“I see Earth! It is so beautiful!” – Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin Biography

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in a small village called Klushino which is about 190km from Moscow, Russia. His parents, Alexey Ivanovich and Anna Timofeyevna worked on a collective farm which is where a number of farmers work a farm together for the collective good, either for the benefit of the community or the state. Alexey was a carpenter and bricklayer and Anna was a milkmaid. As well as Yuri, the couple had three other children, a boy called Valentin who was older than Yuri, a girl called Zoya who was also older and another boy called Boris who was younger.

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When the Nazis advanced on Moscow during the Second World War, the Gagarin residence was taken over by a Nazi officer and the Gagarin family had to make do with a mud hut that they were forced to build for themselves at the back of the house. Measuring only three metres by three metres, they lived there for nearly two years until the occupation ended. Valentin and Zoya, Yuri’s older brother and sister were forced to move to Poland as slave labour in 1943 and they were not seen again until after the war ended in 1945. In 1946, the nearby town of Gzhatsk became the new home for the Gagarins and Yuri was able to continue his education there.

When Yuri Gagarin was sixteen years old, in 1950, he became an apprentice foundryman at a steel plant near Moscow and took evening classes to complete a seventh-grade education. He graduated in 1951 and entered into a training program to study tractors at the Saratov Industrial Technical School. At the weekend he trained as a Soviet air cadet at a flying club near to Saratov and learned to fly. As he was also near to the Volga River, Yuri also earned extra money as a dock labourer.

In 1955, after he had graduated from technical school, he was drafted by the Soviet Army and as he was already a pilot, he was sent to the Air Force Pilot’s School located in Orenburg which is about 1600km to the East of Moscow, near to the border with Kazakhstan. There, he learned to fly the MiG-15 jet fighter and took his first solo flight in the plane on 1957.

On the same day as he graduated from Orenburg, 7 November 1957, Yuri Gagarin married Valentina Ivanova Goryacheva who was a medical technician graduate at Orenburg. They went on to have two daughters together, Yelena and Galina.

By this time the Soviet space program was accelerating and the race was on against the United States to be the first to put a man into space and so, the search was on to find willing and able pilots. After a long selection program, Yuri Gagarin and nineteen other pilots were selected. Due to their performances during the arduous training program, Yuri and another pilot called Gherman Titov were shortlisted to make the first flight. In an anonymous vote by the other nineteen pilots, all but three said that Yuri Gagarin should be the first to fly into space, so on 12 April 1961, he did aboard Vostok 1. Gherman Titov would become the second to do so, aboard Vostok 2 on 6 August the same year.

Following his historic flight, where he also became the first human being to orbit the Earth, Yuri Gagarin became a national hero and a celebrity around the world. The scale of the demonstrations of support in cities throughout the USSR was second only to those celebrating the end of the war. He was paraded through the streets of Moscow on his way to a ceremony at the Kremlin where Nikita Khrushchev awarded him Hero of the Soviet Union.

He travelled quite a lot after this around Europe and visited the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Brazil and Japan among others.

In 1962 Yuri Gagarin was elected to serve as Deputy to the Soviet of the Union, which is one of the two chambers of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.