20.12.2022
In the memoirs of those who knew Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin in Saratov, periodically come across references to the fact that at that time he first thought about a career as a test pilot.
For example, a teacher of history at a technical college Nadezhda Antonovna Brenko said that in May 1955, after passing the final exam on the history of the CPSU, graduates of L-41 gathered in her office and a friendly conversation began to share plans for the future. And then Gagarin firmly said that he would become a test pilot. We cannot say with certainty whether this conversation took place or not, but the preceding and subsequent actions of Yuri indicate that he was determined and decided to tie his life to aviation, should he get such a chance.
Gagarin’s later biographers have had some difficulty trying to reproduce the motivation and reflection of the future cosmonaut at this stage. It would seem to follow the post-flight tradition, that is, claim that from an early age the future cosmonaut “made airplanes,” dreamed of heavenly heights, stars, Tsiolkovsky rockets, and so on. But apparently a more in-depth study of the details of Yuri Alekseyevich’s life, conversations with eyewitnesses of the events and appeared documents broke the propagandistic linearity, revealing its internal contradiction: if Gagarin, as told, was a very purposeful and consistent person, responsible and enthusiastic about his working profession (otherwise he would not have received a diploma with honors), then, one may ask, why did he overnight cross out all that he managed to achieve in twenty-one years of his life, leaving behind not only his own achievements, but also the efforts of parents, relatives, teachers and the state?
Some biographers even went so far as to say that Gagarin never really wanted to be an “industrialist,” but was passively drifting, so to speak, along the stream of life until he was nailed to where he dreamed of going – to aviation. Here is what, for example, wrote Lidia Obukhova in her book “The Favorite of the Century” (I quote from the 1979 edition):
“Apparently, the path of industry did not attract Gagarin from the very beginning. He studied well, because he did everything well, but he liked something else. What was it? How was he to know without experiencing it? He was drawn to order, clarity, and the possibility of moving more quickly through life. And his passion for exertion, each time a little more than today’s strength, remained unchanged at all times.
Wonderful. Well, how can we explain in this case, that Gagarin tried to be not just “good”, but the best? Did he stay up until midnight molding? Did he help others in math, literature, and drawing? Why was he going to the Metals and Alloys Institute? Doesn’t this smell like hypocrisy? But then the opposite generalization arises. Is it possible to be hypocritical for six years in an “unattractive” field and never give yourself away? Gagarin, as we recall, was an excellent athlete and Komsomol activist. The state system in which he grew up approved of both. What prevented him from going down the sports and/or Komsomol line if he was a hypocritical careerist? Even if he had gone on assignment to Tomsk, there is no doubt that he would have found an opportunity to realize his outstanding athletic and organizational skills there. Orderliness? Clarity? Opportunity for rapid growth? Passion for exertion? He could have had all of these things by remaining a foundry worker, but refusal of an assignment, fraught with conflict with the technical school administration, could have seriously ruined his future career in either field.
The problem with biographers is that they took Gagarin out of his real historical context. Perhaps only Viktor Sidorovich Porokhnya remembered what the years 1954-1955 were famous for.
At the February-March Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held in 1954, a resolution “On further increasing the production of grain in the country and the development of virgin and fallow lands” was adopted. The State Planning Committee planned to plow over 43 million hectares of virgin lands in Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Volga region, the Urals and other regions of the country. Before that a considerable work was carried out to study the question. The adoption of the program of the development of virgin lands was caused, among others, by the fact that in 1953 the grain yield remained at the level of 1913, while the population grew noticeably, and it was necessary to raise agriculture to a fundamentally new level. It is noteworthy that the members of the government were not sure that the people would support their initiative, so within the framework of the adopted program it was supposed to involve military units and prisoners of correctional labor camps to the virgin lands. However, the active advertising did its job. Take at least the speech of Nikita Khrushchev, broadcasted on February 22 on the only TV channel: unexpectedly, one of the new leaders of post-Stalin state appeared before the people as an energetic, competent politician, able to speak simply and understandably, to smile and joke. All in all, more than half a million people arrived there on Komsomol vouchers. Viktor Porokhnya recalled that some of the students of the technical school also joined the “virgin lands,” and he and his friends participated in their “seeing off.
