Russians in Space

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1971. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Good/Fair. [8], 300, [4] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. DJ worn and soiled with small tears. This work was prepared by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow. The author was a well-known Soviet journalist. He was a qualified pilot and devoted his entire later career to covering aviation and astronautics. He has 'flown' several space flights on simulators at the cosmonauts training center, knew many of them personally, and watched their selection and training. He may be the same Yevgeny Ryabchikov - the former Komsomolskaya Pravda's journalist who served prison sentence for "counter-revolutionary activities" and came to Norilsk in 1943 at the Abraham Zavenyagin's invitation. He was one of the first Norilsk newspaper For Metal and the bulletins Metal to the Front's correspondents, issued trade leaflets. Yevgenii Ryabchikov wrote the screenplay for the first film about Norilsk The Giant of the Arctic. The film crew from Novosibirsk came to the northern city in 1945. The fact that the book about a tightly closed settlement was published is surprising. The decision to publish this book was taken at the very top in Moscow. Derived from a Kirkus review: A history of Russian space achievements by a longtime Soviet journalist and knowledgeable commentator on "cosmonautics." Riabchikov concentrates on the manned flights, beginning with Gagarin's 108 minute breakthrough in Vostok-1 in 1961 and ending with the Soyuz docking missions. In between there are the many good times (the first woman cosmonaut; Leonov's walk in space; the profitable Luna, Kosmos, and Zond explorations) and the occasional bad times (Gagarin's death). And there are descriptions of Star Town (the Soviet space training center), anecdotes about the cosmonauts and scientists who make the program go and their plans tot the future, and some historical background on the development of Russian rocket engineering -- the ideas and accomplishments of the visionary Tsiolkovsky, the ""founder of cosmonautics,"" and designer Korolev, are especially well synthesized. Riabchikov does provide a trustworthy firsthand account.