Photos from the archives of Aviation Major Mikhail Maksimov (years of life 1922 – 1982), who taught in Engels in the spring of 1960 the members of the first cosmonaut corps of the Earth how to jump with a parachute, came to our publication from the Engels pensioner Taisiya Muratova. She kept them for 40 years – in 1981, when the 20th anniversary of the first flight into space was celebrated, Mikhail Ilyich asked her, the teacher of Engels’ secondary school, to hand them over to worthy hands someday. On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the space era, the request of the teacher of the first cosmonauts was fulfilled – although earlier other copies of these photos appeared among the materials dedicated to the first “stellar” detachment and personally to Mikhail Maksimov.
In these pictures you can see the captain of aviation Maximov together with the future cosmonaut Boris Volynov – the last living cosmonaut from the first, Gagarin set. He is also considered to be the first Jew to be in space.
Volynov visited space twice – in 1969 and 1976. 1983 to 1990 he was the commander of the cosmonaut corps. It all began in 1960 on the land of the Engels airbase.
Another photo from the Maximov archive shows the training of future cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Alexei Leonov.
