For several decades for several decades to the book, from the site to the site, information about the convertible coincidence has been wandering - allegedly for talking about flights to the Moon, a certain Muscovite Nikita Petrov in 1848 was exiled to the Kazakh village of Baikonur. We checked if it was so.

This historical bike scattered in many printed and not very sources. And it exists in two versions. According to One, "The tradesman Nikifor Nikitin for seditious speeches about flight to the moon was exiled to the Kyrgyz village of Baikonur."

Another popular quote looks like So: “It is brought to the attention of the inhabitants of Moscow and the province, which for illegal gatherings and troublemakers about some flights of the Orthodox to the moon the tradesman of the Zamoskvoretskaya part Nikita Petrov was sent from Moscow under the supervision of the police in the Kyrgyz-Kaysatsky settlement of Baikonur.”

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

The famous journalist Yaroslav Golovanov, who worked for a dozen years by the Komsomolskaya Pravda specialist at the Baikonur cosmodrome, included the case in the three -volume of his memoirs "Notes of your contemporary". Dozens of other authors followed his example, including Academician Troitsky in his lecture course "Russia in the XIX century". Information fell into the encyclopedia "Illustrated history of Kazakhstan". Even in the program “What? Where? When?" About this case in 1983, they set question.

Indeed, the story is beautiful. An ordinary resident of Moscow in the 19th century begins to dream of the fantastic flights of man to the moon. He is referred to the Deaf steppe for freedom, to the very place where the century later will be built by the cosmodrome and the rocket will take the first cosmonaut of the Earth into the sky. The parallel is so beautiful that it is easy to doubt its realism.

Traces lead us, although not in the 19th century, but in the already distant 1974. In the newspaper "Dnieper Vesprey" was a note of the senior researcher at the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum Valery Pimenov. The historian wrote that, sorting through the individual archival numbers of the Moscow Vedomosti, he came across the above information. Readers liked the note, one of them even cut out the article and sent Izvestia to the editorial office of the All -Union newspaper. And this was already a guarantee of glory. One reprint - and every second resident of the USSR learned about a dreamy tradesman:

The excitement began. Some especially inquisitive readers went to the library archive for the original old note and ... did not find anything similar. Upon learning of the problem, Izvestia newspaper turned to a mysterious author. Answer discouraged Journalists: “... a note is a fantasy, desired, issued for reality. At that moment, I could not even think that ten lines in a provincial newspaper could cause such a resonance. ” When the famous journalist Vladimir Platonov appeared To Pimenov in the museum for comment, it turned out that the star historian was already fired "for sensational discoveries." But the work of work, and the right to be called one of the most successful Soviet mystifiers Valery Filippovich Pimenov deserved.