Shunya Drishyamanata by Maitree Roy Mullick [Hardcover]

On the morning of March 27, 1968, a fighter jet crashed from a height of nearly fourteen thousand feet in the village of Novoselova, just a few kilometers outside Moscow. According to the report in the country’s daily news at the time, there were two occupants in the jet: Colonel Vladimir Sergeevich Seregin of the Red Army, known as "Stalin's Hawk," and Colonel Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, the world's first cosmonaut. For forty-six years, the mystery of this death remained unsolved. Was it an accident, or was it a premeditated murder? Did Gagarin die, or did he stage his own death and escape to America? This question lingered because, in the very next year, America was preparing for its mission to the Moon. In 2014, some classified files were released by the U.S., but today’s Russia has been reluctant to confirm their authenticity. Gagarin's death remains shrouded in mystery, just as the history of the Soviet Union's space missions, locked away in secrecy, has remained largely unknown. The man who designed one spacecraft after another—Sputnik, Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, Cosmos, Molniya, and Zond—was someone whom powerful countries had desperately tried to track down, but information about him only became available a few years ago. Death does not always end secrecy; it often buries many mysteries. What if that hadn’t been the case? This is a narrative of speculative reality, woven around Yuri Gagarin's death and the Soviet Union's twenty-one years of space missions.