SOVIET FIRSTS

soning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

“We’ve been struck by the number of Russians who’ve been coming, including many who have made the journey from Russia,” said Doug Millard, the senior curator of the exhibitionwhospentmorethan five years organising the selection and transport of the objects over land from Moscow.

“We’ve been knocked out. We used to use the word ‘blockbuster’ and certainly Cosmonauts has been one of those,” Mr Millard said.

Although America effectively won the space race to land the first man on the Moon, it was Soviet Russia that took most of the other medals on the way, including the first satellite in orbit, the first animal in space, the first man, woman and crew in space, the first space-walk, and the first lunar probe and first photographs of the lunar landscape on the “far side” of the Moon.

Many of the objects on display have not been seen in public before, even in Russia. They include the simple mug brought back from a Siberian gulag by “chief designer”Yuri Korolev, who had been caught up in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 40s before eventually becoming the secret head of the Russian space programme, until his untimely death in 1966 during what should have been a routine surgical procedure.

Cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin: the first man in space, Gagarin was a steel worker who became a test pilot and the first cosmonaut to orbit the Earth in Vostok 1. He flew in space only once but he was idolised both within the Soviet Union and beyond. In the same year as his historic flight, in 1961, he was invited to London as a guest of the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers and was mobbed wherever he went. Valentina Tereschova: the first woman in space, in 1963. Tereschova had kept her mission secret, even from her mother, who first heard of her exploits from a neighbour. Tereschova identified an error in her re-entry program which would have killed her had it not been for her foresight. She landed off course in the remote Altai region of Siberia and had to threaten to use her pistol to stop local peasants from interfering with her parachute ropes. Alexey Leonov: first cosmonaut to carry out a space-walk, in 1965. Nobody had done an “extra-vehicular activity” until Leonov stepped out of the temporary air-lock of his Voskhod 2 mission. He later recalled it was so quiet he could hear his own heartbeat. in space, where Cosmism was crucial,” he said.

“It was built on the foundations of Russian [Christian] Orthodoxy, but looking to a second resurrection for everybody, including one’s ancestors, who would come back from the dead and join in this deliverance in space,” he explained.

“The Russians were three years behind Apollo and they did didn’t have the clarity of purpose that Apollo had, and they didn’t have the money. The figures are unclear, but it looks like they had well under half the funding that Apollo had,” Mr Millard said.

One of his favourite items in Cosmonauts is the “golden man” exhibited on its own in the final, neon-blue room. It is a life-size, gold-painted manikin that was sent to the far side of the Moon and back again to test for radiation, which Millard and Blatchford both spotted lying forlornly on the floor of a Moscow polytechnic museum.

“I knelt down to read the label and I was absolutely astonished that we were looking at something that had flown in space. We ended up putting it in the final room where it carries a whole raft of implicit messages about the journey we’ve been on in the exhibit, but also what the future of spaceflight might be, and whether indeed there is one,” he said.