I felt like telling here, in the diary, a little about my life and how I made it to orbit. It wasn’t circumstances that brought me to space, but a hard road of seeking a dream and achieving it. And the dream was born in school years.

Probably from books and the wonderful prewar and wartime films about the courage of our people, from which, for some reason, I chose pilots as my personal example. I grew up in the military settlement of the Kantemirovskaya Division, where my father served.

It’s a happy time — youth, when in your imagination you see no barriers, but believe in the feasibility of even its most daring aspirations.

In school, both teachers and classmates knew I wanted to be a pilot. And so one day in the 10th grade, in spring, April, when it’s warm during the day but still frosty in the mornings, a few of us boys were late for class and decided to wait it out in the bathroom. It was the 2nd floor, the window was open, and someone said: “Valya, you want to be a pilot — could you jump from here, like Seryozhka Tyulenin?” I looked down — the height seemed modest, and there was a flower bed nearby. I said: “I could.” But when I stood on the windowsill and my eyes rose even higher, that’s when it got scary! I don’t know what I would have done — jumped or not — if our military instructor hadn’t seen me. He was entering the school, noticed me, stopped, looking and not understanding what I was doing in the window. Shouting “Forward!” I leaped down, aiming to land on the flower bed, but slipped on the ice on the windowsill and was falling toward the sidewalk. But by some incredible effort I straightened out and landed on my feet. A dull, sharp impact and… pain! I couldn’t get up; I’d bruised my legs badly. They pulled off my shoes. My feet were visibly swelling, becoming like bast shoes. They took me to the medical unit. Fortunately, there were no fractures — I’d just badly bruised my legs. There was little sympathy; everyone called me various names but agreed that I’d stupidly injured myself. And nobody understood, nobody wanted to — and maybe couldn’t — understand that this was a struggle. At that age, behind an act stands a young life that sometimes, invisibly to those around, is searching for itself, testing what it’s capable of, and it’s hard to tell which is greater — the soundness or the foolishness.

After school, my parents talked me into going to an institute so I’d be near them. And here life tested me for the first time on fidelity to my dream. I had no life experience, but all around were plenty of sensible, kind pieces of advice from elders. Stay home, study at an institute? The inner conviction that I must fly allowed me to resist the softening advice and my own thoughts of taking the easier path.

So, half-recovered, on May 20, 1959, I went to my first flight medical examination. I passed. The next stage was the medical commission at the regional military commissariat in Mytishchi. I remember I got up early, around four in the morning; buses weren’t running yet, and there weren’t many in those days anyway. I walked to the station on foot. No trains, so I rode in a freight car to Moscow, then to Yaroslavsky station and by commuter train to Mytishchi. It was July 2. Heat around 30 degrees. By the time I arrived, around 11 o’clock, I was tired. I go through the commission — everything’s normal. Got to the therapist, he measures blood pressure — normal, measures pulse — about ninety. And writes the conclusion: vegetovascular dystonia — unfit for flight school. This was so unexpected and even incomprehensible to me — that I, dreaming of flying, couldn’t make it happen. I was bewildered, since I had no other desire. What to do? What to study? No, this can’t be! I go to the chairman of the medical commission and say fearfully: “Comrade Colonel, I’m fit for flying. I just traveled a long way, it was hot, and I’m tired. May I come again tomorrow?” I don’t know what moved him, but he allowed it. Here I must say that subsequently, in whatever difficult situations or circumstances I found myself, I was always saved by people who believed in me — familiar and completely unfamiliar alike. And I’m grateful for this and always afraid of letting them down.

I spent the night at my grandmother Ekaterina Vasilyevna’s in Moscow, an amazing worker, kind, gentle, who always understood me. Funny as it sounds, my first trainer for entering the cosmonaut corps was my grandmother. In the evenings we’d go to the swings to train my vestibular apparatus, and she, swinging me, would time it with an alarm clock. The next day I came to the commission earlier, lay down under a birch tree in the shade to calm down and rest. Passed the commission, and then went to Orenburg, enrolled in the Higher Military Aviation School for Navigators. I was glad to put on the flight cadet uniform. But a year later, cutbacks came that affected me too.