However, it was not only advertising that created a stir around the government’s agricultural initiative. Many young people, who had not yet managed to get a complete education, saw in it an opportunity to quickly improve their life situation: the country remained poor and could not provide a decent standard of living for the majority of the population, so there was hope (and not without reason) that participation in the development of virgin lands would provide an opportunity to earn good money, learn a new profession, start a family and so on. The synthesis of romance and pragmatism was very successful, and although ten years later the cultivated lands began to experience soil erosion and dust storms, which caused a sharp decline in yields, the program really contributed to the modernization of agriculture in the country and, consequently, to improve people’s lives.
For Yuri Gagarin and his friends, the mass exodus of Komsomol members to develop the virgin lands was an example of how one can change one’s life path overnight. And suddenly it turned out that there was nothing wrong in it – on the contrary, propagandists glorified the impulse of the youth, which does not run away from difficulties, but rather try to test themselves in the most difficult areas of socialist construction. So the future cosmonaut was ideologically and morally sufficiently motivated to go beyond the path prescribed by the technical school and to make a pragmatic choice for a more romantic future. A test pilot? What could be more romantic?
So Gagarin did not go to Tomsk, he stayed at the flying club. Probably he went to the directorate of the technical school with a request to issue a “free” diploma, but he was refused. At the same time, Yuri lost his place in the dormitory – an applicant moved into his bunk.
Gagarin was not too upset by the change in the situation: there was enough to do at the airfield in Dubki. “Ocheletes” had to practice a rather complicated for beginners program and by the end of the training perform at least eighty independent flights with an instructor or another cadet in the back seat. From time to time they were given time off, and then they either wandered around the neighborhood or went to Saratov and the Volga, swam, and took a lot of pictures.
Such a pastime, apparently, seemed boring late biographers, and they began to think of different problems, which the future cosmonaut has successfully overcome, once again proving his “exceptionality. For example, Lydia Obukhova took and announced, referring to the commander of the flying squadron Anatoly Vasilievich Velikanov, that Gagarin was bad at landing. I quote from the earliest text in this series, the magazine publication of the documentary story “Star Son of the Earth” published in Pioneer magazine (1972):
“Each day of flying was worth more than a month of training in a training room. So, knowing everything in theory, the straggler Yuri at first could not learn how to land. Things got so bad that both the flight commander, Hero of the Soviet Union Sergey Safronov, and the commander himself, former fighter pilot Anatoly Velikanov, came to the unspoken decision to expel Gagarin. There was simply no time for separate sessions with him. True, it was not yet sealed by the hand of Denisenko, head of the Aeroclub, though it was on its way.
And here it is impossible not to bring up with a kind word the chief of flight unit Konstantin Filimonovich Puchik!
The next day something unprecedented happened: it was Velikanov who took off with cadet Gagarin, neither instructor Martyanov, nor even captain Safronov. This could not but cause alarm, even though outwardly Yuri was, as always, collected and attentive.
In general, they kept Gagarin in the flying club out of the goodness of his heart and made sure that he could master any flight trick, if he was properly taught. And action began. Victor Stepanov in his book “Yuri Gagarin” (1987) repeats in his own words this story, adding that it turns out that the future astronaut badly made turns, and he lost landmarks when approaching the airport, and “cooled nose”, and “dropped tail”. In short, a disgusting pilot. “The instructor felt uncomfortable in front of Safronov and Velikanov: so many times he vouched for Yuri: “The guy is overstrained, just think: to bring down such a giant – a technical school. If he calms down, everything will be all right. He just needs to get some sleep. The squadron commander and the commander of the link did not respond to vain entreaties, they tacitly decided to expel Gagarin from the flying club.
