Knocking on Heaven's Door - Space Race Storyville

One morning in April, I took a train from Moscow to a town

called Gagarin.

This is where the popular version of how the Russians conquered space begins,

in the otherwise non-descript town they've named after their hero.

On April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go into space.

It was the height of the Cold War. No-one could say it wasn't a triumph for communism.

It was a new emotion which is impossible, I think, to describe in detail. It was...

HE INHALES

Something really great for everybody happened,

and perhaps a little hope that new times started from this day.

But all this razzmatazz tells only half the story.

Finding out about the other half, the unspoken half,

took me on a strange journey,

a journey into a Russian world

where mysticism and science merge, and nothing is certain, not even death.

-So their heads are down underneath there, are they?

-Yes.

It doesn't make sense to die because it's not pleasant, it's not nice,

nothing good happens out of it, at least for the person who dies.

What links the two is a dream of the future...

..in which science would make us all immortal...

..and supermen would rule the universe.

# I feel like I'm knocking on heaven's door

# Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door

# Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door... #

It was not where I expected to start a story on space.

But this is the only place where you can find a statue in the main street

to the man some people say is the true father

of space travel in Russia.

No, not him.

This man, a 19th-century sage called Nikolai Fedorov,

and the inspiration of a uniquely Russian view of the world, called cosmism.

-Alexander!

-Hello!

What's that?

Show it off.

IN RUSSIAN:

Alexander Boiko is a cosmist.

Some of the movement's early heroes adorn the walls of the town.

The core of their idea was that the whole universe is alive, and man is inseparable from it.

And this is now.

The current queen of cosmism held court, we discovered,

in a children's library.

Her name is Anastasia Gacheva.

That's Fedorov, and would you believe it, he came from a long line

not of Fedorovs, but of princes called Gagarin.

IN RUSSIAN:

And it was the wide horizons around that oak tree, said Anastasia,

which first inspired Fedorov to think beyond the limit.

Wow.

'Anastasia said she had something she wanted to show me.

'Not old documents about Fedorov as I expected, but a 50-year-old front page

'announcing that the Soviet Union had just put a man into space.'

"The captain of the first spaceship, it's ours, Soviet."

"A great victory for thought and hard work."

"The world applauds Yuri Gagarin."

YURI GAGARIN IN RUSSIAN:

Anastasia said she had a friend she thought I should meet.

He was hard to miss, even in the Moscow traffic.

His name was Valery Borisov, and apparently he knew everything

there was to know about Fedorov's domestic life.

But Fedorov led a double life,

working in places like this, living like a pauper.

And he ate like a saint,

said Valery, just bread, tea and water.

Devout Christians like Fedorov faced a dilemma in those days.

Outside the churches,

society hovered on the cusp between ancient and modern.

Most of them feared that science would destroy their religion.

Fedorov's genius was to enlist it in support.

Valery had invited me to visit him in his garden.

It turned out to be less of an organic creation, more of a dream world.

In fact, most of the things in his cosmic garden looked dead.

Was it just the cruelty of April, I wondered, or a symbol?

Sublime - but what had it got to do with space, I asked?

GUITARS PLAY MOURNFUL TUNE

Don't think cosmism has died its own death in the modern world.

I was on my way to meet someone who had a business plan for eternal life.

SPEECH OBSCURED BY RUSSIAN SINGING

Not exactly a gateway to paradise.

Hi. Hello.

'The man who greeted me was called Danila Medvedev.

'His group call themselves Transhumanists.

'They believe they can do what Fedorov promised.

'Live forever thanks to science.'

This is a temporary dry ice storage box,

or cooling box, can be used for that as well.

-You put a body in for how long?

-A couple of months we use this one.

This is a small one, so we give the...

You know, those patients who stored only their head or a brain here.

What, so you get the body and cut their head off, do you?

-Yes.

-Yeah. I see. So is there one in there now?

Yes. There are a couple of patients there and they have been here for five years.

-Oh, really?

-Yes.

-OK. Is it possible to look?

Yes.

-So, the heads are down underneath there somewhere?

-Yes.

They are.

