In the very heart of Russia,
near the old town of Gzhatsk amidst birch groves stands the small village
of Klushino. The village is the birthplace of Yuri Gagarin, born a fifth
child in the family of a carpenter.
 “The village
was beautiful, indeed, wrote Yuri Gagarin in his book “A road to space”.
In summer it is all green and in winter it is all covered in snow. Our
house was the second from the village limit, by the road…
I would sneak to the roof to admire the far-stretching fields and
feel the warm wind sending golden waves across the rye fields. I would
look up and see the crystal blue sky… You just wanted to plunge into the
beauty and sail to the horizon, where the earth and sky come together…”
It was from those Russian fields that Gagarin’s rise up to the stars
began.
Like all people his age Gagarin had to undergo the ordeals of the
war years. He was seven, when the Second World War broke out. The boy survived
the Nazi invasion, the severe hardships of the war and separation from
his family. The first planes he saw were war planes and his first educational
supplies were spent cartridges, which he and his peers used to learn to
count.
Together with other people Yuri was lucky to celebrate the victory
and feel the strength and invincibility of his nation and pride for it.
His wartime childhood strengthened his will and became the basis for his
firm and resolute character.
When the war ended the Gagarin family moved to Gzhatsk. Yuri went
to school and read a lot. His brother Boris recalled:
“As children we loved playing football. According to tradition, we
played one street against another. We often went to the river to catch
lobsters. Later on Yuri got carried away by plane modeling and joined a
section in the city’s young pioneer club. He read more and more books about
pilots. And he was fascinated by Jules Verne’s novels”.
The boy was dreaming of becoming a pilot. But life, as you know,
often makes its own changes to our personal plans.
The days of Gagarin’s youth saw the rise from ruins of war-destroyed
cities and construction of new plants. Hence his first profession was a
metal worker. Yuri’s teachers at secondary school and then at vocational
training school remembered him as a lively fellow with inquisitive mind
and outstanding aptitude for everything that came into the range of his
interests.
Gagarin quickly mastered the profession of foundry worker. He then
became a professional draftsman and at the same time was considered the
best on the basketball pitch, where his short height was fully compensated
by liveliness and excellent reaction.
However, his new attraction was taking upper hand. One day at vocational
training school Gagarin was asked to make a report about the work of the
founder of cosmonautics Russian scientist Konstantin Tsyolkovsky in the
sphere of rocket engines and space flights.
“Tsyolkovsky turned my life all around, - Gagarin wrote. – I finished
my report with the scientist’s words: “The human race will not stay on
Earth for ever, but in pursuit of light and space, will first tentatively
break out of the Earth’s atmosphere and will then conquer the entire solar
system”. I read it and felt my heart flinch and beat faster”.
Life was bending to his persistent character opening up new opportunities.
He gets a bird’s eye view of the Earth on a trainer plane he flies himself
as student of an amateur pilots club.
Three years on and he is holding the steering-wheel of a modern high-altitude
super-fast fighter plane. He knows what he wants. In those days he wanted
to become a high-class pilot.
And he became one after graduating from an aviation school in Orenburg.  There,
in steppes at the foothills of the Ural Mountains, he met Valya Goryacheva,
his future wife. Gagarin was offered to stay on in the school working as
instructor but he asked to send him to serve in the Arctic. Their first
daughter Yelena was born there, in the Arctic region, and the second daughter
– Galina – was born in Moscow in 1961.
Later on Yuri Gagarin recalled:
“I graduated from the aviation school, became a fighter pilot and
had no idea that I would be the first to fly to space. No thoughts of this
sort occurred to me. What I might have thought of was that it would be
really great to fly there at least once”.
Meanwhile, the country was witnessing developments that, as it turned
out, predetermined the future of Yuri Gagarin. October 4th,1957 the Soviet
Union launched the world’s first artificial Earth satellite. Scientists
were seriously discussing the possibility of a manned space flight. While
they were designing a piloted space ship they were deciding who would fly
it.
The idea captivated many pilots and in September 1959 Yuri Gagarin
submits a report asking to include him in a cosmonauts team. The team was
formed in spring 1960. All 20 pilots that joined it moved to Moscow and
started training.
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