factfinder

12.4.1961 Nikita Chruscev announced a successful lift off of the Soviet rocket in which Iuri Gagarin successfully orbited the Earth and successfully landed.So far unknown to the world, Iuri Gagarin overnight became a world hero and a favourite of the world media.After the collapse of the SU the Kremlin archives leaked a nasty truth but the Kremlin rulers have not apologized to the world yet.
The list of the space candidates belonged to the most classified but this one is sure : before Gagarin at least seven Soviet cosmonauts had died when attempting to orbit the Earth for the fame of the CParty ( Ladovskiy, Shiborin ,Mitkov,Dolgov,Belokonov,Kachur,Grachov ) without ever being publicly honoured for this sacrifice.Which of them succeeded in orbiting the Earth the Kremlin has not told, most of them, nevertheless, died during landing because the Kremlin only needed to be the first in orbit, the return of the cosmonaut was desirable because of the media but not necessary . Therefore the Soviet engineers were ordered not to be kept by working hard on landing maneouvres, and they were not able to calculate them out which brought about tragical consequences , the more so because the Soviet cosmonauts did not land onto the sea but onto the land ... For this reason they had to catapult themselves at the altitude of 8 kms and then wait for many hours or days to be found . There is evidence that one of them got frozen to death in the deep taiga and another one landed utterly off course
in China where he got arrested . The Kremlin tenaciously denied all the failures.
However, this was not the case with Gagarin who "virtuously" landed in a pumpkin field and after having been treated with pumpkins by the local farmers, the helicopter took him away triumphantly ...
Nikita Chruscev commanded Sergei Korolev,the Chief of the Soviet Space Programme, (whom NCH as a member of the Politbyro sent to Gulag before that) to get a Soviet cosmonaut into the Space at all costs ...
In October 1960 the Soviets tried to launch a rocket but its booster failed to start off. Vladimir Ilyushin was the son of the famous Sergei I. whose fighters and bombers contributed to the Soviet victory over Germany, so he was a protégé of both Stalin and Chruscev but he was not on friendly terms with his son who became a test pilot of his competitor Suchoy . Vladimir Ilyushin , though all his colleagues were on the candidate list, was constantly refusing for a long time to go into the space as he did not think much of the merits of cosmonauts who were totally directed from the commanding centre.
He thought the job of a cosmonaut as discredit for a talented test pilot but in the end he was talked over by Korelev and uderwent a few months (!!!) training while all the other candidates passed a two yrs training.
Vladimir Ilyushin wept when he could tell the truth on meeting American documentarists in 2001. He was launched form the Baikonur cosmodrome on April 7th,1961. During the flight a major dysfunction occurred and the module slost its contact with the commanding centre that let him orbit the Earth three times while he lost conscience as being exposed to the hard cosmic conditions and couldn´t catapult himself upon re-entering the Earth atmosphere, so he landed hard - nobody believed that he survived but he did.
The CIA and other intelligence service naturally were in the know about his flight and during it several press releases were issued - from a Reuters correspondent in MOW , from the French AFP and curiously enough one even from Bulgaria ... The Soviet media immedaitely denied all these reports and the Kremlin was plunged into chaos and confusion. NCH , to whom the space flights had served for his own propagandist promotion, did not want to admit any failure of any sort ... that´s why he maintained that Vladimir Ilyushin had been lying in coma after a bad car accident for a month (than he changed that to two yrs) so he couldn´t have nothing in common with any flight ... ( NCH did not hesitate to say such a lie even though Vladimir was taken in several photographs sound and safe ) The last official crazy version was that Vladimir was transported for a rehabilitation to China ( some journalists wrote that he actually landed in China ) ...