In the vacuum of space his space suit expanded, until he could not get back into the craft without bleeding it of oxygen. Moreover, in minutes, the craft's orbit would take it into total darkness. Training kicked in; he kept his nerve and at last, drenched in sweat, tumbled head-first back through the airlock. Then the craft's reentry went wrong. The guidance system failed and they had to steer manually, bumping down in a snowy forest 1,600km from the landing site.

In 1971 he was bumped from the Soyuz 11 flight to the Salyut 1 space station, and was furious, but the craft opened prematurely on reentry, and the crew died. The space-walk was another brush with annihilation from which he emerged, just about, in one piece. It had also affected him in a particular way. He had gone on this mission not just as a cosmonaut, but as an artist, self-taught from childhood, when he had painted pictures on the white stoves of his neighbours in the remote Siberian village where his parents farmed. A passion to be a fighter pilot, then a cosmonaut, diverted him from that, but he preserved his insatiable love of looking at things.

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