Jamie Doran > Quotes

“When we learned about his flight into space we immediately remembered his very nice smile. He preserved the same smile for the rest of his life – the same one he had when he was a boy.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Gagarin diverted himself with more partying, prompting a ­disappointed Kamanin to note, ‘Since Komarov’s death, Gagarin has been dismissed from all space flights. He has undergone a new, more stormy process of personality disintegration.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Valentin was still a boy, and Zoya was a young and charming lass, defenceless in the face of misfortunes that might befall her far from home. Her mother’s grief was boundless, but her husband said to her, ‘Remember, Boris and Yuri still need you.’ You’d have thought the war, the occupation, the fearful Germans billeted in the Gagarins’ home, would have mutilated for ever those children’s personalities, but their mother and father did everything to prevent this. They never showed even a trace of servility to the enemy. It follows that the children showed none either.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“His first assignment was to insert hinge-pins into the lids of newly assembled metal flasks. The walrus-faced foreman strode across to inspect the work. By beating his fists against his forehead and swearing mightily, he was able to hint that Gagarin had installed his pins completely the wrong way round. ‘The next day we all made better progress,’ Gagarin recalled. By his own admission, this was typical for him. He had no particular knack for getting things right the first time. He had to work quite hard at his tasks, practising them repeatedly. In a brief interview given many years later, Gorinshtein said:   At first Yura struck me as too small and frail. The only vacancy I had available was in the foundry group, which meant a lot of smoke, dust, heat and heavy lifting. I thought it would be beyond him. I can’t remember why I eventually ignored all these negative points and accepted him. It must have been the determination you could feel in him. Was he special? No, but he was hard-working.5”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Everyone is writing about me, and it makes me uncomfortable because they’re making me out to be some kind of superhero. In fact, like everyone else, I’ve made mistakes. I have weaknesses.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“It was not easy to score top marks at Orenburg. Yadkar Akbulatov, a senior instructor, said in 1961, ‘Don’t imagine that Yuri was an infallible cadet, a child prodigy. He wasn’t. He was an impetuous, enthusiastic young man who made the same slips as any other.’ His worst marks were for his landings. He was in danger of failing Orenburg completely if he could not get his aircraft down without bouncing on his tyres. Akbulatov flew with him a couple of times to see if they could iron out some faults. ‘I took him up and watched him carefully. On steep banking turns his performance wasn’t absolutely perfect, but in vertical dives and climbs he put on a show that made me see stars from the g-load. Then came the touchdown. It was faultless! I asked him, “Why can’t you always land like that?” He grinned and said, “I’ve found the solution.” He put a cushion under his seat so that he could get a better line of sight with the runway.’ From now on, Gagarin never flew any aircraft without his cushion.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Both sides in the superpower divide had learned that the space environment showed no concern for nationalities or flags, but treated all trespassers – Russian and American alike – to the same set of risks.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“But there was one notable occasion when Gagarin refused point-blank to help. A mother wrote to him saying that her son was in trouble for cutting down a fir tree in a forbidden area at Christmas time. Gagarin looked into the business, found out that it had probably been more than one tree and that the young man was selling them off for profit. He recommended the man be sacked from his job. According to his driver, Gagarin became pretty angry and said, ‘What happens if everyone goes and cuts down “just one” fir tree? Where are we going to live then? Any day now, we won’t have anything left.’ Leonov puts this (and other similar incidents) down to Gagarin’s perceptions of the earth from space. ‘After his flight he was always saying how special the world is, and how we had to be very careful not to break it.’ This is a common enough truism by modern standards, taught to all of us in school, but what must it have been like for the very first man in space to discover it for himself? In April 1961 Gagarin was the only human being among three billion who had actually seen the world as a tiny blue ball drifting through the infinite cosmic darkness.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“doctors applied local anaesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the Sevastopol surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip. The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment and she remembers him asking her just one question. ‘Will I fly again?’ She said, ‘We’ll see.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“She remembers a tiny little girl, Anna, who kept getting trampled or left behind when the other children stampeded about the place. Yuri became quite protective of her; carried Anna’s satchel after school and walked her home, to show the others that she should not be picked on.