discovered for myself the kindness of this man’s nature,’ Leonov says today. ‘Yuri liked his friends very much and paid them a lot of attention. He kept in touch with old ones and very easily made new ones. Our relationship was especially warm because we knew each other for a long time and, even when he became famous, it didn’t affect him. He always stayed a very good friend.’
On January 11, 1960, a special cosmonauts’ training centre was inaugurated under the directorship of medical scientist Yevgeny Karpov. His second-in-command, directly responsible for the cosmonauts’ recruitment, training and ‘ideological reliability’, was General Nikolai Kamanin, a tough and highly ambitious combat veteran with no discernible sense of humour. The space historian James Oberg has described him as ‘an ageing war hero and authoritarian space tsar, a martinet’,[4] while Yaroslav Golovanov, who was intimately connected with the early Soviet space programme, remembers him as ‘a terrifyingly evil man, a malevolent person, a complete Stalinist bastard’. In time, many of the cosmonauts would come to hate Kamanin, but his strict military discipline, his remorseless attention to detail and his refusal to accept anything but the highest standards from his students would prepare them successfully (in most cases) for the rigours of space.
2
Hooper, Gordon R.,
4
Oberg, James,