Sergei Anokhin (test pilot)

Sergei Anokhin (Russian: Сергеи Николаевицч Анохин; 19 March 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a Russian Soviet test pilot.

Sergei Anokhin was born in Moscow on March 19, 1910. He worked on the railroads until the 1930s when he enrolled at a Higher Air Force School. From there, he became a glider pilot and set numerous world records for flying. In World War II, he assumed command of an Air Force regiment in Belarus.

In 1943, Anokhin become the lead test pilot for the first type of Soviet developed jet propelled airplane. Through this, he come became one of the most popular test pilots in the Soviet Air Force. He was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union honor on February 3, 1953, the highest commendation in the Soviet Union. In 1959, he became the Soviet Union’s first Merited Test Pilot of the Soviet Union. In July and August 1964, Anokhin was commissioned to test specific airlock designs for what would become future Soviet spacecraft, specifically for the spacecraft sent on the Voskhod 2 mission. Also in 1964, Anokhin was selected by Sergei Korolev to be the head of a team to train civilian cosmonauts, rather than military that they had been prior. Under him, seven people were selected for training. These people included Konstantin Feotistov, Georgiy Grechko, Valeriy Kubasov, Oleg Makarov, Nikolay Rukavishnikov, Vladislav Volkov, and Valeriy Yazdovskiy. These men were collectively known in the Soviet Space program as “Korolev’s Kindergarten”. After training these men, they were brought into various Soviet missions as engineers and scientists at the discretion of Anokhin. Eventually, Anokhin himself was denied becoming an active cosmonaut for later missions due to health problems. He worked in the administration of the Soviet space program until his retirement in 1978.

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