When Gagarin and his nineteen colleagues arrived for training, few suitable facilities existed to prepare them for space. Karpov and Kamanin were allocated a large swathe of birch and pine woodland forty kilometres north-east of Moscow, and in March 1960 they began construction of a secret base called Zvyozdny Gorodok, or ‘Star City’. A huge square compound was cleared in the middle of the site, thoroughly screened from any nearby roads by the surrounding woodlands. A simple hostel was built; some standard-issue barracks; and a number of low buildings to house the training facilities, some of which – as the cosmonauts would discover to their cost – were designed to inflict stress, trauma, loneliness and exhaustion. In time, Star City would grow to the size of a small town, with its own private community of bars, hotels, sports clubs and administration centres. A short distance to the south, a large and sprawling Air Force base at Chkalovksy provided convenient landing strips for jet trainers and cargo planes, as well as accommodation for the cosmonauts and their young families.
Despite the size of the Star City construction zone, few people outside the space effort knew very much about it. The road that passes Chkalovsky skirts the dense pine forest that so effectively conceals the complex. On the right-hand side a small guardpost protects an innocent gap in the mask of trees. In 1960 the turn-off road might easily have been mistaken for a loggers’ track or an old farm route, except for the guardhouse and the solid tarmac surface capable of taking heavy trucks.
When Gagarin and his colleagues were recruited, the facilities at Star City were not yet operational. The cosmonauts’ early training consisted mainly of academic and physical work in various Moscow scientific and medical institutions, in particular at the Zhukovsky Academy of Aeronautical Sciences on Leningradsky Prospekt. The least popular venue was the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems near Petrovsky Park, headed by Oleg Gazenko, where all the cosmonauts underwent a bewildering array of medical, physical and psychological tests. One of the procedures they all had to face here was the ‘isolation chamber’, a large sealed tank capped by an airlock and containing the barest of living accommodations. The doctors would seal their victims inside, then raise or lower the interior air pressure according to their scientific whims. Then they would provide a miserable set of tasks: maths sums, intelligence tests, physical exercises, and so forth. What the inhabitants of the chamber were not allowed to do was pass the time by somehow enjoying themselves. No chatter was permitted; no books, no magazines; no contact with the outside world, except for the most minimal dialogue with the technicians monitoring the chamber. A session might last anything from one to ten days, although the victim was never warned in advance how long it might be. The purpose of this ordeal was to determine if a man could survive the boredom and loneliness of life in a spaceship, perhaps held in orbit above the earth for many days during some unfortunate delay in the re-entry sequence. That was the official explanation for the chamber. For a cosmonaut the choice was perfectly simple: take the chamber with a smile or you did not get to fly in space.
Gagarin survived several sessions without major incident, although he did confess afterwards that he found the experience ‘uncanny, unnerving’. The psychologists told him to describe his thoughts and emotions at certain regular intervals timed by a clock inside the chamber. When he talked, his listeners did not always reply. He could not be sure whether they were ignoring him deliberately, or whether they had simply gone away to find some breakfast. Or maybe supper… Gagarin’s clock gave no reliable clues to ‘outside’ time; nor could he count on dawn or dusk to guide his pattern of existence, because the chamber had no windows. The interior electric lighting came on when he tried to sleep or switched off abruptly when he was awake and busy with some task or other. Time lost all its meaning. ‘It’s easy for your mind to dwell too much on the past in such isolation,’ he reported later, ‘but I concentrated on the future. I shut my eyes and imagined myself in the Vostok, with the continents and oceans drifting beneath me.’[5]
The journalist Lydia Obukhova was allowed to witness one of these tests (though she was not permitted to publish what she had seen until some months after Gagarin’s eventual flight in April 1961):
Gagarin joked with himself in the chamber, and would speak through the microphone to whoever was on duty outside, even though he couldn’t expect any answer… A few days went by. Outside the chamber, everyone knew that his isolation was to end that day, but Gagarin himself had no inkling of this. He started singing to himself about the few objects in the chamber with him. ‘My electrodes… One electrode with a yellow wire… Another with a red one.’ The doctor explained, ‘He has run out of stimuli in the chamber, so now he’s looking for new ones, like a nomad in the desert singing about everything he sees.’[6]
Regardless of the mental torture inflicted by the psychologists, Gagarin never lost sight of the main prize: getting into space. He smiled, he charmed, he played the innocent farmboy to Titov’s stern, poetry-spouting intellectual, but he tolerated all the tests with the same self-discipline and bravery.
When it came to Titov’s turn in the chamber, he was one of the few cosmonauts to think more deeply about what the ordeal was really supposed to prove. It wasn’t just a question of testing the body in various atmospheric pressures, or merely surviving the boredom. There were more subtle tests to pass, he was sure. ‘They tell you there’s no noise in the chamber, but that’s rubbish. The air-conditioning system is working, the ventilator is on. They’re all making noise, and you quickly get used to it. The most important thing is the isolation. Can you spend ten days on your own?… There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’
The tins of food and the little cooking stove seemed to represent some sort of test. There was water in the chamber for drinking and for personal hygiene, but very little to spare. On the very first day of their sessions, some of the more impetuous cosmonauts had ripped open their food tins with great enthusiasm, eager to relieve the tedium with a snack. They had emptied the tins into the single saucepan provided, warmed the pan on the stove and eaten the food, only to find that there was no obvious means of cleaning the pan afterwards, and they still had many more mealtimes ahead of them. Titov says, ‘I thought I’d be clever about it. I put my tins into a saucepan of water and heated them that way. Then you open the tins, eat the meals and throw the tins away. You don’t have to wash anything afterwards.’ Repeatedly boiled, the few cupfuls of water in Titov’s pan were safe to reheat later. His water lasted, his pan stayed clean and his psychologists were happy. Or at least they were not unhappy, which was the most a cosmonaut could hope for at the end of his time in the chamber.