Yesterday I came across an interesting article about the childhood of Yuri Gagarin, the son of a milk maid and a carpenter (like a certain other famous person), third of four children, and Earth’s first man to fly to space. Here’s a summary in English along with some expanded information I found for you.
His official date of birth is not true
Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino, Smolensk region, on the evening of March 8 1934, International Women’s Day. This made his father quite unhappy, who said that “a man cannot be born on International Women’s Day” and insisted his date of birth be written as March 9.
Yuri dreamed of becoming a pilot
As a boy in the pre-war period, Yuri would watch planes such as the Yak and LaGG fly overhead with the red star on their wings. During the war he witnessed a Soviet fighter shot down, and a second pilot landed to rescue him. Yuri would later say that “every one of us wants to fly, to be brave and beautiful like them.”
Of course at the time, he only imagined it was possible to fly in the sky and no further than that.
The war years
On September 1, 1941, Yuri’s first day of school, Germans occupied Klushino and occupied the Gagarin house. The father was beaten and pressed into forced labor while the rest their four children sheltered in a small dugout heated by a stove and survived by foraging in the woods for food.
At one point a German soldier caught Yuri’s five-year-old brother Boris and, for fun, hung him by his scarf off a tree branch. Luckily Yuri arrived in time to save him. He later took revenge by sabotaging a German motorcycle.
Throughout the war, the village boys hindered the enemy occupation in every way possible, like scattering glass on the main road.
The man of the house
As the Red Army approached Klushino in early 1943, the retreating Axis forces seized the local youth for slave labor back in Germany. His older brother Valentin and sister Zoya were taken, but Yuri was not as he was still too young. After Klushino’s liberation, the eldest brother Alexey, a mill worker who was too sickly for the pre-war conscription drives, was this time mobilized. This left Yuri as the oldest male in the family.
Valentin and Zoya were presumed dead but fortunately they returned after the war ended in 1945.
Yuri flies for the first time
After the war, the Gargarins moved to the nearby village of (now named Gagarin). In 1954 Yuri enrolled in a flight school and took his first independent flight on the Yak-18 in 1955. That autumn he joined the Soviet air force to begin pilot school, and the rest is history.
Ian Kummer
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After the end of WWII, the family moved to the town of Gzhatsk [gʒΛtsk]. The war had reduced the population of Gzhatsk nearby from 32,000 to 7,500 people. That was hard to survive in an empty village.
Most of war victims have scars on their psychic; Gagarin didn’t. He enjoid the colleagues’ successes, thought straight and effective. Such men must be found to save the Galaxy 😉
After the space flight, Gagarin didn’t bath in his fame; he worked, and he helped those who wrote to him. Peasants asked for help as Khruschov reforms destroied the Russian village.
The humanity is blessed with having such a kindness-shining man the first cosmonaut.