For several decades now, from book to book, from site to site, information has been circulating about a very amusing coincidence - allegedly for talking about flights to the Moon, a certain Muscovite Nikita Petrov was exiled to the Kazakh village of Baikonur in 1848. We checked to see if this was the case.

This historical story has spread across many printed and not so popular sources. And it exists in two versions. According to alone, “The tradesman Nikifor Nikitin was exiled to the Kyrgyz village of Baikonur for seditious speeches about a flight to the moon.”

Another popular quote goes like this: So: “It is brought to the attention of residents of Moscow and the province that for illegal gatherings and troublemaker talk about some flights of Orthodox Christians to the Moon, a tradesman of the Zamoskvoretsk part, Nikita Petrov, was expelled from Moscow under police supervision to the Kyrgyz-Kaisak settlement of Baikonur.”

Both options refer to the primary source - the Moskovskie Vedomosti newspaper for 1848.

The famous journalist Yaroslav Golovanov, who worked for ten years as a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, included the incident in the three-volume set of his memoirs “Notes from your contemporary" His example was followed by dozens of other authors, including Academician Troitsky in his course of lectures “Russia in the 19th century" The information also appeared in the encyclopedia “Illustrated history of Kazakhstan" Even in the program “What? Where? When?" they asked about this incident in 1983 question.

And indeed, the story is wonderful. An ordinary resident of Moscow in the 19th century begins to dream of fantastic manned flights to the Moon. For his freethinking, he is exiled to the remote steppe, to the very place where a century later a cosmodrome will be built and a rocket will carry the Earth's first cosmonaut into the sky. The parallel is so beautiful that it is easy to doubt its realism.

The traces lead us, although not to the 19th century, but to the already distant 1974. The newspaper “Dnepr Vecherniy” published a note by Valery Pimenov, a senior researcher at the Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum. The historian wrote that, while going through individual archival issues of Moskovskie Vedomosti, he came across the above information. Readers liked the article, one of them even cut out the article and sent it to the editorial office of the all-Union newspaper Izvestia. And this was already a guarantee of glory. One reprint - and every second resident of the USSR learned about the dreamy tradesman:

The excitement began. Some particularly inquisitive readers went to the library archives for the original of the old note and... did not find anything similar. Having learned about the problem, the Izvestia newspaper turned to the mysterious author. Answer discouraged journalists: “...the note is a fantasy, a wishful thinking passed off as reality. At that moment, I couldn’t even imagine that ten lines in a provincial newspaper could cause such a resonance.” When the famous journalist Vladimir Platonov appeared to Pimenov at the museum for a comment, it turned out that the star historian had already been fired “for sensational discoveries.” But work is work, and Valery Filippovich Pimenov fully deserved the right to be called one of the most successful Soviet hoaxers.