Fifty years on, Yuri Gagarin’s death still shrouded in mystery
Yuri Gagarin, feted as a Soviet national hero for being the first man in space, was killed in a plane crash 50 years ago but the details of his death remain shrouded in mystery.
On March 27, 1968, at 10:18 am, Gagarin was preparing for a training flight in his MiG-15 plane at the Chkalovsky aerodrome near Moscow, his former colleague Vladimir Aksyonov recalls.
Aksyonov’s flight was cancelled. At 10:30 am, when he returned to his base, Gagarin and his co-pilot Vladimir Seryogin were no longer responding to radio calls.
Gagarin’s body was found the next day. He was 34.
For the first time in Soviet history, a day of national mourning was declared for someone who was not a head of state.
The engineers knew Gagarin was training on a MiG and that he had already experienced landing problems. When they heard the investigation commission give its conclusions, they were perplexed.
At the time, wild rumours surrounding Gagarin’s death were circulating around the Soviet Union: that he was killed by the Kremlin, drunk in the cockpit or kidnapped by aliens were just some popular theories.
In 2011, to celebrate the
50th anniversary of Gagarin’s historic 1961 flight into space, the Kremlin released some fresh information on his death.
Newly declassified documents said “one of the probable reasons” for the crash was a sharp manoeuvre made to avoid a weather balloon.
“One of the probable reasons! This wording does not mean anything. None of the documents from the 29 volumes of the investigation was published in full,” said historian Glushko.
He believes that the secrecy around Gagarin’s death was retained to hide “the flaws in the organisation and the functioning of the Soviet space sector,” a symbol of the USSR’s might.
“In the absence of the truth, rumours are multiplying and continue to circulate to this day,” he added. AFP
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