And when it came to the draft order, Konstantin Filimonovich Puchik, head of the flight unit, took pity on Yuri. They say that he went to Velikanov himself and persuaded him to fly with Yuri, so that he could see for himself once and for all.
Behind Stepanov his version of the flight “failure” of Gagarin is put forward by Viktor Anatolievich Mitroshenkov, which is especially offensive, because his book “Earth Under Heaven” (1981, 1987) – is not just a biography, but a chronicle of the life of the first cosmonaut, painted literally over the days. And yet in it we find information that looks, to put it mildly, unreliable:
“September 6 [1955]. Third mistake in the last week. Bad landing, side impact… Bad. A bad landing is not a theoretical answer, you can’t hide it in a sheet, you can’t cover it with the next sheet. Gagarin was deeply affected by the failure. His situation was also complicated by the fact that, having started the camp period two weeks late, he was still behind in a number of disciplines, although he studied hard and a lot.
The thought of expulsion from the Aeroclub seized him with impetuous haste. During these decisive days for the young pilot his squadron commander Anatoly Vasilievich Velikanov ventured to make the last control flight. Yuri Gagarin brilliantly performed all the elements of the flight, including landing. Yuri was in the lead and would never let anyone else take the lead.
Well done, Gagarin! But was he good? Confidence in Mitroshenkov was so high, that almost all subsequent biographers begin to write about the September failures of Yuri Alexeyevich. They say that there are also spots on the sun, and that Gagarin had failures, but he corrected himself, overcame them.
Alas, but this is the case when in a desire to support the false beauty of the “legend” researchers bought unverified information. If we turn to memoirs of instructors and “pupils” of the “Gagarin’s” group, written down not for publication, but for the archive, we see that there are no mentions of Gagarin’s problems with landings and turns. Nor is there any mention of the flight with Velikanov, though it would surely be remembered by all involved. But there is a sharp criticism of Obukhova’s books. Here is what the head of the radio station Sergei Ivanovich Golovachev stated:
“I would like to note that some authors of books about Gagarin, either in haste or from a lack of competence in matters of aviation, allow unfortunate inaccuracies and distortions of facts. Thus, in Lidia Obukhova’s book “Starry son of the Earth” the author says that during the first solo flight Gagarin was released by his squadron commander, Anatoly Vasilievich Velikanov – this is not true. The first independent flight Gagarin released Pushchik Konstantin Filimonovich, which was written July 3, 1955 in the newspaper “Young Stalinist”. Further, Obukhova wrote that on September 24, 1955 Gagarin received an excellent mark for his knowledge of the Yak-18T, and this type of four-seat transport plane first appeared in 1967, that is, 12 years after Gagarin graduated from the flying club.
Regarding these and other inaccuracies Lieutenant Colonel Grigory Kirillovich Denisenko, the head of the Saratov Aero Club and Hero of the Soviet Union, visited Lidia Obukhova in Moscow and promised to make corrections in future editions.
People who write do not know the specifics of flying. They don’t talk to all the people who witnessed the period when Gagarin was a student at the flying club. Many of Gagarin’s instructors were no longer working at the Aeroclub when Obukhova came to Saratov to gather material for the book. She did not meet them. This explains her mistakes in the book.
Flight instructor Dmitry Pavlovich Martyanov spoke even more harshly:
“Some people are trying to smear Gagarin, for what, I do not know. The popularizer, writer Lydia Obukhova in her book “The Favorite of the Century” wrote a lie. The lie that they tried to expel Yuri from the flying club because he failed in flying. This is not true.
How Gagarin really flew during his training told a former “pilot” Yuri Gundarev, to whose testimonies we already referred:
“The flights were in full swing, Yura was one of the first to fly on his own (I don’t take myself into account, I was already in my second year of flying this plane and was preparing to compete in aerobatics within the Aeroclub, and I was trained by the flight instructor Orekhov Mark Petrovich). Yura was flying well and always had confidence in himself. I had to fly with him in the rear cockpit instead of the ballast, and I really liked his coordination in performing this or that figure, and he landed at the landing “T” on all three “T’s”.
