Poyekhali!

The exchange at launch

Vostok 1 lifted off from Baikonur on 12 April 1961. The flight log records Chief Designer Sergei Korolev radioing, "Preliminary stage... intermediate... main... lift off! We wish you a good flight. Everything is all right," and Gagarin replying, "Let's go! (Poyekhali!)". The phrase was not improvised at that instant: during training for the first cosmonaut group in 1960-1961, test pilot Mark Gallay, who supervised it, would say "Poyekhali!" whenever a trainee took his seat inside the Vostok-3A mock-up, after which the simulation of normal and emergency flight situations began. It was heard at every session and became habitual.

Accounts of the origin

The Russian Wikipedia article on the phrase states that Gallay deliberately encouraged the informal "Poyekhali" in place of the regulation report "Crew, taking off!", partly for psychological reasons. Gallay himself recorded that the habit was widespread among test pilots, and recounted that the command had been used before the war by instructors at the Leningrad flying club where he had learned to fly.

From symbol to everyday speech

The words became a symbol of the new space era and an everyday expression for any new beginning across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. They spread further through the refrain of "Do You Know What Kind of Guy He Was" from Gagarin's Constellation, a song cycle written by Aleksandra Pakhmutova and Nikolai Dobronravov in 1968-1971. Since 2011 "Poyekhali!" has also been the name of an itinerant Russian science-fiction festival, and Saratov Oblast has given it to a first-year students' festival and a transport card.