Beyond that is liquid nitrogen, and submerged in liquid nitrogen are metal containers

for the patient's heads or brains inside.

Confident fellow, to call them patients!

Most people tend to feel that if something is impossible today,

it will never be possible in the future.

We have the opposite way of thinking.

We think that some technologies,

some different things we want to happen

can basically be taken for granted. Just not now, in the future.

Outside, it was like a set from some dystopic movie.

He'd come to cryology, he told me, from investment banking.

What do you want to be immortal for?

I just don't want to die.

It doesn't make sense to die, because it's not pleasant, it's not nice,

nothing good happens out of it, at least for the person who dies.

-Wouldn't you get bored?

-No. I wouldn't get bored so much

that it would make eternal life bad on balance.

And now we store the patients here in this container.

But bodies to Danila are already yesterday's technology.

His version of Fedorov's dream is to upload his identity into a computer file

and live forever in cyberspace.

Transhumanists don't care about having a body, they care about becoming post-humans.

As we get closer and closer

to actually becoming post-humans,

uploading ourselves into computers,

then it doesn't actually matter where your brain resides, because

it's run inside a computer and it doesn't matter if the computer is inside the moon or inside the Earth.

Somehow I felt Fedorov might have had something more spiritual in mind.

I think the general idea is we are

following his plan that science find a way to deal with death,

and we're doing that.

Would there still be good and evil in your futuristic world?

I don't think that if you have sufficient intelligence you can have evil,

because usually evil happening in the world is the result

of either lack of intelligence or lack of other resources.

So smart people who have healthy brains,

they don't commit bad things if they have enough resources.

So it would be a world for rich, healthy people, would it?

It would be a world of rich, healthy people, not for rich, healthy people.

'That's revisionism for you...'

I headed back into the 19th century,

to the great Rumyantsev Library over the road from the Kremlin.

As a special favour, Anastasia had arranged for me to be taken up to the very top,

through the roof rafters to the balcony, from which Fedorov had contemplated the heavens.

What a view.

No wonder his thoughts turned to space travel.

A sort of mystical mission control.

Fedorov, it was emerging, had an obsession with controlling things, very Russian.

We went down to the reading room.

For 20 years, Fedorov worked here as a senior librarian.

Today's librarian brought some rare old papers out

from the vault for me to see.

'The common task.

'That was what he called the search for eternal life through science.'

Gosh, I can't read it.

But I think I can read that.

Universal...

That's resurrection...

Too hard for me. My friend Theresa did rather better.

This line which separates the two parts of the join

seems to say, "The transition from blindness and lack of ability

"to be in charge of your own destiny, to self-direction,

"self-regulation and self-government."

And when you cross that line,

then you're in the ideal world where you have the resurrection of everybody,

the unification of worlds.

Fedorov wrote very little down.

What makes him significant is the influence he had on other great thinkers.

This is actually a letter written by Dostoevsky,

and it's written to Fedorov's pupil, and it says here,

"I have just become acquainted

"with the ideas of this great thinker

"and I would very much appreciate that you could convey to him how much

"his ideas have absolutely enthralled me."

Then he's saying that, "When I read these ideas

"and when I understand what they mean,

"I feel as though they're completely part of me,

"that they are close to my heart, they could be mine."

Dostoevsky.

That's Dostoevsky, about Fedorov's philosophy and ideas.

But the person who injected those ideas into the bloodstream of Russian science

was a near-deaf teenager

who came here to study because he couldn't keep up at school.

His name was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

For three years, Fedorov helped the young Tsiolkovsky

choose books to improve his mind.

This is the park in Moscow that celebrates the official story of space.

Pride of place among the steel and granite memories goes to that same deaf boy, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

The kids must think he thrived under the regime that erected this monument, but it simply isn't true.

For most of his life, Tsiolkovsky lived in the sticks, unrecognised, unrewarded.

And there he would probably have stayed but for one extraordinary insight.

I was looking for an article about rocket propulsion

that Tsiolkovsky had published in the very year that Fedorov died.

This is why it's famous.

Look at the date. 1903.

May.

An article published in an obscure science journal in Russian.