It was 1960. Again I faced the question — where to go, what to become. My parents again called me to Kostroma, where they were living at the time. No, I decided to continue in the same direction. I enrolled at the Moscow Aviation Institute, thinking that from there I’d be closer to the sky, closer to flying. I decided to become a test pilot — many MAI graduates are among them. I lived in the dormitory, studied, and flew in Tushino, in Kolomna, first on gliders, then on aircraft. But what does it mean to fly airplanes while living in Moscow? It meant riding the commuter train to Kolomna, 120 km away, then a tram, a sprint to the Moscow River, a ferry crossing, and several kilometers by hitchhiking to the airfield. And it was then that my love for the sky was truly tested and strengthened. I saw many romantics who couldn’t endure this journey. Flying didn’t come easily to me either: I got airsick during aerobatic flights. I endured, hid it — even had to throw up inside my jacket, into my gloves — but for some reason I believed I could fly. In the third year, our group had a meeting with writers organized by our beloved teacher, Anastasia Mikhailovna Naumenko. Among them was Gennady Semenikhin, who told us about meetings with cosmonauts and trips with them across the country and abroad. One of the guys said: “We’ve got Valentin here who’d make a cosmonaut. Could he write an application addressed to Gagarin, and would you pass it along?” He agreed, I wrote it. That was the beginning. I never received a reply. Of course, how many people wanted to fly to space in those days — especially since I was still a student.

Those were the vivid times of our cosmonauts’ first flights. And a new dream was born, especially since my future profession, “engineer of flight vehicles,” was designed for work at enterprises where such technology is created.

And on May 25, 1965, still a fifth-year student, I was summoned to a commission with Borodin, Konstantin Fyodorovich. I’ll never forget my first meeting with this wonderful man, who believed in me and supported me going forward. I arrived, entered the waiting room. I see about ten young officers sitting there — pilots and navigators. Konstantin Fyodorovich greeted me sternly and warned that I must not say what purpose I was being examined for, otherwise it would all be over. The rest, apparently, were similarly warned, because the word “space” was never uttered. We talked among ourselves about everything except that. We were nervous, but so far everything was normal. But when it came to the therapist, my old problems from encounters with his colleagues when I applied to the school surfaced. Blood pressure 130/80, pulse 84. By today’s standards that’s normal. But then they tried to select with a big safety margin. Conclusion: unfit for further examination. I go to Borodin. He says: “Come back at the end of summer, sometime in August, and we’ll try examining you again.” That summer I was at military camp in the Moscow region. There I decided to toughen myself up thoroughly. Every morning I ran not just for exercise but covered about five kilometers, then bathed in the dew, rolling like a barrel down a small grassy hill. I got considerably stronger in camp.

In mid-August I was called for the commission. I remember as if it were now: I’m walking to the station through a field of rye along a path, and to make my feet feel pleasant and light, I took off my boots and slung them over my shoulder. All around, the gold of ripe grain sways. In the blue sky, larks hang high.

I’m bathing in the thick warm aroma of the smells of the earth. Extraordinary beauty! And here I am in soldier’s uniform, barefoot with three sergeant’s stripes, marching to the commuter train, heading for the cosmonauts. I pass the commission, and again they reject me. And so it went eight times. Only in 1972 was I finally enrolled in the corps. And all those years I worked at the design bureau, starting with the first Soyuz spacecraft, studied in graduate school, flew jet aircraft at the DOSAAF club in Novy Aidar in Ukraine, helicopters in Vyazniki, and kept preparing myself. A year later, in 1973, Petya Klimuk and I flew our space mission on “Soyuz-13.”

I was in my 32nd year. After the first flight, nine years passed before the second. For several years I wasn’t even listed on a crew; I just worked as an engineer while carrying the title of cosmonaut. There were moments, I’ll say frankly, when it was hard to carry that title. I had to travel the country a lot, and people, everyone around, treated me as a cosmonaut: asking questions, showing interest in flights and problems, while I no longer felt them. I’d lost the feeling of space… And then I threw myself into work, tried to give as much as possible, and a new understanding of the tasks of space exploration arose in me — the aspiration to make my flight worthwhile.

At the end of the day I registered the work of my heart on the French “Echograph” device, as Jean-Loup Chretien had done, recording the jugular vein and carotid artery on videotape. The device is very convenient. All registered information is displayed on screen, where you can see a cross-section of the vessel or mitral valve, the aorta with their electrocardiogram contractions, and if necessary all this can be recorded on video. There’s also the ability to do an acoustic search and monitor their operation through headphones. Easy and convenient to work with. Today I once again reconfigured and adjusted the EFO to somehow make it workable. In the evening I repaired the water distribution and heating unit — it’s been tormenting us. I had to remove its insulation, since it gets wet when we prepare food from water leaking from the taps, and the unit overheats and breaks down. Interesting moments I noticed: I took an unfolded newspaper and spun it — it rotated but wouldn’t fold up. In the “Fiton” instrument, the Arabidopsis seed pods have ripened, burst, and released seeds — they’re like tiny fish teeth.