Starman by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, Bloomsbury, 拢17.99, ISBN
0747536880
NOT long after Yuri Gagarin became the world鈥檚 first spaceman, he toured the
world describing his experiences. In Japan, a journalist asked why he was buying
Japanese toys. Maybe he couldn鈥檛 get nice toys at home? 鈥淚 wanted to surprise my
daughters,鈥� he replied, with a smile. 鈥淣ow this will be all over the newspapers
and it鈥檒l take away their surprise.鈥�
Bemusing hostile journalists was the least of Gagarin鈥檚 gifts. His quick wit
and honesty seduced world leaders, promoted world peace abroad, inspired
spectacular jealousies at home and, for a while, smoothed the path for countless
acts of personal generosity.
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Until recently, little was known publicly of Gagarin鈥檚 life. His
poor-boy-made-good story always seemed a little pat, his open peasant smile and
rustic wiliness too close to the Soviet Union鈥檚 own banal self-image. The irony
is that Gagarin was a hero, after all, and reading Starman is rather
like seeing a doctored Tass photograph returned, after meticulous
reconstruction, to a lively, poignant, but basically identical original.
Well, not quite鈥攁nd the differences are compelling. Gagarin, for one
thing, was not canny. Canniness doesn鈥檛 begin to define a man who in 1964 comes
up with a practical and prescient design for a reusable spaceplane. Nor was he
so honest. All his life he kept the state secret that his landing capsule wasn鈥檛
equipped for soft landing鈥攎ore especially, that he ejected early from an
undetermined height when it went into an uncontrollable spin. It seems fitting
somehow that Gagarin鈥檚 lies, such as they were, actually play down his
heroism.
Starman is not a book that, by exposing long-kept secrets and breaking down
habitual reticence, cares to reveal much muck. And when its authors鈥�
efforts鈥攁nd they are honest and considerable鈥攄o happen to expose
institutional idiocies and failures, these are disturbing by their very
familiarity. Anyone who has read Constance Penley鈥檚 NASA/Trek
(Review, 26 July 1997, p 56),
in which she unpicks the agency鈥檚 emotional mishandling of
the Challenger disaster, will wince at the account of Gagarin鈥檚 death in 1968. A
simple air traffic control error was almost certainly the cause of his dreadful
crash. But, in the very act of avoiding individual blame and stanching
institutional trauma, Soviet authorities have left Gagarin鈥檚 family members
convinced to this day that he was assassinated.
Other failings are, thankfully, not so familiar to the West. One of them is
criminal rather than incompetent. In 1967鈥攚ith chief designer Sergei
Korolev dead and a friendly Nikita Kruschev routed in a coup鈥攖he cosmonaut
Vladimir Komarov entered his Soyuz spacecraft knowing that he was going to die.
The technicians knew he would die. Yuri Gagarin, then deputy director of
cosmonaut training, knew too, and his frustrated and petulant antics on the day
of the launch can be understood only as the final futile attempts of a man
trying to scupper the countdown.
Komarov died because bureaucrats suppressed detailed and damning technical
reports prepared by Gagarin and his technicians. The spacecraft had 203
identified faults on it鈥攊ncluding a parachute that wouldn鈥檛 open. Those
who had been willing to handle the report were sacked or sidelined. One man
found himself pushing a pen in a consulate in Iran. No one listened. In the old
Soviet Union, only patrons listened, and with Kruschev gone and their old boss
Korolev recently deceased, Gagarin and the Baikonur cosmodrome technicians had
no patron. They were inaudible.
Patronage is central to the Russian bureaucratic method. Without an
appreciation of its importance, Komarov鈥檚 death cannot be understood and
neither, ironically, can some of Gagarin鈥檚 most generous acts. Take the
thousands of letters he received after his historic orbit鈥攚hat we would
call begging letters. Gagarin, far from dismissing these pleas for adequate
housing, better health care, or judicial mercy, used his influence to resolve as
many cases as he could. A correspondence department including two KGB staffers
helped him sort his workload. He even got his own postcode, Moscow 705.
Celebrity in the egalitarian Soviet state was not the same as Western celebrity,
but it was not a sham.
In fewer than 250 pages,Starman takes us at breakneck speed through
Gagarin鈥檚 strange trajectory: a pilot who was rarely allowed to fly, a
hard-drinking man, sidelined by an envious Brezhnev, who turned things around so
well that he was put second in line to fly the new Soyuz craft.
The fashion for short biography is welcome. But Starman, shaped by
writer Bizony from the researches of TV documentary maker Doran, is more of a
path-cutting exercise, whetting the appetite and making possible a biography yet
to be written. We learn, for instance, Gagarin slept around, but was devoted to
his family. What damage occurred, what strengths discovered, what the
compromises and disappointments were, is the stuff of contemporary portraiture,
and, while respecting Valentina Gagarina鈥檚 intense privacy, you cannot help feel
its鈥攊ndeed, her鈥攁bsence from the story.
The book is strongest as it recounts the remarkable industrial project at
Baikonur and in particular the power of humanity of its chief designer, the
walking state secret Korolev. Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, Gagarin鈥檚 arch rival in
the race into space, is a vivid but less sympathetic portrait. Proud,
middle-class, successful, a bit of a snob, Titov, now a Duma politician, does
not need all the pathos and poignancy the writers give him. Sensing the
imbalance, you cannot help forming an inadvertent but hilarious impression of
second-place Titov as Terry-Thomas, left soot-blackened and cursing on the
ground as Gagarin鈥檚 Tony Curtis blazes whitely to victory鈥攁n impression
not banished by Titov鈥檚 own spaceflight, which ends with him being dragged by
his parachute across the path of an oncoming train.
But this is the story we came to hear: the adventure, not without incident
and not without error, of men and women who had embarked upon a complex and
heroic enterprise. And what has got in the way of our view all these years and
made this book necessary is not, after all, any single big lie, but rather a
continual and ungenerous ironing-out of the human by a political culture that
was easily embarrassed by it.
Why did they airbrush brawling cosmonaut Grigory Nelyubov out of all the
group photographs? Because they didn鈥檛 want to admit that they had to sack him.
Why go ahead with Komarov鈥檚 fatal launch? Because nobody wanted to embarrass
Brezhnev on May Day. Why conceal the truth about Gagarin鈥檚 death? Because
otherwise some wretched radar operator or SU-11 pilot would have to admit he
killed a Hero of the Soviet Union鈥攈ero number 11 175, as Gagarin delighted
in reminding people. Without slim books like these to shelter it, history is
eroded by propganda and real heroes fall victim to spin.