Full of calculations for deciding how much you need to

propel the rocket, what speed you need to get to, what fuel you need

to get out of the Earth's atmosphere.

And amazingly, he wrote that seven months before the Wright Brothers had even flown a yard.

But virtually no-one took any notice.

To find out why, I made my way to a dacha outside Moscow.

Inside was Alexander Urnov, grandson of the man who helped save

Tsiolkovsky's stroke of genius from oblivion.

Hi.

Morning. Would you like some?

I'd love some. That'd be great.

-Thanks.

-This is just my grandfather.

Let's see.

-And this is your grandfather as well, is it?

-Yes.

In those days, Boris Vorobyev was quite a man about town.

He lived in this house off Pushkin Square.

He was into every new trend.

We lived in the same apartment.

His room was called Dedovo Komnata -

grandfather's room,

and we came, my brother and me,

from time to time, to him, and got him a lot of questions.

As the transport revolution advanced, his grandfather

decided to launch a magazine specialising in aviation.

Somebody said to him that there is one dreamer who thinks about

exploration of the space and flights to the moon.

He bought him a letter inviting him to write something for his journal.

And Tsiolkovsky wrote a very detailed paper

saying that yes, he has materials, he has scientific works

and about explorations of space, not only aviation,

but much larger, universe, I would say.

Editorial board will shock this person, he's thinking about

exploration of universe, because at that time,

it seems to be much more important problems on the Earth.

Indeed there were.

Russia was entering the death throes of its imperial age.

But the paper was published, and Tsiolkovsky wrote to thank Alexander's grandfather.

This letter from Tsiolkovsky started with the words that...

This person is speaking like a prophet, and it's true, he became a prophet, actually.

Once again, his article went unnoticed, submerged

beneath the turmoil of revolution.

But with peace came a brief utopian period,

when to dream of new worlds

seemed perfectly normal.

This period of the '20s,

starting from the revolution, it was a spirit of the time.

You know,

people...

were enthusiastic about changing of everything.

This is one of the places the intellectuals of the new age used to meet.

An arts centre then, and an arts centre of sorts now.

The band call themselves Cosmis, retro-utopians.

But back in the '20s, the place was full of the real thing,

artists, musicians, writers,

poets and filmmakers who found the idea of cosmism intoxicating.

They queued round the block when Aelita, Queen of Mars came out in 1924.

For example, very rich people and very famous people,

they supported Bolsheviks, just spent money, funding, etc,

because everybody would like change what we see now here...

into something different.

So people were going to make trips to unknown places to discover something.

It was great enthusiasm.

And it was an atmosphere in which Tsiolkovsky would at last prosper.

-Let me see that.

-It's his grandson.

Oh, really? Tsiolkovsky and his grandson.

-Yeah.

-Gosh.

-That's a rare photo.

-This is unique.

-What does it say on the back?

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 71, with his grandson.

In his old age, his ideas for space travel

were finally being taken seriously.

But Utopia was over.

He cannot be a philosopher because it was a period

when we had only one philosophy, Marxist philosophy,

so you should be very cautious.

Either you became very famous,

it means that Stalin will look at it positively,

or you just will be imprisoned and killed.

Tsiolkovsky didn't care.

He knew he was near the end anyway,

but he did want a state pension to look after his wife.

Somebody gave him an idea to write a letter directly to Stalin.

And it seems to be he did it, and Stalin answered.

And since this answer was made from Stalin directly,

even Stalin wrote in Russian...

So he got his pension,

a medal, and two years later, a grand state funeral.

The space establishment is celebrating Cosmonauts' Day.

Many of these people have spent their entire working lives in total secrecy, making rockets

but to launch warheads more often than men.

This was their annual happy hour celebrating their heroes,

though not quite in the way I was expecting.

I saw Georgi Gretchko in the audience.

He was one of the first Russians to walk in space.

He told me something intriguing.

When he was young, many of the books by the man they now called

the father of space travel were virtually banned.

And why was that?

# Baby, do you understand me now?

# Sometimes I feel a little mad

# But don't you know that

# No-one alive can always be an angel

# When things go wrong

# I seem to be bad

# I'm just a soul whose intentions are good

# Oh, Lord

# Please don't let me be misunderstood. #

This is the city where Tsiolkovsky lived for most of his life,

fretting about money and the future of mankind.

