Chapter 1Klushino

Foreword

He was twenty-seven years old and he had one hundred and eight minutes.

Then he lived another seven years, during which the country that had made him famous would not let him fly an aircraft by himself, and it is those seven years this book is mostly about.

Eleven of these twenty-one chapters sit after 12 April 1961. That reverses every existing treatment of the subject and it is the structural claim of the book: the flight is the shortest and least interesting thing that ever happened to Yuri Gagarin.

The argument runs like this.

The Soviet Union did not select a cosmonaut in April 1961. It cast one.

The requirements were unusual. The man had to be short enough for the capsule, which ruled out most fighter pilots. He had to photograph well, because the point of the exercise was going to be the photograph. He needed a class background that would read correctly in every newspaper on earth: a carpenter's son from a village that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht, a foundry apprentice at sixteen, a collective farm behind him. And he needed a name that was not German Titov's.

Nikolai Kamanin's diary records ranking the two men nearly equal and choosing days before the launch.

What the state got was exactly what it had commissioned, and then it discovered that it could not risk the thing it had made.

Everything after Vnukovo is the logic of an icon rather than of a career. A promotion from senior lieutenant to major that skipped captain. A seat in the Supreme Soviet. Thirty countries in eighteen months, an identical speech, a schedule that reads as labor when you lay it out. Lieutenant colonel, then colonel, then a deputy directorship at the training center — every rank available to a man and no aircraft.

By 1967 he was permanently barred from spaceflight, because Vladimir Komarov had come down in Orenburg Oblast at about forty meters a second and the state had decided it could not afford a second funeral.

I want to be exact about the claim, because the strong version of it is wrong and this book does not make it. He flew again. On 27 March 1968 he was airborne from Chkalovsky in a two-seat MiG-15UTI with Vladimir Seryogin in the back, on a check ride he had spent years arguing for. The accurate statement is not that he was never a pilot again. It is that after 108 minutes in April 1961, the Soviet Union never again let Yuri Gagarin go up by himself.

Chapter 8 is the foundation and it is the most Soviet fact in the book.

The man who built the rocket could not be named in his own country. Sergei Korolev had been arrested in 1938, sent to Kolyma, and worked in a prison design bureau with a jaw that had been broken and never set properly. He ran the entire program and appeared in the Soviet press only as the Chief Designer.

So a system that required genius and could not tolerate individuals produced one anonymous man to build the machine and one extremely famous man to sit on it.

Chapter 11 is where the whole thing turns.

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale required a pilot to land with his craft. Gagarin had ejected at seven thousand meters and come down under a canopy into a plowed field in Saratov Oblast. So the Soviet Union said he had landed in the capsule, and went on saying it until 1971, and he had to repeat it — to journalists, to the FAI, on the tour, in the first weeks of the space age.

That is the moment a man becomes a piece of state information, and information gets edited.

Two more things the reader should know at the start.

The first is that this book corrects an error rather than repeating it. Yuri Gagarin never said he had looked around up there and not found God. Khrushchev said something to that effect and it was reassigned to Gagarin, and it has stayed reassigned for sixty years. It is the single most common false attribution about him and the correction is in Chapter 15, not in a note.

The second concerns a photograph.

Grigori Nelyubov was one of the original twenty and one of the six who trained for the first flights. In the spring of 1963 he had a drunken confrontation with a military patrol and was dismissed, and he was painted out of the group photograph taken at Sochi. He died under a train near Ippolitovka on 18 February 1966.

That is what the icon cost, and it is in Chapter 15 alongside the busts and the stamps and the renamed town, because they are the same operation.

Chapter 19 is the crash, and Chapter 20 is the argument about it.

At 10:18 in the morning on 27 March 1968 the trainer was airborne. At 10:27 the maneuvers were reported complete. At 10:29 clearance to return was requested and granted. At 10:30 there was silence, and about a minute after that the aircraft went into birch woods near Novosyolovo, sixty-five kilometers out.

Twenty-nine volumes of state commission findings were classified. A KGB paper released in 2003 blamed outdated weather information and fuel tanks on the wings. A 2011 release said the crew had swerved from a weather balloon or a cloud edge and stalled. Alexei Leonov insisted until his death in 2019 on a supersonic Su-15 passing within twenty meters. There are at least four other serious accounts by named people, and they are all in this book, and it declines to choose among them.

The persistent rumor that he had been drinking is disposed of. The blood chemistry was clean.

He was thirty-four. The training center was renamed for him five weeks later. His widow was a widow for fifty-two years.

