… On that gray, dank morning in the cloudy sky over the small provincial town of Kirzhach, an airplane with a first-class crew of two Heroes of the Soviet Union was falling. Air Force Colonels Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin, who were dying in front of several residents of the outback, did not know at the last moment of their lives that they would be betrayed by those who shouted loudest for decades to the whole world about love for their people - the Kremlin camarilla, which never did anything to reveal the mystery of the disaster that happened …
1967, March 15, the Kremlin - a secret meeting of the "space" direction of the Soviet military-industrial complex is underway. The event is being hosted by Leonid Smirnov, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers State Committee for Defense Technology. At the end of the meeting, he asked several comrades who were in charge of manned space exploration to stay, and confidentially told them the opinion of the Central Committee and the government, who strongly opposed "the encroachments of some cosmonauts regarding their further participation in space exploration." Among the "troublemakers" the first was named Yuri Gagarin, whom, "as you, comrades, must understand, we cannot risk it."
General Nikolai Kamanin, Assistant Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force for Space, was outraged: “Well, let's turn cosmonaut No. 1 into a museum piece! Have you really decided to destroy it for the joy of the imperialists ?! Then you have to be consistent to the end: we will forbid him to play sports, drive a car, walk on foot!"
Smirnov gave in reluctantly: “Personally, I am not against his noble aspirations for the glory of the Motherland! But the Defense Ministry should also express its point of view. And we will prepare materials for the Politburo."
1968, March 26 - Honored Military Pilot of the USSR, Lieutenant General of Aviation Pushkin: “Hearing from Seregin on the phone that he was going to release Gagarin himself on an independent flight, I mentally approved the choice of the export command: Volodya fought, behind him - 200 sorties to IL-2, three downed Messers; total flight time 4000 hours. He graduated from the academy with an appointment to the Air Force Flight Research Institute. As a pilot, he is reliable, cool, skilled and highly disciplined."
10 h 50 min. Colonel Alexander Maslennikov: “Having found Kamanin at the Cosmonaut Training Center, I reported to him about the departure of Gagarin and Seregin at 10.19 and the loss of communication with them at 10.32. At the end of the conversation, he expressed concern that in 10 minutes the fuel would run out.
13 hours. IL-14 planes and helicopters, with tolerable visibility, searched the surroundings of Kirzhach, but all in vain. Generals Nikolai Pushko and Nikolai Kuznetsov delicately reminded Kamanin: "Maybe it's time to report to the leadership?" "Early!" - sharply cut one off. In the end, at about 15 o'clock - the long-awaited radiogram from the helicopter. Major Valery Zamychkin reported: “I see the wreckage of the plane 64 km away. from Chkalovsky and 3 km. from the village of Novoselovo! " An hour later, about a kilometer from the crash site, the first helicopter assault landed; drowning in wet snow, the military hardly reached the smoking crater, around which the locals were already crowding together with techies …
18 h 40 min By nightfall, it became clear that the irreparable had happened. None of the arriving generals, who surrounded the smoking crater, pronounced Gagarin's name aloud, but there were enough signs of Gagarin's death around: the remains of a flight jacket, shoes, a tablet with red felt-tip pen marks made by his hand. Finally, General Kamanin made up his mind and ordered to connect him with the Air Force Main Headquarters. From there, a message soon went to the Kremlin: "Seregin died, the death of Gagarin is very likely, but the final conclusion will be made after a detailed examination of the crash site."
Promotional video:
March 28, 1 h 45 min. Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, Colonel-General Pavel Kutakhov: “The assistants of the General Secretary grabbed me tightly, demanding that I be informed about the results of the investigation every hour. All my attempts to explain to these zealous campaigners that they do not do such serious things have not met with understanding on their part. I was perfectly aware of all the political consequences of what was happening and I was not going to sculpt something “from the lantern” without thoroughly checking every word and fact”.
10 a.m. By the decision of the Central Committee, a government commission was created, whose task was “to clarify the circumstances and reasons for the death of Yu. A. Gagarin and V. S. Seregin ". The composition of this "collegial body" is never more threatening: Ustinov, Smirnov, Dementyev, Yakubovsky, Vershinin, Mikoyan. This "healthy collective" disciplines and cements a comrade from the "organs" - General Nikolai Zakharov.
