GAGARIN OUT OF CONTROL
60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST HUMAN IN SPACE
Insistent ringing of the phone wakes up General Andrey Stuchenko in the middle of the night. Drowsily he lifts the receiver, then fully wakes when he hears an official voice on the line. The unexpected call is from his superior at the Kremlin, and Stuchenko immediately senses something out of the ordinary about this call. The voice on the phone continues:
“Very soon, a man will be launched into space. Our glorious cosmonaut will be landing in your district. Make sure to organise a safe rescue and suitable reception. You will answer for the task with your life!”
It is April 1961, and the general is in the barracks on the outskirts of Saratov, a city in in southern Russia. Stumbling out of bed, he fetches his map of the region and uses a pencil and ruler to divide the area into squares. Then he assembles his troops and despatches groups to each separate square.
“Look towards the sky and watch for something out of the ordinary,” General Stuchenko orders them, quietly adding: “A man will fall out of the sky.”
What neither the general nor his troops know is that the man they are waiting for, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, is struggling with problems that threaten to turn the Soviet Union’s triumph into a humiliating fiasco.
Peasant’s son wanted to fly
Yuri Gagarin’s parents were peasants in a Soviet agricultural production cooperative, and the boy grew up during World War II. As a child, he had been fascinated by planes, but when 16-year-old Yuri left home in 1950, he began with machinery that was more down to Earth: the teenage Gagarin became a steel works apprentice in Moscow.
He performed
