Sharp plane manoeuvre ’caused Gagarin death’

Russia on Friday revealed newly declassified documents on Yuri Gagarin’s mysterious death in a plane crash, saying he was likely killed as his jet manoeuvred sharply to avoid a weather balloon.

Top Kremlin archives official Alexander Stepanov told a news conference that a Soviet-era commission — whose conclusions had until now been classified — has concluded that this was the most likely cause of his death.

“The conclusions of the commission are that the most likely cause of the catastrophe was a sharp manoeuvre to avoid a balloon probe,” he said. Balloon probes are often used for weather-forecasting purposes.

But he indicated that the conclusions of the commission, whose documents were declassified to mark the half century of Gagarin’s voyage into space in April 1961, had given a second possible cause for the manoeuvre.

“A less probable cause was avoiding entry into the upper limit of the first layer of cloud cover,” he added.

Stepanov said he hoped the publication would quash rumours about the cause of Gagarin’s death.

“I hope they will dismiss very many speculations that are circulating in Russia in pseudo-history books,” he said.

The conclusions of an investigation were outlined in a decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers dated November 28, 1968, which was marked “absolutely secret.”

The presidential archive published the two-page conclusion of the commission, signed off by Brezhnev, in a book of archive materials published for the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s first manned space flight.

The commission writes that manoeuvres by Gagarin or his co-pilot, Vladimir Seryogin, led the jet into a “supercritical flight regime and to its stalling in complex meteorological conditions.”

Over the years the death of the first man in space has been explained variously by the result of a rapid change in height to avoid an object, interference from another craft, or oxygen deprivation in the cabin.

There has been speculation of sabotage by conspiracy theorists although this has never been backed up by evidence.