Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993 TAG: 9308080049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: D-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCIS X. CLINES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
It is as if Ivan always knew the gallant adventure of Communism's astronauts would come to this - a hard-currency auction at Sotheby's.
The hundreds of artifacts of the only triumphal chapter of Bolshevism range from a well-charred space capsule built for three, to Ivan himself, the full-sized Soviet test dummy, still suited up and ready for earth's bittersweet turnings.
"This is close as you can get to the beginning of man's entry into space," said David Redden, Sotheby's director of the auction planned in New York City for December. He was visiting Ivan in a warehouse where the space artifacts are being massed as if for a going-out-of-business sale.
In a way, that's what it is, for the big-budget days of the space race ended with the Cold War. Dozens of Soviet astronauts who were celebrities mainly within Star City, the secret Soviet space center outside Moscow, have come forward with memorabilia for Sotheby's - looking for dollars, of course, but also wanting to share with the world their long-hidden adventures.
"Here were heroes of the cosmos, lining up with parcels and bags containing extraordinary things," Redden said.
The auction will feature such historic items as:
Turn-of-the-century monographs of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who brilliantly anticipated the details of space flight.
The "wand of the magician" - the well-used slide rule of Sergei P. Korolyov, chief engineer of the Soviets' Sputnik and manned flight triumphs whose identity and masterful program management was one of the most tightly kept secrets of the space race.
The one spacesuit the Soviets never got to use, a highly elaborate one designed for a manned landing on the moon that never came to pass.
There is no sign of Tang thus far in the rudimentary, unsavory space food packets arriving at Sotheby's.
For Redden, some of the humbler looking items hold the greatest value. In long months on the Mir space station, for example, astronauts borrowed a pastime from whalers on long sea voyages; they etched intricate designs onto their simple aluminum cutlery. "Space scrimshaw," exults the auctioneer.
In 18 months of visits and negotiations for Sotheby's in the former Soviet Union, Redden discovered the Russians' passion for making rich narrative of life's details.
A badly frayed space glove turns out, in the telling, to have been critical for a cosmonaut who spent seven desperate hours in a spacewalk, clawing at a damaged hatch that threatened doom.
An innocuous-looking packet of nuts and bolts from one of the earliest flights was nervously collected by an astronaut startled to find pieces of his spaceship coming loose, just like parts of a badly made Soviet automobile, and floating about.
The tales sound as potentially priceless as the various artifacts offered by Col. Aleksei Leonov, the first human to walk in space. He returned to earth badly, landing far off course in the Urals during a three-day blizzard.
He managed to build a fire outside the capsule with some tree scraps, only to be chased back inside by a bear. "There's almost a moral in that story," said Redden, noting Leonov thereafter ordered a special combined flare-and-shotgun designed to deal with bears.
The auctioneer, not the astronauts, broached the idea of the sale, stressing that detailed accounts of the stories behind objects were critical. "Only when they described the personal memory of these items do you get a true idea of what the human dimension of space travel was like."
Consider Maj. Gherman S. Titov, the stand-in left waiting at the rocket pad when Col. Yuri A. Gagarin became the first human in space. Titov later became the first human to eat in space and his fork is for sale, child-size and decorated with a tiny chanticleer symbol.
"Unbelievably banal on the surface, until you think about it," Redden said.
Titov, who went on to become a general and a leader in astronaut training, offered a tale Tom Wolfe, author of "The Right Stuff," might savor about how, unlike the American program, the secretive Soviets made no advance preparations for mass publicity management. Once Gagarin was back on earth, Titov said: "They prepared me for the cosmos, but I was not prepared for the testing by an ocean of human eyes."
Sotheby's auction contracts are being made with individual astronauts and with the still-operating state monopolies of the space program like the Zvezda spacesuit factory, which offered its latest model bearing a Russian emblem in place of the defunct Soviet patch.
Redden has no clear idea of the possible monetary value of it all, but discerns a special sort of preciousness.
"Here is a chapter of history so contained, so dwindling," he said, appreciating how humanity often overlooks artifact-rich periods as they unfold and, now, fade in plain sight.
The artifacts bear witness that the Soviet program had more of a quality of buccaneer's intuition to it than the endlessly rehearsed American program. Night landings were feared and generally forbidden by the commissars of Star City. Still, a small black illuminated celestial globe routinely packed aboard the ships turns out to have been the key to saving one cosmonaut's life in an emergency plunge back to earth one night and a harrowing search for bearings in the tumbling universe.
Ivan Ivanovich, as he awaits fate's bidding, has a story to tell, too. In the Soviets' approach to the space race, there were no immediate rehearsal flights and retrievals of elaborately wired monkeys as in the American program.
The Soviets had pioneered animal testing in space, but with what Western romantics saw as a Cold War heartlessness exemplified by Laika, the dog who was the first living creature to make a true space flight, in 1957. Ten days of weightlessness ended, as planned, without retrieval and with Laika's becoming the first creature to die and drift sepulchrally in space.
But immediately before the flight of the pioneer human, there was just Ivan Ivanovich, Comrade Dummy, rocketed up a few weeks in advance of Gagarin's flight to test the suit and parachute ejector.
They did, and when Ivan was parachuted from the Vostok spacecraft into the peasant village of Bolshaya Sosnovka 32 years ago, a team of seven rescuers arrived by sleigh to retrieve him in a blizzard in the heartland of the secrecy-mad empire.
"There was the orange-colored hero," one of the rescuers recalls for the Sotheby catalog. "One would think he was a tired traveler, dead frozen from losing his fight with invincible Nature."
Villagers became angry when guards barred them from aiding the snowbound Ivan with the soup, vodka and other necessities that tradition prescribes for the long-distance Russian voyager. Not until one of the "old believers," a village elder, was permitted to touch the rubbery face of Ivan through his open visor did they back off and leave the visitors to their eerie secrets.
"Fully assured now that any help of theirs would be irrelevant, the villagers started to slowly leave the place and go back to their routine," the rescuer of Ivan Ivanovich recalled of earthlings back then.
by CNB