18.12.2022
On every anniversary of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin’s flight into space, over and over again, articles about how Gagarin was not the first Soviet cosmonaut appear on the pages of periodicals.
Usually they are reduced to listing rumors and retelling incredible details about pilots who flew to orbit before Gagarin, but died there, so their names were forever classified. Under Soviet rule, such publications were inaccessible to our readers, but now there are no censorship restrictions on their distribution. Where did the myth of Soviet space victims come from?
The first accusations against the Soviet Union for hiding the fact of the cosmonauts’ deaths were made before Yuri Gagarin’s flight. In the diaries of Nikolai Kamanin we read a note from February 12, 1961: “After we launched a rocket to Venus on February 4, many in the West believe that we failed to launch a man into space; the Italians even seemed to “hear” groans and intermittent Russian speech. All these are completely groundless fabrications. In fact, we are working hard to guarantee the landing of a cosmonaut. From my point of view, we are even overly cautious about this. There will never be a complete guarantee of a successful first space flight, and some degree of risk is justified by the greatness of the task.
The launch on February 4, 1961 cannot really be called a success. On that day, the rocket “Molniya” launched the interplanetary vehicle “1BA” No.1 into space. During withdrawal the converter in the power supply system of upper stage “L” failed (it turned out that it was not designed for vacuum operation), the engine did not start and the spacecraft remained in earth orbit. The next day, a TASS report declared the failure a victory, as has become customary:
“In accordance with the plan for creating and testing spacecraft of increased weight, a heavy artificial earth satellite was launched in the Soviet Union on February 4, 1961, using an advanced multistage rocket. The weight of the satellite, not including the last stage of the launch vehicle, was 6,483 kilograms. The satellite carries a radio telemetry system for monitoring parameters of structural elements and equipment for trajectory measurements. All the onboard equipment of the satellite functioned normally during takeoff and further orbital movement.
Preliminary data from the ground-based instrumentation complex helped to determine the following satellite orbital parameters: orbital period of 89.80 minutes, perigee altitude of 223.5 kilometers, apogee altitude of 327.6 kilometers and orbital inclination of 64 degrees, 57 minutes.
The measured parameters of the satellite’s orbit are close to those calculated.
The scientific and technical tasks assigned to the satellite during its launch have been accomplished.
Since the Soviet propaganda seriously invested in the propaganda about the forthcoming human space flight, the Western journalists thought Sputnik-7 (the Russian acronym for 1BA in the Western press) was a manned spacecraft and not an interplanetary spacecraft. The hype surrounding the classified death of the unknown cosmonaut was such that Soviet officials had to issue a denial, but of course without acknowledging the seriousness of the claims. The Pravda newspaper published an article titled “Toward the Launch of a Heavy Soviet Satellite:
“On February 4 of this year in the Soviet Union a heavy artificial satellite of the Earth weighing more than 6 tons was successfully launched into orbit. In connection with this, a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper turned to Academician L.I. [Leonid Ivanovich] Sedov with a request to describe the course and scientific significance of this major experiment. Answering the question of the “Pravda” correspondent, L. I. Sedov said:
As has already been reported, in this launch an artificial satellite of the Earth weighing 6,483 kilograms was launched into orbit around the Earth with the help of an improved multistage rocket, which is almost 2 tons more than the weight of the satellite ships that had been launched in the USSR before. There was no special equipment for scientific research in outer space and there were no experimental animals on board the satellite launched on February 4 this year because it was the first time such a spacecraft had been launched and only for experimental purposes. I should also note that the rumors circulating abroad that there was a human on that satellite do not correspond to reality.
The main purpose of this mission was first of all to put such a big satellite into orbit and then to study the parameters which characterize the performance of its construction. For this purpose, a radio telemetry system was installed onboard the satellite for monitoring its structural parameters.
Second, an equally important and at the same time very difficult task was the high-precision injection of a heavy satellite into a given orbit. This was successfully achieved, and the necessary measurements and observations were made with the help of the trajectory measurement equipment installed on the satellite.
With the help of the ground-based measuring and computing complex, it was established that the motion of the satellite occurs in an orbit that is very close in its parameters to the calculated one.
This experimental launch did not include a special system for the return of the satellite to Earth.
Because of the low orbit, the satellite will not last long and will soon enter into the dense layers of the atmosphere and cease to exist.
As you can see, it is hard to come up with a more contentless answer to serious questions. Any person with any knowledge of astronautics will notice at once that the government which had sent spacecrafts to the Moon and dogs in spaceships should not have any problems with placing heavy satellites into their orbits. If such difficulties arise, it would be more reasonable to launch the satellite into a high orbit, to get more time for research and more data to improve the equipment.
However, on February 12, Molniya was launched, which launched 1BA No. 2 into space. This time everything went almost perfectly – the apparatus flew out of Earth orbit and was given the official name “Venus 1”. Behind the triumph of another victory, the strange story of Sputnik-7 seemed to be forgotten.
