Yuri was born March 9, 1934 on a collective farm 100 miles outside Moscow. His mother Anna worked the fields and his father Alexei was a carpenter. Anna was well educated and kept many books in the house. For the early years on the farm, life was calm and scheduled. Family members recall Yuri as a mischievous, happy child.
Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and life was thrown into chaos. German officers occupied their home and sent Yuri's brother Valentin and his sister Zoya to slave labour camps in Poland. Yuri, his parents, and his younger brother Boris lived in a tiny mud hut for 21 months, the remainder of the German occupation. Alexei Leonov, a fellow cosmonaut and first man to walk in space, recalled this time as “the formative years in Yuri’s life.”
During the war, a Soviet aircraft was shot down near the village. Yuri and the other village children fed the pilots and kept them hidden from the Nazis until they could be rescued. It was then that Yuri knew that he wanted to be a pilot.
In 1946, when he was 13 and the war was over, Yuri’s siblings returned. Their father moved the family home (plank by plank) to the nearby town Gzhatsk. Yuri joined his school’s aviation club and learned to fly light aircraft. His favorite subjects were physics and math, and he had a smile that all the girls loved.
In 1955 he entered Orenburg Military Pilot's School, graduating in 1957 as a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force. In August of 1959, Yuri’s record was reviewed for consideration for the new top-secret cosmonaut training program. Among age and physical restrictions (candidates had to be under 5’9” and weigh less than 158 lbs to fit in the capsule) the project guidelines required future cosmonauts to be intelligent, used to stressful situations, and physically fit. Flight experience was not a very high priority, since (unlike the American space capsules) the Soviet spacecraft were designed to be mostly automated.
Of the 3,000 initial candidates, Yuri was of 200 selected for further interviews and training, and then was one of 20 who passed all the rigorous mental and physical tests. They were locked in hypobaric chambers, spun in centrifuges, put in solitary confinement to test the effects of “public loneliness,” and subjected to every medical test known to man. Much like the American Mercury astronaut training, the first cosmonaut training was essentially made up as it went along, and was sometimes simply a test of how much pain a candidate could endure. No one, Soviet or American, knew what to expect in space.
In June 1960, the trainee cosmonauts met Sergei Korolev for the first time, who was simply referred to as “Chief Designer” to protect his identity. Korolev was reportedly very taken with Yuri’s natural charm. When the time came to select the cosmonaut for Vostok 1, Yuri’s good-naturedness worked in his favor. Star City engineer Boris Raushenbakh recalled, “In any company…he always conducted himself tactfully and naturally. Few can do this…but he always seemed to be in a good mood and conducted himself freely.”
He was the perfect candidate technically and ideologically: he was very intelligent, accomplished in mathematics and the theoretical aspects of space travel, and had grown up in a very Russian, working-class background. As described by Dr. Andrew Jenks, Korolev cited Gagarin’s “selfless patriotism” and faith in the mission as major reasons for his selection, and he was also praised for his “boundless optimism, curiosity and nimble mind, bravery and decisiveness, neatness and patience, simplicity and humility…and an ample human warmth and attention to others.”
The decision was made, and the stage set for a major scientific achievement—ahead of the Americans.