The Presidential Library marking the 90th anniversary of the birth of the planet’s first cosmonaut

March 9 marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of the first person to conquer space, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin. He lived a very short life - only 34 years. Gagarin conquered space at the age of 27.

The newsreel “Cosmonautics in the USSR” shows Sergei Korolev at the control panel, anxiously awaiting radio communication with Yuri Gagarin. Seconds stretch agonizingly until the moment when he hears Gagarin’s words: “I see the Earth!”

Everyone then was interested in how a person endures weightlessness in space flight.

According to the generally accepted version, Yuri Alekseevich circled the globe in 1 hour and 48 minutes. The space pioneer landed near the village of Smelovki in Saratov Region. However, as it became known from declassified documents, the historical flight was two minutes shorter. And this is connected with a number of dangerous situations that occurred before and during Gagarin’s “star journey” and which he courageously overcame. Writer and journalist Anton Pervushin spoke about this in detail at a lecture at the Presidential Library. The video version of his speech “106 minutes of Yuri Gagarin: declassified details of the first space flight” is available on the library's portal.

The same issue of the newspaper contains urgent reports from the TASS news agency. One of them reported on the successful landing of the Vostok spacecraft and quoted the first words of Gagarin himself.

...On March 27, 1968 - 18 days after his 34th birthday - the famous cosmonaut visited the sky for the last time. Not far from the village of Novoselovo in Vladimir Region, he and his instructor Vladimir Seryogin died in a plane crash during a training flight on a MiG-15UTI aircraft.

The Presidential Library's digial collection contains unique materials dedicated to the life and heroism of Yuri Gagarin. Many of them entered the “Outer Space” collection, which includes fragments of newsreels, periodicals, books, commemorative medals, badges and postcards that spotlight various milestones in the development of astronautics. Thus, the collection includes a reproduction of a 1961 postcard with Gagarin’s autograph. Books written by the planet’s first cosmonaut with his own hand is available in the collections of the Presidential Library. His personal record, donated to the Presidential Library by the Roscosmos State Corporation as part of a cooperation agreement, is also kept here. Gagarin’s personal record includes a questionnaire, a detailed table about his active military service in the Soviet Army, a list of positions in the cosmonaut corps - from student to pilot-cosmonaut engineer, information about his marital status, reference from the place of study and other documents. Many facts of Gagarin’s biography are widely known, but his personal record also contains some interesting details - for example, he had a second sports category and a first category referee in basketball. No less interesting is the autobiography written by Gagarin himself.