The flight of Yuri Gagarin into space became an extraordinary event in 1961, not only for the Soviet Union, but for the whole world. However, the increased attention of specialists was attracted not only by the flight itself, but also by the landing of the astronaut. Only 25 years later it became known that Gagarin landed by parachute, and not at all in a spaceship, as everyone thought.
It is not for nothing that the Cosmonautics Day is celebrated annually on April 12 in our country. It was on this day in 1961 that Yuri Gagarin made the first space flight in the history of mankind. Gagarin was absent from planet Earth for 108 minutes, and then, as the newspapers wrote, he successfully landed in the Saratov region. The first people who had a chance to see the arrived cosmonaut were Anna Takhtarova, the wife of a local forester, and her granddaughter Rita. At first, seeing the "orange monster", Anna Akimovna and Rita ran away. But Gagarin shouted that he was his own, they say, Soviet. After that, Takhtarova, realizing that she was dealing with a man, even helped Gagarin to take off his helmet. And then the military arrived.
This story has been described in many publications more than once. There were always enough details in it. For 25 years, the journalists have never told the world the truth about just one thing - how the domestic cosmonaut landed. The general public was convinced that Yuri Gagarin came to the surface of his home planet from the cockpit of a spacecraft. However, this was exactly what the Soviet authorities were convincing everyone of.
Although, it is worth noting that the suspicions that Yuri Gagarin did not land in a spaceship at all arose in the very first days of the hero's celebration. As Geliy Salakhutdinov writes in his book Adventures in Orbits, during a large-scale press conference, one of the foreign journalists asked Gagarin directly how he landed. The cosmonaut was embarrassed, talked about something with the head of the event and answered the correspondent in a rather evasive way. "The chief designer," said Gagarin, "assumed two methods of landing: both inside and outside the aircraft."
Gagarin was well aware that he had no right to give out genuine information about the method of his landing. The fact is that Yuri Alekseevich really ejected and went down to the ground already by parachute. But in those years, no one has come up with another, safer method of landing. This circumstance did not in the least detract from Gagarin's feat, but he perfectly understood what a too long tongue might be fraught with.
Why was such secrecy necessary, because a space flight actually took place? According to Valery Lesnikov, the author of the book “Gagarin Time. 1960-1969 , if the feat of the Soviet pioneer was approached from a bureaucratic point of view, then his flight would not be considered a space flight. According to the requirements of the FAI (International Aviation Federation), the space status was assigned only to the flight during which a person made a start from the ground, visited space and landed on the same aircraft. That is why the authorities of the USSR for more than 20 years hid the fact that Yuri Gagarina left the spacecraft and descended with the help of a parachute.
The disclosure of this secret could entail the most dire consequences for someone who turned out to be too talkative. So, 2 years after Gagarin's triumph, one of the pilots who tested the catapult for the first cosmonauts, Valery Golovin, blabbed to random interlocutors in a cafe that Yuri Gagarin landed not at all in a ship, but by parachute. A month later, Golovin was removed from work, and a few weeks later the tester died, falling from the balcony of the multi-storey building in which he lived.