I'd arranged to meet his great-grandson Sergei Samburov.

Understandably perhaps, he wanted to meet at the great Museum of Space

they've built in Tsiolkovsky's honour.

Tsiolkovsky died before a scrap of this stuff was built, of course.

But the myth is everything.

Tsiolkovsky is establishment now,

and so up to a point is his great-grandson, who has a good job in the prestigious space industry.

After a few minutes looking around, he said there was something he wanted to show me,

in the park along the road.

What is this place?

Monument to an incorrect philosopher.

I asked Sergei which would be most important to him -

his rockets, or his blueprint for the human race?

This house became a shrine for every Russian cosmonaut.

This is where Tsiolkovsky sat,

and where, as cosmonauts who are going into space, as a special favour, they're allowed to sit.

Tsiolkovsky, unlike Fedorov,

never stopped writing on whatever engaged his inquisitive mind.

But a recurrent theme was how to save humanity when the planet died.

This is a man who would have fitted the bill.

The old Cold Warriors were paying their respects to the engineer who led them into space.

On the face of it, Sergei Korolev was like them,

shunning the limelight to serve the state.

But would he tell us his name?

I went to see Korolev's daughter

who lived on the 14th floor of a smart block of flats in the centre of town.

She sat down to show me the family photographs.

Korolev and his friends had caught the space bug

that was sweeping Russia.

But their work had nothing to do with the Soviet state.

The turning point came

when a shrewd general spotted the military potential.

They got a small grant to rent the cellar of that building.

The half-truths of hindsight.

What actually happened was their military protector fell from grace.

And on June 27th 1938,

the Secret Police turned up at the Korolevs' flat on the top floor of this building.

Did he think he was going to be executed?

One minute a bright young hope for the future,

the next, hard labour, in one of the worst camps in the Gulag.

The man who saved his life, ironically,

was the Secret Police boss, Lavrentii Beria, on the right.

He saw that using the state's best scientists to break rocks

or build railways wasn't exactly in the national interest.

So he had him transferred to Moscow.

I found the place where he was sent,

here on Radio Street.

That's the building, a sort of prison laboratory for brainy traitors.

The plaque says that the famous aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev

worked here for years.

What it doesn't say is that he too was a prisoner,

charged with wrecking state enterprises.

The only fresh air Korolev got then was up there on the roof.

Now he stands in the park, showered in Soviet honours,

but deep down, I wondered,

had this supremely practical man

shared any of the incorrect tendencies of his granite companion?

But even if the only immortality he dreamed of was fame,

that great day still had a bitter taste.

And Korolev wasn't the only person with mixed feelings.

Fedorov's followers still have their eyes on a bigger prize.

In the optimistic aftermath of Gagarin's flight,

building accelerated on a new town in the Siberian forest.

It's called Akademgorodok.

It was built as a place for scientists

to live as one big community, as a place for generating ideas.

They wanted to create a paradise

for scientists, so that they would feel safe and comfortable here.

Artem was taking me to ISRICA, a research institute

where the DNA of Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov has survived everything.

-Do you know much about ISRICA itself?

-I know what my mum's been doing.

-What's that?

She's been trying to figure out ways

of distant communicating between

the human mind and, er,

other cosmic consciousnesses

in the universe.

Gosh, I see, so how to communicate

from someone on Earth

to some sort of being elsewhere.

Right. Right.

His mother and the boss, Alexander Trofimov, were in the middle of an experiment.

On my right, a large aluminium wall.

In front of it, a technician monitoring brainwaves.

Their theory is that objects

give out information about themselves.

They've placed one inside what they call the transmission zone.

And there is the receiver.

They call the chamber that Anton sat in a Kozyrev Mirror,

named after an astrophysicist who spent 11 years in the Gulag.

Cut off from other scientists,

he developed his own unorthodox theories.

One was that all cosmic matter is ceaselessly communicating with itself.

And what they believe here is that laser beams

and anti-magnetic chambers like this

help them tune into that information network.

