Yuri Gagarin

He met his wife, Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva, while he was at the ‘First Chkalov Air Force Pilot’s School’ in Orenburg in 1957. She was a medical technician graduate of the ‘Orenburg Medical School.’

They got married on November 7, 1957, which was the day he passed out of flying school. They had two daughters: Yelena, who is presently an art historian, and Galina, who is a professor of economics. He baptized his children in the ‘Orthodox Church.’

After his rise to fame, he was forced to socialize, due to which he started drinking heavily and was even caught with another woman by his wife. However, this did not cause the couple to separate.

He was born on March 9, 1934, in Klushino village near Gzhatsk, in the USSR, to Alexey Ivanovich and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina. His father was a bricklayer and carpenter, and his mother worked as a milkmaid. He had an elder brother, Valentin, an elder sister, Zoya, and a younger brother, Boris. He was baptized and raised according to the faith of the ‘Orthodox Church.’

During World War II, their land was occupied by the Nazi forces. Subsequently, his two older siblings were deported to Poland for slave labor. His family moved to Gzhatsk in 1946, from where Gagarin completed his secondary education.

He became a foundryman apprentice at the ‘Lyubertsy Steel Plant’ near Moscow at the age of 16 and joined evening classes for the seventh grade. In 1951, he was selected for a technical training program on tractors at the ‘Saratov Industrial Technical School.’

He earned pocket money as a dock labor and volunteered to train as a Soviet air cadet during weekends at a local flying club. He qualified to fly a biplane and then the ‘Yak- 18’ trainer.

After completing his technical training, he was drafted into the ‘Soviet Army’ and sent for training to the ‘First Chkalov Air Force Pilot’s School,’ from where he flew his first ‘MiG-15’ solo in 1957.

Gagarin was chosen as one of the 20 pilots for the Soviet space program, in 1960. He further made it to the elite training group of six prospective cosmonauts for the ‘Vostok’ program of putting humans into space. After strenuous training and psychological tests, Gagarin and Gherman Titov were shortlisted as the final two candidates.

On April 12, 1961, Gagarin became the first human to travel into space and orbit the Earth on the ‘Vostok 1.’ The spacecraft was launched from the ‘Baikonur Cosmodrome.’ His call sign was “Kedr,” Russian for cedar. According to his narration, he sang the patriotic song ‘The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows’ during his re-entry and touchdown.

He became a national hero and a global celebrity after his successful mission into space and back. The event marked a victory for the ‘Eastern Bloc’ against the West, and the US in particular, in the race to space age.

The event was celebrated throughout the USSR, and Gagarin’s photographs and biography were splashed across the world in newspapers and periodicals. He was paraded through the streets of Moscow and was awarded the title of the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ by Nikita Khrushchev.

He made a world tour of several countries, such as Germany, Canada, Japan, and the UK, to publicize and talk about the ‘Vostok 1’ mission.

Besides being the first man to enter space, he wrote a successful thesis on the spaceplane, which is a craft that flies like an aeroplane in the Earth’s atmosphere and like a spacecraft in space, thus making it reusable.