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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Cosmonaut doomed because no one showed Brezhnev a memo 

In "Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage'," National Public Radio reporter Robert Krulwich discusses the forthcoming book Starman by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, which recounts the sad death of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, burned alive in the 1967 crash of a Soyuz module after re-entry:
The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships. [...] It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.

The problem was [Yuri] Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.

The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."
[Via Popehat.]
Posted by: Allen Varney / 4:59 PM

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