One of their heroes is Vladimir Vernadsky,

a contemporary of Tsiolkovsky who said there was a third dimension of the cosmos,

beyond things and living creatures,

which he called a noosphere or sphere of the mind.

And that, say this branch of the cosmists,

is where to find immortality.

The man I needed to see was Alexander's partner,

Vlail Kaznacheev, the current guru of cosmism.

He's now in his 80s and too frail to come to the laboratory.

But he welcomed us into his house,

and began to explain how cosmism had evolved.

Let's make a disc for concentration on two colours.

'I thought I'd better give it a try myself.

'They tested my reactions. They measured my cosmic aura.'

All of your parameters are normal.

-Green shows normal.

-'And then I went into the mirrors.'

Make a pause, make a stop,

and just put yourself

to relax, relaxation.

Say hello to this information system

and find inside yourself

what are you looking for.

And find the answers inside.

Just sit here and make some questions

that you can ask this system,

with help of mind of the universe.

-Make this conversation with universal mind.

-OK.

-OK.

-See you later.

-See you later.

Let's finish this contact.

-Well, it was peaceful.

-Yeah.

I knew it.

Taisiya, with years of practice and faith,

had much better results.

She showed me the record she kept

of the images that had flooded into her head inside the mirror.

I'm beginning to get the idea.

We're talking close encounters here.

And that is cosmism today.

Man inextricably bound up in the universe

whether he travels through it, or stays on Earth.

Whatever you think of the dreamers,

you can't fault the scientific credentials of Alexander Urnov and the Lebedev Institute.

Portraits of Nobel prizes...

Look at that wall lined with Nobel prizewinners,

who've earned their spurs here.

Alexander is a solar physicist working at the cutting edge.

And there on the surface of the sun these cosmic questions

are not thought crazy.

-What are we looking at here?

-We see how alive the solar corona is.

-Yeah.

-I can show you another example.

An international satellite started to explore the sun

and they saw the structure of solar corona.

They start to speak, people start to speak, the solar corona is alive.

What do you mean when you say alive?

Well, not alive. This is I think one of the questions in modern science

which is in the frontier.

His words felt like a blessing on my whole journey.

But he hadn't finished.

Fedorov, formulated, so great,

so fantastic, and a huge idea,

which I cannot compare with anything else.

What is the name, or if somebody thinks different,

he have to correct me?

What is anything else most important for human being as an answer,

on the question - "what is the sense of your life?"

And his idea helps to answer this question.

The development of knowledge which science gives you

helps to make you immortal.

That is, I think, absolutely beautiful.

I don't know anything more beautiful, speaking about ideas.

It was time for my pilgrimage to the hometown

of a carpenter's son who unwittingly fulfilled Fedorov's prediction.

In the town's stadium, they were starting the Annual Gagarin Games.

Apparently this was the sort of fun that young Yuri had

before Playstations,

television, mobile phones.

I bet.

That woman, someone told me,

was Yuri Gagarin's favourite niece, Tamara.

I made a date to meet her at the family house.

Young Yuri went off to technical college,

got married and seemed to be doing well as some sort of test pilot.

Back here, they had no idea what he was really up to.

They celebrate it still, that moment

when the Soviet Union excelled America.

But it didn't last long.

Within a decade, America was overhauling them in space,

and Gagarin was dead,

killed in a senseless air crash

that left the nation distraught.

50 years on, Gagarin has found a sort of immortality,

forever young, forever smiling.

All over Russia, churches have been handed back to Orthodox priests.

But here, they worship different gods.

This is the village where Yuri Gagarin was actually born.

When he was seven, Nazi armies overran the place.

I was told there was someone in the graveyard who'd been his pal when they were boys.

And thus at the end,

I learned of the real miracle, that Yuri Gagarin

had grown old enough to fly into space at all.

The hammer, he said,

was for smashing the casings off the explosive heads.

# There's a starman waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us

# But he thinks he'd blow our minds

# There's a starman waiting in the sky

# He's told us not to blow it

# Cos he knows it's all worthwhile

# He told me

# Let the children lose it

# Let the children use it

# Let all the children boogie. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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