“We all lived as one collective.”īut medical work in Star City wasn’t standard fare.
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The team was close, ambulance driver Vladimir Chizhenko said. When the first whispers of a new disease in China reached Russia in January, Lebedeva, a doctor trained in neurology, was working as the head of Star City’s ambulance service. In the circular building housing the training center’s centrifuge, a 300-ton arm spins cosmonauts around an 18-meter radius until the force of gravity acting on their bodies is multiplied up to eight times, replicating the feeling of re-entering the atmosphere, of falling to Earth. “They are cosmonauts, the families of cosmonauts, military personnel.” Fewer than 6,000 people live in the town’s dozen or so apartment blocks, many of them working for the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
The residents there are not easy,” said Irina Antropova, who worked with Lebedeva on the town’s ambulance service from 2006 until 2009. So was the pressure, working in a close-knit and closed-off town, a place of rumor and recrimination, heroism and national pride. Otherwise, I don’t know what I might have grabbed.”īleak tales peppered with black humor were part of everyday life for Lebedeva and her team as they navigated Russia’s often maddeningly bureaucratic and underfunded medical system. “It’s good that he was wearing underwear, at least. They wrestled the young man away from the ledge. It didn’t even cross my mind that he might try to jump,” the paramedic said. “If she hadn’t screamed, I wouldn’t have noticed. The young man was heading for the open window. “We walk in and he’s in nothing but his underwear,” the other paramedic recalled. One autumn, she and another doctor were called out to the 12th-floor apartment of a young musician. To this day, flowers are often placed at his feet.įor around a decade, physician Natalya Lebedeva worked out of the Star City clinic as a paramedic. Star City’s medical clinic stands in a wooded area just past a monument to Yuri Gagarin, who became the first man in space in 1961, and a soaring symbol of Cold War-era glory. REUTERS/Evgenia NovozheninaĮven now, it is shrouded by forests, and behind its tall concrete walls lies the somber infrastructure of Russia’s legendary space program, and the Soviet-era apartment blocks that its cosmonauts and scientists call home. A historic monument in Star City near Moscow, Russia, October 21, 2020.
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