What happened to Yuri Gagarin when he came back down to Earth?
On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history by becoming the first human to go into space – but his journey home was far from glamorous.
After ejecting from his capsule and releasing his parachute, Gagarin landed in the field of a collective farm outside Saratov, south-west Russia, meaning there was no need for the knife and gun he had taken on his flight in case he ended up somewhere inhospitable. However, he did succeed in scaring an old peasant woman, who thought he might be an alien or an American spy, as she watched him fall to the Earth from the heavens.
According to legend, Gagarin then hitched a lift on the woman’s horse and cart in order to find a telephone and alert officials of his whereabouts, after which he was taken to Moscow. Upon arriving in the city, he was greeted with a huge bear hug from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, before being paraded in front of ecstatic crowds in Red Square.
Pretty soon, Gagarin became one of the most famous people on the planet and was met almost everywhere by top-level dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth II and British prime minster Harold Macmillan. He remained a prominent figure within Soviet popular culture and the space programme more generally, until his tragic death in a plane crash in March 1968.
That’s not to say Gagarin’s name has faded a great deal since then. In Russia, he’s still very much an iconic figure today.
Robert Hornsby, associate professor of modern European history at the University of Leeds
An early telephone used by Queen Victoria. Not everyone was taken by the new technology, however