The first thing that such an authoritative body did was immediately, by the end of the same day, created as many as 4 subcommittees, on the main strategic directions of "careful search". Among them, the fourth subcommission is distinguished by the seriousness and responsibility of the task: it is called upon to prepare a general opinion and a report to the Central Committee. It was led by Smirnov, Ustinov's right hand. There are, of course, no outsiders and cannot be either in this or in other subcommissions: they are staffed only by comrades from the KGB, the Central Committee, the government, and only slightly "diluted" by the pioneers of space.
At the moment when Leonid Smirnov gave the last orders regarding organizational issues, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, Ustinov became the guard of honor in the Central House of the Soviet Army. Next to them are the cosmonauts, relatives of the victims.
At 10.30, the government decided to cremate the dead "on the same day." It happened at 21 o'clock in the presence of all the cosmonauts, Ustinov, Vershinin, Kamanin. The urns with the ashes of Gagarin and Seregin were delivered at night to the Red Banner Hall of the CDSA, and from 9 o'clock the next morning workers were allowed access to them.
22 h 40 min From the crash site, the Air Force Main Headquarters received a message: “The aircraft engine, part of the front cockpit has been removed; aircraft watches, pilots' wristwatches, Gagarin's identity card with S. P. Queen … "Such a" trifle "as the discovery of a photograph of the deceased's wife, Valentina Ivanovna, next to the Korolyov's photo, is omitted by the originator of the telegram due to the" insignificance "of this fact.
March 29. Already in the morning, more than enough material evidence of the death of the Twin's crew fell into the hands of the search engines. The flow of people to the CDSA, meanwhile, did not dry up. At noon, the funeral commission decided to organize a commemoration of the victims in one of the vacant halls of the CDSA. The composition of the participants in this mournful event is 200 people, including 130 guests. Over the course of half an hour, the Central Committee, the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Council and the Ministry of Defense received several thousand applications for the participation of apparatchiks of all ranks and stripes, who suddenly at one moment amicably loved the dead heroes. However, endless lists of faithful campaigners were mercilessly cut down to 70 people.
Returning home, General Kamanin made an entry in his “underground” diary, which the KGB would vainly hunt for on the instructions of the Central Committee: “It was difficult to listen to long sorrowful speeches. Valentina Ivanovna was the hardest of all, but she held out with all her strength. Her eyes, indifferent to everything that happened, said only one thing: “Yura is no more. I will never see him alive again …”"
April, 4. Dmitry Ustinov visited the cosmonaut training center with a huge retinue, appearing, as always, unexpectedly. He got acquainted with the test base in detail, talked with the cosmonauts for a long time, again and again returned to the flight of Yuri Gagarin and was annoyed: "Time is running out, and the reasons for Gagarin's death are still not established." Most of all he was outraged by the fact that no one was able to at least presumably explain what had happened: "The devil knows what: a hundred luminaries are digging, but no one is able to mumble at least something intelligible!"
April 11. Nikolay Kamanin, diary entry:
“I do not stop thinking about the most burning question that thousands of Soviet people are asking these days in their letters to the government:“Why didn't you save Gagarin?”
I understand better than anyone else that saving the lives of famous astronauts is one of the most important issues, one of my fundamental tasks. With Yura, I traveled all over the world, he met with hundreds of millions of people, speaking 20 times a day. Everything went well … We adhered to the strictest regime with him, we managed to maintain efficiency and vigilance. Yura had a very strong character, but even a steel robot would not have withstood the onslaught that he was subjected to daily from ministers, marshals, academics and other “big people”.
Everyone wanted to drink with him, and always “to the bottom”. I reported, asked, and insisted on limiting the cosmonaut's meetings with the people. Even a resolution of the Central Committee was adopted, but nothing could contain the inevitably negative influence of banquets and drinks on the character and appearance of Yuri Gagarin. Stormy life and booze slowly but surely erased Gagarin's charming smile from his face. Only his preparation for a new space flight, as well as airplane flights, could stop the disintegration of Gagarin's personality.
