Home from the heavens, Major Yuri Gagarin was the toast of Russia. Simferopol in the Crimea threw up a hastily sculpted plaster bust of Yuri. Moscow planned a 287-ft. commemorative obelisk. Yuri's voice in space on an LP record with commentary in six languages was being readied for world sale. Yuri's image blossomed on everything from postcards to pottery. The grateful Soviet government outdid itself: it bestowed on the first spaceman and his household of six a new, four-room apartment.
But was Yuri Gagarin really the first spaceman? French Correspondent Edouard Bobrowski, just back from Moscow, and speaking over France's state-owned radio, declared that Gagarin was the second. The first spaceman, said Bobrowski, was Sergei Ilyushin, son of Russia's famed aircraft designer. Said Bobrowski: "Sergei Ilyushin is a tough boy, a kind of Soviet Gil Delamare [French parachute jumper, stock-car racer and stuntman], and his father's position permitted him to do anything he wished. He absolutely wanted to be the first one to reach the cosmic barriers. Authorization was given him through I don't know whose influence in the Soviet government, and he followed training courses for only a few months before his attempt . . . He took the risk himself. The cosmic vessel bearing Sergei Ilyushin went three times around the world. He returned to earth, but as a completely shattered and unbalanced man.'' Ilyushin had made the trip three days before Yuri, said Bobrowski. and he was now "absolutely unconscious in a Moscow hospital." Bobrowski's account jibed in many respects with the London Daily Worker's "scoop" three days before Yuri's flight. The Communist Worker described the successful space flight of "the son of a top-ranking Soviet aircraft designer, understood to be suffering aftereffects of the flight."
Western tracking stations offered no confirmation of a pre-Yuri space flight—nor was one likely, for two reasons. The West confirms only those shots the Russians have documented in order to keep secret just how effectively the worldwide Western tracking net functions. And the Russians might well have calculated Ilyushin's first orbit as carefully as they did Gagarin's, which artfully swung around the earth in a pattern that avoided the major Western tracking outposts. In fact; the West saw neither initial orbit—but later picked up Gagarin's empty rocket casing still orbiting after his descent.