A state that had closed the churches needed a face for the future, and it found a working pilot from Klushino, and this book's last question is whether making a saint of him was an honor or the confiscation of the last thing he had.

Chapter 1 · Klushino

Klushino is a village of wooden houses in the Smolensk region, standing in flax country on the old road that runs west out of Moscow through Mozhaysk and Vyazma — a little under two hundred kilometers from the capital, by the figure usually printed. The land it sits on is flat, wet and thickly wooded, cut by slow rivers, and the villages along the road occupy clearings that people hacked out of forest and have to keep hacking or the forest takes them back. This is not the black earth of the south. Nothing here grows easily. What grows here is flax, and timber, and the crops a short summer will tolerate, and the particular conviction, held in these villages longer and harder than anywhere else in Russia, that west is the direction from which men with weapons arrive.

They have arrived along this road with a regularity that looks on a map less like history than like weather. It is the road every invader has used. Beside it lies the field where in 1610 a Polish army destroyed a Russian one and opened the way to Moscow — a battle that took its name from the village, so that for as long as the name meant anything to anyone outside the district, what it meant was a defeat. Poles came along this road. Frenchmen came along it. Germans would come along it inside the lifetime of everyone standing in the village when this story begins. A place on an invasion corridor learns a particular relationship to the state: the state is a thing that arrives late, requisitions, and leaves, and the next thing that arrives is an army speaking a foreign language. Nothing in the history of Klushino before the twentieth century suggests that its inhabitants had reason to think of themselves as important to anybody in Moscow.

The road carried more than armies, and this is the older Russian difficulty. West was where the danger came from and also where the machinery came from, the engineering, the medicine, the models of the state, the idea of the future itself. Every Russian government of the modern period has had to import from the direction it was defending itself against, and every Russian argument about national identity since has been in some sense an argument about that road. The countryside along it did not conduct the argument in those terms. But it lived on the ground where the argument was physically settled, which is to say that when Russia lost, the losing happened here, in front of these houses, and when Russia decided it needed to catch up with the west in a hurry, the resources for the hurry were extracted from villages of exactly this kind. That is the panoramic fact about Klushino. It is a place things are taken from, on a road things arrive along.

Flax is worth pausing on, because it shaped the year. It is a crop for cold, damp, unpromising ground, and it feeds nobody. It is grown to be sold, or to be worked at home through the winter into thread and then into linen — which meant that the woman's labor did not stop when the harvest was in, and that a village of this kind had a cash relationship with the world beyond it even when it had almost no cash. The forest supplied the rest: fuel, building timber, mushrooms and berries in season, and the raw material of the one trade a man could carry in his hands. The houses were made of logs. The roads between them were made of mud for a good part of the year. A village of this kind had nothing vertical in it except trees, chimneys and, where one had survived, a church.

The log house is worth reading as a document, because it is the only piece of architecture most people in this village would ever live inside, and its plan encodes a way of life. It is organized around a stove that is simultaneously the heating system, the cooking apparatus and, in winter, a place to sleep on, with the living space arranged around it and very little in the way of interior division. Everything in the house is made of the material standing outside it. Nothing in it was bought if it could be cut, split or joined instead. In the traditional arrangement there is a corner set aside for icons, diagonally opposite the stove, the place a guest turns to first on entering. What was in that corner in the houses of Klushino in the 1930s is not something the record establishes, and it is not a small question: it is precisely the question of what had replaced what, in a decade when the state was systematically removing the objects of one belief and had not yet manufactured the objects of another. We do not know what hung in the Gagarins' corner. We know what the state would eventually put in the vacancy, because it would stand in school corridors across a continent in the form of busts and portraits, and the face would be the face of the third of that household's four children.

Into this the Soviet state had recently arrived, and it had arrived by force. Collectivization abolished the peasant holding. Land, draft animals, tools and buildings were brought into a common enterprise; households that resisted, or that owned enough to be classified as the kind of household that would resist, were expropriated and deported. It was done fast, it was done against the declared wishes of most of the people it was done to, and it broke both the resistance and the thing being resisted. By the time Yuri Gagarin was born, the fighting phase was finished. The collective farm was no longer a policy in the village. It was simply what a village was.

What that meant in daily terms is easier to state than what it felt like. A peasant no longer worked land that was his. He worked the farm's land, and what he received came as a share of what the farm produced after the state had taken its own share first, which meant that the household's income depended on a calculation made somewhere above it and could not be predicted in the spring. Alongside this, a family kept a small private plot beside its house, and if it was fortunate a cow, and the plot and the cow were frequently what stood between a household and hunger. The system produced a peculiar arithmetic in which a family could work all year on a collective enterprise and be fed principally by its own garden.

