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    Gagarin, Yuri Alexeyevich (1934-1968)

    Yuri Gagarin
    Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to travel in space. The son of a carpenter, Gagarin grew up on a collective farm in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (later renamed Gagarin), west of Moscow. He went to college in Saratov, a scientific and industrial city, southeast of Moscow on the Volga river and was also a member of an amateur pilot club in Saratov. After graduating with honors from the Soviet Air Force in 1957, Gagarin was selected as one of 20 fighter pilots to begin cosmonaut training. Immediately before his historic flight, the 27-year-old was promoted from senior lieutenant to major. The flight itself aboard Vostok 1, took place on April 12, 1961, lasted 108 minutes, and concluded with Gagarin ejecting from his capsule after reentry and descending by parachute to the ground near the village of Uzmoriye on the Volga, not far from Saratov. In his orange flight-suit he approached a woman and a little girl with a calf, who began to run away (it was only a year since U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers had been shot down over Russia). Gagarin called out: "Mother, where are you running? I am not a foreigner." Asked then if he had come from space, he replied, "As a matter of fact, I have!"

    Arriving on motorcycles, Uzmoriye villagers purloined the cosmonaut’s radio and inflatable rubber dinghy and buried it for safekeeping. “The dinghy was a genuine gift for the village fishermen ... it literally fell down from the sky,” Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. But then the KGB
    appeared on the scene and threatened to arrest the entire community if the equipment was not returned. Despite protests from the villagers that the dinghy was torn, the KGB captain put it in his car anyway and drove off.

    Gagarin was hailed as a hero and given a luxury apartment in Moscow. However, he found all the attention and publicity hard to deal with, and began drinking heavily and sometimes behaving badly. Nevertheless, he was assigned to a second space mission – Soyuz 3, which would involve the first docking between two spacecraft in orbit. On March 27, 1968, he took off on a training flight in a MiG-15 alongside Vladimir Seryogin, a senior test pilot and a decorated military hero. For reasons still not clear, but possibly involving a sudden maneuver to avoid another aircraft, the plane crashed and Gagarin and his copilot were killed. He left a wife, Valentina, and two daughters, and was buried with full honors in the Kremlin wall along with the greatest heroes of the Soviet Union. Statues commemorating Gagarin have been erected in his hometown and in Moscow in the Yuri Gagarin Square. At the spot where he landed after his historic spaceflight a 40-meter-tall titanium obelisk has been erected. In addition, a crater on the far side of the Moon has been named after him.


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    [Thanks to Paul Kosterin for corrections to the article on Mar. 8, 2007]



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