Robert Gorelangton

The face of space

Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow

Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow

Fifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth.

Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation Street. Yuri was mobbed, the girls infatuated with the beaming Soviet pin-up Macmillan called ‘a delightful fellow’. And so he was by every account. Everyone loved him. But by 1968 he was dead, killed in a mysterious jet crash.

Last week, at a talk at the Royal Society, the British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers (who has logged over 559 hours in space) had a three-way discussion about the Soviet space achievement. With him were John Zarnecki, a professor of space studies, and the writer Rona Munro. She was there because the early Soviet space programme is being celebrated by a Royal Shakespeare Company production of her new play Little Eagles, soon to open at the Hampstead Theatre.

Gagarin, we learned, was picked because he was short enough to get in the rocket and also, rather endearingly, because he removed his shoes when first being shown the capsule. The son of a tractor driver (under a political regime that had a near-erotic obsession with tractors) he ticked every possible box with the belligerent peasant Nikita Krushchev, who saw in the handsome young cosmonaut some great PR potential for communism.

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