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Two days after the fighting had subsided, the older Gagarin boys, Valentin and Yuri, sneaked into the woods to see what had happened. ‘We saw a Russian colonel, badly wounded but still breathing after lying where he fell for two days and nights,’ Valentin explains. ‘The German officers went to where he was lying, in a bush, and he pretended to be blind. Some high-ranking officers tried to ask him questions, and he replied that he couldn’t hear them very well, and asked them to lean down closer. So they came closer and bent right over him, and then he blew a grenade he’d hidden behind his back. No one survived.’ Valentin remembers Yuri’s rapid transformation after this from a grinning little imp to a serious-minded boy, going down into the cellar to find bread, potatoes, milk and vegetables, and distributing them to refugees from other districts who were trudging through the village to escape the Germans. ‘He smiled less frequently in those years, even though he was by nature a very happy child. I remember he seldom cried out at pain, or about all the terrible things around us. I think he only cried if his self-respect was hurt . . . Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed around that time, during the war.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Yuri walked down the gangway and onto the carpet, looking every inch the hero in his brand-new Major’s uniform and greatcoat, but Zoya immediately noticed something terrible. ‘I saw something dragging on the ground behind him. It was one of his shoelaces.’ Gagarin noticed it too, and spent the interminable ceremonial walk along the carpet silently praying that he would not trip over and make a fool of himself on this of all occasions. He told Valentin later that he had felt more nervous on the carpet than during the space flight. But he did not trip. Incidentally, the shoelace can be seen in the many commemorative films of the day’s events. The cosmonauts’ official cameraman, Vladimir Suvorov, noted in his diary the endless discussions later about whether or not to edit the film and remove the scenes showing the untied shoelace. Eventually, at Gagarin’s insistence, the shots were preserved as a sign of his ordinary, lovable humanity. The ‘mistake’ turned out to have its own special propaganda value.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Gagarin’s death was shameful not just because of the loss of a national hero in muddled circumstances, but because of the dangerous flaws revealed in the Soviet military technology of his time. Obviously their radar systems were not capable of simultaneous mapping of aircraft heights and positions, nor of positively identifying one target from another. The implications of this were highly alarming.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“A Japanese journalist wanted to know why Gagarin had bought a load of Japanese stuffed toys for his children. Could it be that Russian toys were not available back home? Gagarin replied, ‘I always bring presents back for my daughters. I wanted to surprise them this time with Japanese dolls, but now this story will be all over the newspapers and it’ll take away their surprise. You’ve spoilt a joy for two small girls.’ He made this speech with the most charming smile and the questioner conceded defeat.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“This apt metaphor of a pyramid helps illustrate that Gagarin’s life was full of contradictions. He was an ambitious and competitive individual, acutely aware that the central achievement of his life was based on the efforts of many others who were not even permitted to reveal their names, let alone share in his public glory. He was a peasant boy at ease with complex engineering equations; a programmed technician who could think for himself; a loyal member of a conformist society who rebelled against the system. He was impetuous, occasionally thoughtless, yet highly disciplined in his work and responsible towards others, often at great risk to himself. He knew little of politics, while displaying a remarkable knack for diplomacy, both at home and abroad. He was an adulterer who never really betrayed his wife and family. As all these conflicting elements of his life intermingle, the story that emerges is one of an essentially decent and brave man giving his best in extraordinary circumstances.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“It’s hard to decide which of them should be sent to die, and it’s equally hard to decide which of these two decent men should be made famous worldwide.  ”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“When he grew weary of the adulation at his news conferences, one of Gagarin’s favourite ploys was to remind his listeners that his Hero of the Soviet Union medal was stamped with the number 11,175. ‘That means 11,174 people accomplished something worthwhile before me. I disagree with any division of people into ordinary mortals or celebrities. I’m still an ordinary mortal. I haven’t changed.’ (Once, in Moscow, he laughed happily when he overheard a woman in the crowd say, ‘Oh, look! He’s cut himself shaving.’)”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“Anna was in tears of pride, but Gagarin must have known how frightened she had felt over the last day or so. He hugged her, wiped away her tears with a handkerchief and said in a mock-childish voice, ‘Please don’t cry, Mamma. I won’t do it again.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

“At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his cramped office cot. He and many other NASA staffers were working 16-hour days in the lead-up to astronaut Alan Shepard’s first flight in a Mercury capsule. When the phone at his side rang in the pre-dawn silence, he was irritable and unprepared. ‘Hey, what is this!’ he yelled into the phone. ‘We’re all asleep down here!’ Next morning the headlines read: ‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.”
― Jamie Doran, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin