A cosmonaut without a square

Today is Cosmonautics Day, and in Nurzhan Dmitry Baranov has a statue at last, though not where his admirers wanted it.

Baranov, the only cosmonaut the Iradi SSR produced, was born in Kobozev in 1948 to a Russian father, a foreman at the oil refinery, and an Iradi mother. He flew an eight-day Soyuz mission to a Salyut station in 1984 and was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1992 he went on Kobozev television to back Vasily Chernov's Socialist Republic and called the Provisional Government in Talas “horse thieves with a telex”. He left for Moscow in 1993, died there in 2017, and asked to be buried in Nurzhan, which he was.

The square

Earlier this year the Bekzatov Foundation offered the city a bronze statue of Baranov in his spacesuit for Vokzal Square, opposite the station. City hall refused the site, saying the square's plan “does not provide for a monument”. The foundation put the statue up instead in the park of the Nurzhan Oil Refinery, on company land, where it was unveiled this morning before a crowd of several hundred.

Nurzhan already has a Baranov Street, named by the Labor Party majority on the city council in 1996. It has no Baranov Square, and Talas has nothing at all.

Two memories

To the Russos of Nurzhan, Baranov is a son of the city who went to space, and the refusal of the square is another slight from Talas. To many in Talas, he is the man who sided with Chernov in the year the city was shelled. “He flew higher than any of us,” said a retired refinery engineer at the unveiling. “He also landed on the wrong side. Both are true. Why can't a statue say both?”