108 mins in space: Celebrating 60 years of Gagarin’s pioneering journey
Russians on Monday celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first manned flight to space carried out by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the Soviet hero remains one of the most admired figures in the country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was set to travel to Engels, a city in the south of the country on the banks of the Volga river, to the site of the cosmonaut’s landing where a memorial stands to honour the historic flight.
The anniversary of the spaceflight is a “day of national pride” for Russia, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.
On April 12, 1961, Gagarin’s Vostok spacecraft took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union, as the 27-year-old cosmonaut exclaimed his iconic catchphrase “Let’s go!”.
His flight lasted just 108 minutes, the time it took to complete one loop around the Earth, before returning to home soil.
The legend of the man who rose from humble beginnings to become a Soviet hero lives on today and the day of Gagarin’s flight is celebrated every year in Russia as Cosmonautics Day.
His now rusty Vostok capsule is on display at Moscow’s Museum of Cosmonautics where an exhibition dedicated to Gagarin is set to open on Tuesday. “He is a figure who inspires an absolute consensus that unifies the country,” says Gagarin’s biographer Lev Danilkin.
His smiling face adorns murals across the country. He stands, arms at his sides as if zooming into space, on a pedestal 42.5 metres above the traffic flowing on Moscow’s Leninsky Avenue. He is even a favourite subject of tattoos.
“This is a very rare case in which the vast majority of the population is unanimous.”
Humble beginnings
The son of a carpenter and a dairy farmer who lived through the Nazi occupation, Gagarin trained as a steel worker before becoming a military pilot and then, at age 27, spending 108 minutes in space.
He was lauded for his bravery and professionalism, an example of the perfect Soviet man, but his legend was also imbued with tales of camaraderie, courage and love for his two daughters and wife Valentina Gagarina.
Like all great Russian heroes, Gagarin is a tragic figure.
His death during a training flight in 1968 at the age of 34 remains a mystery because authorities never released the full report of the investigation into the causes of the accident.
Partial records suggest his MiG-15 fighter jet collided with a weather balloon, but in the absence of transparency, alternative theories abound.
One holds that Gagarin was drunk at the controls; another that he was eliminated by the Kremlin which feared his popularity. More than 50 years later, many Russians have yet to come to terms with his death.