Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was born in 1934 in Klushino, a farming village in Smolensk oblast, the son of a kolkhoz carpenter. In the autumn of 1941 the village was occupied by the Nazis; the family was turned out of its house and wintered in a dugout in the yard, and his elder brother and sister were taken for forced labor. After liberation the boy climbed, rung by rung, the ladder the Soviet education system set before him: a foundryman's qualification at the vocational school in Lyubertsy, studies at an industrial technicum in Saratov where he first took the controls at the local aeroclub, then the Orenburg military aviation school and service as a naval fighter pilot above the Arctic Circle.

In 1960 he was selected for the first cosmonaut group. And on the morning of April 12, 1961, inside Vostok 1 on the Baikonur pad, at the moment of ignition he left one buoyant word on the radio: "Poyekhali!", "Let's go!" The first human spaceflight circled the Earth in 108 minutes; Gagarin ejected from the capsule as planned and came down by parachute in a field near the village of Smelovka outside Saratov, where the first to greet him were a woman and a child in a potato field.

That a twenty-seven-year-old former foundryman became humanity's first spacefarer was no accident. What opened, one after another, the doors of the technical school, the aeroclub, and the military academy to a peasant's son raised in an occupation-era dugout was the Soviet path of education and advancement, and the USSR presented Gagarin to the world as living proof of exactly that possibility.

Right after the flight Gagarin toured the world as an envoy of peace, and the tour ignored Cold War lines. In July 1961 he came to Manchester at the invitation of the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers, a union welcoming a foundryman-cosmonaut as one of their own. Rain poured on Manchester that day, but Gagarin refused to close the roof of the open car: if the people standing in the rain to see him were getting wet, he reasoned, he could not stay dry. The union hung an honorary member's medal on him, and at Trafford Park he told factory workers that he too had learned his trade in front of a furnace.

That same summer in Havana, Fidel Castro embraced him and decorated him with an order of the young revolutionary republic. The industrial workers of Manchester and the revolutionary crowds of Havana welcomed the same man with the same warmth. In the middle of the contest of systems, Gagarin's smile was a rare currency that crossed ideological borders, and for the USSR he was a living ambassador of the kind of human being socialism could raise. He visited dozens of countries, meeting kings and presidents, dockers and students, in exactly the same manner.

He later served in the leadership of the cosmonaut training center, and as backup pilot for Soyuz 1 in 1967 he witnessed the death of his comrade Komarov. On March 27, 1968, during a training flight to requalify for flying, his MiG-15UTI crashed near Novosyolovo in Vladimir oblast, killing him together with instructor Vladimir Seryogin. He was thirty-four. The whole Soviet Union mourned, and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall. The town nearest his native Klushino now bears the name Gagarin.