It turns out that the story about Gagarin’s problems with piloting in the flying club is made up from beginning to end. At that time, his problems were of a different kind. Since he could no longer earn money in the city, he had to live practically on wild food. The head of the Aeroclub, Grigory Kirillovich Denisenko, recalled how he asked his wife to cook dinner on weekends for Yuri and other cadets who did not have their own housing and table in Saratov. As a return favor, Gagarin got to his foundry and made several airplanes out of aluminum for the flying club’s training purposes.
However, the main difficulty was the issue of distribution: the technical school kept insisting on sending the graduate to Tomsk. In order to solve the problem once and for all, Gagarin went to Oktyabrsky district military enlistment office in Saratov, where he asked to send him to a military flying school after graduation from the flying club. His request was granted there. The director of the technical school, Rodionov, had to write in his military registration card: “Called up to the Soviet Army” – he could not object.
Autumn came. By this time Gagarin had made 81 independent flights and in total he participated in 196 flights. Total flight time was 42 hours and 23 minutes. Pilot-instructor Nikolay Ivanovich Novikov was taking the cadets flying techniques. He later recalled (I quote from the book “Life – a Beautiful Moment” by Adolf Borisovich Dikhtyar, 1974):
Gagarin performed the entire flight up to the zone following all the rules of the course. When he started flying in the comfort zone, I was amazed by the precision of his actions. You could think that the car was driven not by an aeroclub graduate, but by a professional pilot. I wanted to check whether this impression was deceptive. After Gagarin finished his aerobatics, I asked him to climb again and repeat the left complex. It included a roll, a Nesterov loop, and a half-loop. Gagarin, just like the first time, performed everything perfectly. I realized that it was not a chance that helped the cadet, that Gagarin was a man of great abilities.
And at the end of September 1955 Gagarin, along with other graduates of the aeroclub, stood in front of the graduation committee. The head of the aeroclub, Hero of the Soviet Union Grigory Kirillovich Denisenko read aloud the “Individual score sheet” of the pilots of the initial training, who graduated from Saratov DOSAAF aeroclub. The guys listened attentively, meaningfully looked at each other from time to time, each with excitement, waiting for his name to be heard.
The thirty-fourth in the list was Gagarin.
– “Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin,” Denisenko read, “born in 1954, Russian by nationality, education – secondary technical, member of the Komsomol. I graduated from the flying club with the following grades: the plane YAK-18 – excellent, engine M-11-FR – excellent, piloting – excellent, aerodynamics – excellent, radio – excellent, the instructions for the production of flights – excellent. And finally the general mark of the graduation commission – Grigory Kirillovich paused and finished to the applause of his friends: “Also excellent.
Then the head of the flying club congratulated the graduates and announced that the best of them will be recommended to the aviation schools. Yury Gagarin was among the best.
Admittedly, Novikov praised Gagarin in support of the “legend”, but without any reference to anything, the “Record of individual grades” tells us that if Yuri Alekseyevich cannot be called a unique pilot, then he was definitely an excellent pilot, thus refuting any speculation about poor training.
On September 27, 1955 was issued the order № 58 on the completion of training of cadets in the Saratov AeroClub. Since Gagarin received an “excellent” rating in all flying disciplines, he was able to qualify for admission to the prestigious 1st Chkalov Military Pilot School (ChVAMS) named after K. E. Voroshilov. The Oktyabrsky District Military Enlistment Office made a corresponding request, but the call was delayed. Yuri lived under the rain in a tent city, patiently waiting for the fateful decision. Finally, on October 17, the call came. Together with other “ulyotets” Yuri Gagarin went to the city of Chkalov (now Orenburg) in the south of the Urals. The Saratov period of the future cosmonaut’s life came to an end.