Still, rumors about Soviet cosmonauts who died and were classified continued to multiply. The American astronaut historian James Oberg conducted a small investigation, the results of which he shared in his article “Phantoms of Space” (1975). He showed that the first known report on the “victims of red space” was in December 1959: the Italian news agency Continentale distributed a statement by a high-ranking Czech Communist that the Soviet Union had carried out a series of manned ballistic missile launches since 1957. One of the pilots, named Alexei Ledovsky, died on November 1, 1957, during such a suborbital launch. Developing the theme, the agency called three more names of “lost” cosmonauts: Sergei Shiborin (died February 1, 1958), Andrei Mitkov (died January 1, 1959) and Maria Gromova (died June 1, 1959). It was also pointed out that pilot Gromova found her death not in a ballistic missile, but as a result of an accident of a prototype orbital plane with a rocket engine.
It is noteworthy that at the same time (14 December 1959) the founder of German astronautics, Hermann Oberth, told The Gadsden Times that he had information about a manned suborbital launch, which took place at Kapustin Yar in early 1958 and ended in the death of the pilot. He allegedly obtained the information while working for the U.S. space program. Herman Obert was cautious in his statements, saying that he knew about the “space disaster” from hearsay and could not vouch for the veracity of the information, but the agency “Continentale” gave away one sensation after another. Italian correspondents told stories about a “lunar lander” exploding on the launch pad at the Sputnikgrad launch site in Siberia, or about two Soviet pilots traveling in secret in a single spacecraft. Since none of the scoops were confirmed, the Continentale reports were no longer trusted. But the “rumor mill” (as such agencies were called in the West at the time) soon had followers.
In October 1959, Ogonyok magazine published an article “On the Threshold of Great Heights” about aircraft testers, which mentioned Alexei Belokonev, Ivan Kachur, Alexei Grachev, and Vechernyaya Moskva newspaper, in a note on a similar topic, told about Gennady Mikhailov and Gennady Zavodovsky. An “Associated Press” reporter who reprinted the articles somehow made the conclusion that the articles and the accompanying photographs depict future Soviet cosmonauts. Since the names mentioned later never appeared in “TASS” reports, a “logical” conclusion was made that all five died as a result of the early starts, which ended in accidents. Moreover, the exuberant imagination of newspapermen was so played out that for each “phantom astronaut” they came up with a separate version of the death with a huge number of completely unbelievable details.
So, after the launch of the first spacecraft “1KP” on May 15, 1960, Western newspapers claimed that the pilot Zavodovsky was on board, who died because of a failure in the orientation system, which took the ship into a higher orbit. The version of the death of the cosmonaut on the “First Satellite Ship” was supported by the popular American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was visiting the Soviet Union in those days. In his essay “Pravda means ‘Truth'” (“Pravda means ‘Truth'”, 1960), written as a result of his trip behind the Iron Curtain, he said (I quote in my translation)
“Around noon on May 15, the day before the failed Paris summit conference, Mrs. Heinlein and I were walking down from the castle that overlooks the beautiful city of Vilna [Vilnius]. A damned dozen Red Army cadets were coming up: we stopped and chatted with them, answered their questions, and showed them our passports.
Impressive, isn’t it? However, it is possible to understand Heinlein’s attitude to what was happening: it was physically painful for a man who was used to absorbing large volumes of news and commentary to find himself in an information vacuum, eating scraps of rumor and emasculated TASS reports. If the Soviet censorship had at least not allowed verbal garbage to clutter the airwaves, much could have been forgiven, other things being equal, but on the contrary, idle chatter, behind which it is easy to hide the essence, was an element of legalized propaganda. As a result, instead of pride in an obvious achievement, ordinary people felt that they had somehow been deceived again. Had the cadets made a mistake? It is possible. But it is also possible that along with the TASS report on the flight of the satellite spacecraft, a horrible story about a secret pilot dying in orbit spread across the country.
However, we digress. The next “phantom astronaut”, Ivan Kachur, found his death on September 27, 1960, during the failed launch of a satellite ship whose orbital flight was to take place during the visit of Nikita Khrushchev to New York. Allegedly the Soviet leader was carrying a demonstration model of a manned spaceship to be triumphantly displayed to Western journalists upon receiving the news of the successful flight and the return of the cosmonaut. The Soviet diplomatic services themselves created an unhealthy atmosphere of anticipation for the big event by hinting to American journalists that “something amazing” was going to happen on September 27. At the same time, intelligence reported that space tracking ships had taken up positions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A Soviet sailor who escaped to the West during the period described confirmed that a space launch was being prepared. On October 13, Nikita Khrushchev left America, but nothing happened. There was no official statement from TASS either. Of course, the policy of silence bore its usual fruit: journalists trumpeted to the whole world the new disaster that had befallen the Soviet space program. Only now, when many archives are open, we know that the next launch was indeed planned for Sept. 26-27, 1960, only in space was not to fly a cosmonaut, and the “Sh” – vehicle to study Mars.