June 5. The reason why Gagarin died remains unclear; nevertheless, the apparatus of the Central Committee and the military-industrial complex, in an atmosphere of complete secrecy (and secretly from the generals), began to refine the wording of the official conclusion about the incident, intended for the media.
Pilot-cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: “Consciousness is paralyzed by the riddle, the incomprehensibility of what happened. After all, it was reliably established that just a minute before his death, Gagarin was in an absolutely normal state: his speech in the recordings of negotiations with the command post was measured and calm, both pilots' poses remained working until they hit the ground: Gagarin held the control handle with his left hand, his legs and Seregin were on the pedals."
26 July. In the Council of Ministers, an absolutely secret draft decision “on the Gagarin disaster”, born in the labyrinths of the Central Committee and the military-industrial complex apparatus, lay on Leonid Smirnov's table. For approval, the following wording was proposed: "The probable cause of the crash is the execution of a sharp maneuver … with the subsequent hit of the aircraft in supercritical flight modes in complicated weather conditions."
Having heard about this, General Kamanin met with Leonid Smirnov and moved from the spot to the quarry: “What does“sharp maneuver”mean? Where from ?! And what does this series of incomprehensible “ors”, used by the authors only to make the reader “go crazy”, mean? Why on earth ?! Whose finger has all this rubbish sucked out of ?! Don't you see that this so-called "formulation" contradicts all the available facts and the actual flight situation? And besides, it dishonors the honor and dignity of the victims ?!"
Walking around the offices of the headquarters of the "defense", Kamanin, to his horror, discovered that generals Kutakhov, Pstygo, Mishuk and Eremin had already surrendered their positions to the apparatus without resistance and approved this bastard "sharp maneuver"!
July 27. The "secret" news of the birth of the leadership divorced from reality finally reached Star City. Gagarin's companions in the detachment sat down for an "open letter" addressed to the secretary of the Central Committee, Dmitry Ustinov, who took care of the Soviet cosmonautics:
“Due to the fact that the negative pressure drop in the cockpits of Gagarin's plane could only be the result of depressurization, it was necessary to study all the reasons for its occurrence. It could have happened as a result of the destruction of lanterns or cabins from a collision with a foreign object (including a balloon), from an explosion on an aircraft in the cockpit area. We believe that there is no reason to conclude that the aircraft has reached a supercritical mode and, consequently, its fall due to a sharp turn of the aircraft by the pilots from the clouds or from the balloon. As aviation specialists, we look with bewilderment at such a free, unreasonable interpretation of the actions of the pilots …"
General Kamanin felt in time that a steep mess was about to brew around the work of the government commission. He reported the situation to Commander-in-Chief Konstantin Vershinin. It turned out that the air marshal also thinks about the tragedy and, moreover, managed to form in his mind a very definite opinion about what happened on March 27. He believes that the most probable cause of Gagarin's death was precisely the collision of the aircraft with the balloon-probe, which destroyed the cockpit glazing, and as a result, the crew's loss of performance. Kamanin left his faithful friend, senior comrade and mentor satisfied. Still: the marshal, as always, correctly understood the essence of the event. Kamanin agrees with him, but does not exclude that an explosion could have occurred in the cockpit.
August 2. The defense department of the Central Committee agreed on the "final version" of the decision of the CPSU Central Committee on the reasons for the deaths of Gagarin and Seregin. This conclusion, which will be signed by Brezhnev and Kosygin, will never be published, it read: “The most probable cause of death was a sharp turn of the plane in order to avoid a collision with the balloon-probe. The less likely cause was the plane's swinging away from the top of the clouds. As a result, the aircraft reached critical flight angles, difficult weather conditions made it difficult to control the aircraft, and the crew died."
Alexey Leonov: “Rumors and false versions regarding the circumstances and reasons for the death of Gagarin, at times subside, then begin to be exaggerated with renewed vigor. What to do: this is the price of the costs for which we have to pay in the absence of reliable information."
At the same time, it is quite obvious that this “flooded sea” of conjectures and pseudo-hypotheses around the name of Yuri Gagarin was provoked by a genuine conspiracy of silence by the Kremlin leaders about the circumstances of Gagarin's death and their complete, utter helplessness shown in organizing the investigation of the disaster.
M. Rudenko
