Academician Boris Chertok in his three-volume memoirs Rockets and People translated into English and published by NASA’s History Division, recollected:
“It grieved us when we heard a radio report that on 15 April, a press conference had been held at the House of Scientists in honor of the flight of the first man into space. After Gagarin, Academicians Vasiliy Parin, Yevgeniy Fedorov, Norair Sisakyan, and Aleksandr Nesmeyanov spoke at the press conference. And there was no mention, not a word about the other academicians—the real heroes of this event. Their very presence in the hall even proved to be a nuisance. In the “heat of the moment,” had someone failed to think it through? No, this harmful extra layer of security had been thought through and deliberately carried out. The official report made public on 16 April somewhat placated the masses of anonymous heroes: The CPSU Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers deemed it necessary to award orders and medals to the scientists, workers, engineers, and technicians who participated in the production of the Vostok orbital spacecraft and who supported the world’s first successful flight of a Soviet man into space. The appropriate ministries and branches have been instructed to submit the names of those individuals who were involved in the production of the Vostok and its flight support so that they might be awarded.
Academy of Sciences President Aleksandr Nesmeyanov had done nothing against space research, but he had somehow failed to suit Khrushchev and Suslov. On 19 May, a general assembly of the Academy of Sciences accepted his “request” to resign from his high post, and Mstislav Keldysh was elected president. On 19 May, the new president opened a general assembly of the Academy of Sciences dedicated entirely to human spaceflight. Everything that he said in his opening address was unconventional, and for the uninitiated, very new. However, when listing all the achievements, only two names were mentioned—Gagarin and Tsiolkovskiy.
Academician Anatoliy Blagonravov gave the main report at the assembly. He dwelled on the technical problems of spaceflight—a section that had been prepared at our own OKB-1 and carefully edited by Korolev before it was handed over to the speaker. It was history’s desire that during the launch of the first Sputnik, Blagonravov was on a science-related trip to the United States. During Gagarin’s flight, Blagonravov was in Italy. At the conclusion of his report, he said: “I witnessed first-hand what elation and admiration the news of the historic flight of our Gagarin’s flight caused among the broad masses of the Italian people.” You couldn’t blame Blagonravov for trying to grab a bit of borrowed glory. He had resisted and did not want to give this report, believing that it dishonored Korolev and the other members of the Council of Chiefs, and the academicians as well. But the Presidium of the Academy, on instructions from the Central Committee, obliged him to do so. The majority of the assembly participants understood fully that if the esteemed academician had been in Italy on the day of Gagarin’s flight, then he bore no responsibility for this particular success of our science and technology.
A decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet dated 9 April 1962 established 12 April as Cosmonautics Day in commemoration of Gagarin’s flight. That day, in the hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, a function was held celebrating the first anniversary of the flight. Gagarin gave a speech. Not a single chief designer was in the Presidium! Not a single one of the actual participants in the production of the rocket and spacecraft!
… Until the end of their days, Korolev and all the other chief designers could not compete with Gagarin in terms of the number of different awards. He received the highest governmental awards in almost every country that he visited. According to our unwritten laws of the Cold War, no scientist involved in rocket-space technology, no matter how great his merits, was supposed to be known abroad and had no claim to fame in his own country. Academician Petr Kapitsa advocated awarding the Nobel Prize to the scientist who set up the experiment for the creation of the first Sputnik. The scientist who realized mankind’s dream of flying into space was all the more deserving of the Nobel Prize. But Kapitsa’s appeal remained “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”
(Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1894–1984), one of the Soviet Union’s most famous physicists, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978 for his inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics.)
Sergei Korolev and Gagrin’s first flight into space >
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