The failed launch of the “Venusian” apparatus on February 4, 1961, which we discussed above, sparked a new wave of rumors. It was then that the two amateur radio brothers Achille and Giovanni Giudica-Cordiglia, who had built their own radio station near Turin, first made themselves known. They claimed to have succeeded in intercepting the telemetric radio signals of a human heartbeat and the intermittent breathing of a dying Soviet cosmonaut. This “incident” is associated with the name of the “phantom cosmonaut” Mikhailov.
But that’s not all! In 1965 the daily Corriere della Sera published a sequel to the story of the two amateur radio brothers. This time they told of three interceptions of strange signals from space. The first interception took place on November 28, 1960: radio amateurs heard the sound of morse code and a request for help in English. The second interception, on May 16, 1961, picked up a Russian woman cosmonaut speaking indistinctly. The third interception, on May 15, 1962, recorded three Russian pilots (two men and a woman) dying in space. The following phrases can be discerned through the crackling noise: “Conditions are getting worse… why aren’t you answering?… the speed is dropping. the world will never know about us.
To finally assure the reader of the authenticity of the “facts” presented, the Italian newspaper mentioned the names of the victims. The first “victim” on that list was pilot Alexei Grachev. The female cosmonaut’s name was Lyudmila. Among the trio who died in 1962, only one – Alexey Belokonev – was named for some reason.
As for the article in Ogonyok (Ogonye) that generated not even a myth, but a whole mythology, the well-known popularizer Yaroslav Kirlovich Golovanov, who also investigated the history of “phantom astronauts”, interviewed Alexey Timofeyevich Belokonov himself (and not at all Belokonov, as the journalist wrote) about it. Here is what the tester, who was buried a long time ago by the Western media, said:
“In the ’50s, long before the Gagarin flight, me and my comrades, then very young guys – Lyosha Grachev, Gennady Zavodovsky, Gennady Mikhailov, Vanya Kachur were engaged in ground tests of aviation equipment and anti-overload flight suits. By the way, at that time suits for the dogs that flew on high-altitude rockets were also created and tested in the neighboring laboratory. It was hard work, but very interesting. Once a correspondent from Ogonyok magazine came to us, walked around our laboratories, talked to us and then published reportage “On the threshold of great heights” with photos (see Ogonyok #42, 1959 – Ya. G.). The main hero of this report was Lyosha Grachev, but there was also a story about me, how I experienced the effects of explosive decompression. Ivan Kachur was also mentioned. There was also mention of the altitude record of Vladimir Ilyushin, who climbed to 28,852 meters. The journalist distorted my last name a bit and called me Belokonov, not Belokonov. Well, that’s how it all began. The New York Journal American printed a fake that my comrades and I had flown into space before Gagarin and died. Alexei Ivanovich Adjubey, editor-in-chief of Izvestia, invited Mikhailov and me to the editorial office. We arrived, talked with journalists, we were photographed. This photo was published in Izvestia (May 27 1965 – Ya.G.) next to an open letter from Adjubey to Mr. Hirst Jr. the owner of the magazine who had sent us into space and buried us. We published our own response to the Americans’ article in Red Star (May 29, 1965 – JG), in which we honestly wrote: “We did not have an opportunity to go into exo-space. We are engaged in testing various equipment for high-altitude flights. No one died during those tests. Gennady Zavodovsky lived in Moscow and worked as a driver and was not in Izvestia at the time – he was on a trip, Lyosha Grachov worked in Ryazan at the counting and analytical machines factory, Ivan Kachur lived in the town of Pechenezhin in the Ivano-Frankovsk region and worked as a teacher in an orphanage. Later I took part in tests related to life support systems for cosmonauts, and even after Gagarin’s flight I was awarded the medal “For Valor in Labor” for this work. So, in the list of mythical cosmonauts still there were people who worked for the space program, but their real life was markedly different from journalistic fantasies.
In addition to the four test friends, a very real figure was, for example, Pyotr Dolgov. The Western press announced that he was a cosmonaut who died during the crash of the orbital lander on October 10, 1960 (on that day, as we remember, the attempt to launch the spacecraft “1M” No. 1 failed). Colonel Peter Ivanovich Dolgov did die, but on November 1, 1962, while making an experimental jump with a parachute from the stratospheric vehicle “Volga” (1409th jump as a personal achievement), lifted to an altitude of 25.5 km. When Dolgov was leaving the stratostat, the face shield of his helmet cracked – death came instantly.
I give these numerous details here not to somehow impress you or make you doubt the reliability of the generally accepted history of astronautics. The review of rumors and mythical episodes is needed to show how detrimental the policy of silence was to the reputation of the national space program. The unwillingness and inability to admit mistakes played a bad joke on propagandists: even when TASS made a perfectly truthful statement, they refused to believe it, looking for contradictions or trying to read “between the lines.
All of this, of course, also had an impact on the reputation of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, who later had to blush repeatedly for someone else’s lies.
