– Yuri Petrovich, when did you become interested in the biography of Yuri Gagarin?
– April 14, 1961. On the 12th, Gagarin’s flight was announced, and on the 14th, we VGIK freshmen were sent to a demonstration. I studied at the workshop of Roman Lazarevich Karmen, before that I studied at the Ural State University. We were a couple of people from VGIK, I’m 25 years old, we ran different branches and asked for permission – can I vomit you a few times and lay you on the floor very carefully? So we managed to shake three people.
They disappeared, they said they weren’t pilots but we answered them, the point is that you are a major like Gagarin. All this happened on Prospekt Mira, where the entrance to the VDNKh metro station is now, a demonstration was held, everyone went to Red Square.
We saw three streams of people, millions of people, in Red Square. They clashed and the organizers were stunned because they didn’t think such a pandemic would happen.
So my interest continued to grow, I read everything that could be read in the newspapers. And one evening, Edik Topol from the script department, who later became an excellent journalist, the author of many books, such as “The Brezhnev Journalist”, “Lyubozhid”, brought me a film application in the evening: “Let’s make a movie about Gagarin!”.
I say come on.
– Do you have permission?
– Not.
“Neither do I.
— How many films about space have you made?
– Then I started to get into the space theme seriously, even though it is a closed space. In space alone, I made 11 out of 104 movies.
Gagarin’s flight was such a powerful impetus, because we 25-year-old guys walked out and asked each other – did we really do all this? Then everyone said “we”, there was a collectivity in everything. Its debut then left an indelible impression on everyone.
I was already working in Shabolovka when Gagarin died. In 1970, I defended my defense at VGIK with the five-part film Yuri Gagarin. The film was published and shipped to 112 foreign countries, making it the first human film about Gagarin. For the first time I interviewed his wife Valentina Ivanovna for a photo.
Another of my films is Earth Gravity, which describes the preparation and flight of the Soyuz-9 spacecraft with the crew of Andriyan Nikolaev and Vitaly Sevastyanov in 1970. We then shot a quick movie, the guys with security clearances handed us the classified materials.
– How did you meet with Gagarin’s countryman Yulia Vasilievna Zubova?
– In September 1941, the Germans had already bombed the village of Klushino, where Gagarin was born, and Gzhatsk. Occupying the village, the Germans drove the Gagarins out of the house and turned the batteries into a workshop for refueling. Father, Alexei Ivanovich, quickly dug a bunker, was in general a jack of all trades.
He built a stove there that kept it hot for a very long time. In the villages there were very old stoves with shelves. And the men were all there.
And if suddenly there was a bombing, the neighboring children also resorted to them, and this girl Yulia Zubova and her slightly older brother Vitya, whom the Germans recruited as an adult.
Every year for a long time I went to Gagarin readings in the Smolensk region and decided to find out if there were other witnesses who could somehow tell something about his childhood? I was told that there is such a Zubova, and the operator and I went to him. She already lived in the city of Gagarin, 20 kilometers from Klushino, she. In 2009, Gagarin’s 75th birthday was celebrated.
This woman died a few years ago. And the cameraman didn’t copy the tape for me and I forgot about it. And I remembered him not so long ago.
Then why did you decide to record an interview with this woman?
– First, anyone who has something in common with Gagarin is interesting because he can remember things. Interestingly, he talked about the good attitude of the Germans towards them, they were not kicked out of the house, and one German even shared a Christmas present with him before the New Year.
A good story came out about Gagarin’s evening campaign for his mother and father, with many names of neighboring villages – Popovo, Teterino … After all, Gagarin with this boy (Yulia Zubova’s brother) actually saved his mother and father.
Do you plan to use this interview in the future?
– The plans are very serious. I just turned 87, which is quite a long time, and I’m going to make a movie about Gagarin, Titov, Sheppard, and Glenn. But the complete lack of interest in such films intervenes, they say to me – why do we need space? We’ve been shooting the movie for a year. I have collected unique material for an hour-long movie, but two million rubles must be collected for such a movie…
In fact, two generations do not know who Gagarin is. Now is a different time … about a year ago we were shooting on Red Square, I see a boy standing there, his eyes are very lively … I ask – do you know who Gagarin is? He says – maybe this is a writer? Here is your indicator.