The purpose of all this, from the point of view of the men who designed it, was not agricultural. The countryside was being reorganized so that it could be drawn on: for grain that could be sold abroad or fed to the cities, and for people who could be moved off the land and into factories. Russian elite thinking had circled the peasantry for generations — its mass, its patience, its suffering, its supposed spiritual reserves — and the Bolshevik answer to that long argument was blunt. The village was not the soul of the nation. It was a resource, and an obstacle, and the modern country the state intended to build would be built out of it and on top of it. Villages like Klushino were where that proposition was tested on actual people. It is also the reason a bright child born in one of them in the 1930s had, as his realistic horizon, a technical school and a bench in somebody else's town — which is, in the event, exactly the route this one took.

The other institution that went in those years was the church. This was a state that had closed the churches — closed them as a matter of policy, in a campaign that ran alongside the campaign against the peasant holding and drew on the same conviction that the old rural world was an obstacle rather than a heritage. The consequence in the villages was not that people stopped believing things. It was that the place where belief had been publicly performed, the building at the center of the settlement, the calendar of the year and the images on the wall, was removed and not replaced. A vacancy was created. It is worth registering here, at the beginning, that the vacancy was real and institutional and would still be open when the same state discovered it needed a face to put in it.

The family inside this panorama was ordinary in every respect the state kept records of. Aleksey Ivanovich Gagarin was a carpenter. His son's patronymic — Yuri Alekseyevich — carries the fact forward, as Russian names do, so that the father is present in the name the whole world would eventually learn. Carpentry in a village of log houses was not a specialization but the trade on which the settlement physically depended, and it had a quality that mattered under the new order: it was a skill, and a skill was the one form of property that could not be brought into the collective. Land could be taken. A horse could be taken. What a man knew how to do with his hands remained his, and was wanted by his neighbors and by the farm alike. Of Aleksey Ivanovich as a person the record available to this book establishes very little beyond the trade and the name, and it would be dishonest to fill that in from the general shape of such lives.

Anna Timofeyevna worked as a dairy worker on the collective farm. Dairy work is among the jobs on a farm of that kind that do not have a season: the animals require attention in midwinter as much as at harvest, and the work continues through the months when the fields are frozen and much of the rest of the labor force has nothing to do. It was, in the local hierarchy of collective-farm employment, a real and continuous job. Here again, the biographical record thins immediately past the occupational fact. Anna Timofeyevna would later become a public figure in her own right, and would produce published recollections of her son's childhood during the Soviet period. Those recollections are the principal source for almost everything intimate that is told about this household, and the conditions under which they were produced are discussed below, because they govern how much of this chapter can be believed.

There were four children, and Yuri was the third. Valentin and Zoya came before him; Boris came after. He was born on 9 March 1934, in Klushino, in the Smolensk region of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He was the child of a carpenter and a milkmaid in a village on the Vyazma–Mozhaysk road, in the first years of a collective farm, in a country that had recently rebuilt the rural economy by force and was now attempting to industrialize on what the rural economy could be made to yield.

It is necessary to notice, without hindsight and then with it, what that combination amounted to on paper. The Soviet state sorted its citizens by origin, and the sorting had consequences that ran through a whole life: what you could study, where you could work, whether a question about your grandparents would end a career. By those categories this household was not merely acceptable. It was ideal. A manual tradesman for a father, a farm laborer for a mother, no property to explain, no priest in the family tree, no merchant, no officer, nobody who had owned anyone or anything. Every box on the form that a Soviet personnel department cared about was, in this family, blank in the correct direction. Nobody arranged it. Nobody in Klushino in 1934 was thinking about a form. But when the argument of this book arrives — that the first man in space was cast rather than chosen, and cast in part for a carpenter's son from an occupied village with the right class background and the right name — the casting notes were already being written here, by circumstance, on a newborn who had done nothing.

Here the biographer has to make a declaration, and it is better made early than smuggled in later. The documentary record of this childhood is thin and its condition is poor. There are no letters, because nobody in the household had anyone to write to and the boy was too young to write. There are no diaries. There is no family archive of the kind that makes a Western childhood recoverable. What exists is administrative — a birth registered, a farm's employment records, the paperwork a Soviet village generated about itself — and, in overwhelming volume, recollection. The recollection was gathered after he became famous. Almost none of it was set down before that, which is to say that every remembered scene of Yuri Gagarin's boyhood passed through the mind of somebody who already knew how the story ended, and most of it passed through an editorial apparatus as well.

The physical record is in the same condition. There is a memorial museum in the town of Gagarin, in Smolensk Oblast — the district town of Gzhatsk before it was renamed for him — built around the family house complex and including a reconstructed wartime dugout, and this book has not established its present condition or what it currently holds. What can be said about it in general is what can be said about every curated childhood site of a national hero anywhere: it was assembled after the fact, by an institution with a settled view of the outcome, out of a district that had been occupied and fought over in between. It is a museum of a boyhood curated by the state that made use of the man. That does not make its objects fake. It makes them arranged. A visitor is looking at an argument, and the argument is that everything here was pointing somewhere, which is the one thing about this village in 1934 that was not true.

That apparatus produced a book. Road to the Stars appeared in Moscow from the Foreign Languages Publishing House in the early 1960s, under Gagarin's name, and a great deal of what is still repeated about his early life comes out of it. It should not be read as autobiography. It was assembled with the assistance of Pravda journalists and it went through the propaganda apparatus like any other state text, and what it contains is not what a young man remembered but what the Soviet Union had decided a Soviet childhood ought to look like in the person of its most valuable citizen. This does not make it worthless. It makes it a different kind of evidence. As a record of what happened in a village in the 1930s it is unreliable; as a record of what the regime wanted its own past to have been, it is a primary document of the first importance, and this book uses it in that mode and says so each time.

The same caution applies to the family memoirs. His brother Valentin and his mother both produced published recollections during the Soviet period, and his widow published hers in 1981. All of them were written under, or shaped by, official supervision. This is not an accusation against any of them. It is a description of the only publishing conditions that existed. A woman writing about her dead son in the Soviet Union of that period was not free to be uninteresting, and was not free to be ambivalent, and the version of a childhood that reaches print under those conditions is a collaboration whether or not anybody involved thinks of it that way. The emotional core of the family's account is real. The detail is soft. Both statements have to be held at once, and this book will keep saying so rather than quietly choosing one.

One story in particular should be dealt with now, because it is the hinge on which every popular account of this boyhood turns. In the standard telling, the boy's ambition to fly begins with a Soviet fighter that came down in a field near Klushino, and pilots he saw at close range, and a child's decision made on the spot. The story comes from Road to the Stars and from family memory, which is to say from the state text and from people recalling a childhood after its subject had orbited the Earth. It has, additionally, the exact structure that origin myths have: the future is revealed to the hero in a single visible sign, and the sign is the thing he will himself become. The story may be true. Nothing establishes that it is, and its provenance is precisely the provenance that ought to make a historian slow down. It is recorded here as what the century told itself, not as what happened in a field.

What can be said about Klushino in the 1930s without depending on any of that is the panorama, and the panorama is enough. It was a village that had just been through a forced reorganization of rural life and had come out the other side poorer, flatter, and administratively legible in a way it had never been before. Its horizon of ambition for a bright child was the district town, and beyond the district town, if things went extraordinarily well, a technical school and a trade. Nobody in it had heard of rocketry. There were no cosmonauts anywhere, in any language, and no reason for anyone in a Smolensk village to expect that there would be. The state that governed the village was, in these years, engaged in an argument with itself about whether the Soviet future would be built out of grain, steel or terror, and was in practice attempting all of them at once.

And yet the vocabulary that would later be attached to this village was already being assembled elsewhere, in a country that liked to date its own achievements early. Within his own lifetime the Soviet Union would tell the world — and, more importantly, tell itself — that space flight was a Russian idea before it was anybody's, theorized in Russia, engineered in Russia, and finally accomplished by a Russian who had come from precisely this kind of place. Klushino would be required to have been the beginning of something. Its wooden houses, its flax, its mud road and its invasion field would be read backward as the necessary origin of the first human being to leave the planet, and the village would acquire, with no say in the matter, a significance in the history of the twentieth century that nothing about it in 1934 could have predicted or supported.

That is the last thing to hold onto before the war arrives and takes this world apart. On 9 March 1934 the third child of a village carpenter and a collective-farm milkmaid was born on the Vyazma–Mozhaysk road, in a place whose only entry in the historical record was a battle lost to the Poles in 1610. Twenty-seven years later, on 12 April 1961, that child would spend 108 minutes off the surface of the Earth and come down into a plowed field, and a country that had closed its churches would find that it had produced, from a village it had impoverished and then failed to defend, exactly the figure it needed. Nothing about that was visible from Klushino. Nothing about it was visible from anywhere. The village had never heard of rockets, and it was about to be told, for the rest of its existence, that it had invented them.