While still in Orenburg Pilot School, Yuri went to a dance and met a lovely young medical student named Valentina. They were married on his graduation day in 1955 and had two daughters, Elena and Galina. The girls were two years and 34 days old, respectively, the day of his flight. He was very close with his family and loved to read to his daughters.
When Yuri was selected for his historic mission, he telephoned Valentina to say he was assigned to do “something big,” but told her it was scheduled for April 14th. She didn’t learn her husband was orbiting the Earth until the news came over the radio an hour later. Apparently, Yuri did not want her to worry.
Physical fitness was a very large part of cosmonaut life, and Yuri loved sports like basketball, ice hockey, and hunting. His strength of character and sportsmanship shone in his training. Yuri Surinov, physical fitness training supervisor at Star City, recalled Gagarin’s athletic abilities for Air & Space Magazine:
“When you see people at play in games such as hockey and basketball and volleyball, a lot is revealed about their personality. Yuri was the peacemaker in hockey. He was small, but the best basketball player the cosmonaut corps had, with quick reflexes. Even after he became famous he didn’t want to be a star. He wasn’t aggressive, but when he made a mistake he took himself to task quietly. He brought other people up to his level of intense playfulness.”
Yuri’s history and personality made him an ideal public champion for the Soviet Union. He was a man from peasant roots who underwent intensive training and scientific instruction to become the world’s first man in space. His unaffected humility and charming smile made him an instantly popular and likeable public figure worldwide.
His naturally modest, genial personality also had its serious side. Cosmonaut Yevgeniy Khrunov, one of the original twenty men selected with Gagarin to train for the cosmonaut program, remembered him as “very focused”:
“Gagarin…when necessary, [was] very demanding of himself and of others. Which is
why I think that concentrating on that famous smile of his might miss the mark entirely
and might even diminish the image of who he really was.”
Even after Yuri became world-famous, his marriage to Valentina was still largely happy and harmonious. Galina, their younger daughter, recalls her father spending all the time he could with them, taking the family on vacations and helping her and her sister Elena with homework. Elena remembers how he would talk to them about literature, and recite poetry by Pushkin and other World War II writers.
However, fame brought Yuri extra pressures and responsibilities. Between travelling the world on publicity tours and relaxing with his family, Yuri was deputy director of the cosmonaut corps, a member of the Supreme Soviet, appointed chairman of the Soviet-Cuban Friendship Society, and head of the Federation of Water Sports. Stories began to circulate that when his wife caught him in a hotel room with a young nurse, he jumped from the second-story window, injuring his forehead.
Despite these rumored difficulties, Yuri retained his famous good humor. In the Party view, he remained invaluable propaganda material, so much so that he was not allowed to add to the 250 hours of flight training he gained as a fighter pilot, out of fear of his safety. He remained grounded, more useful as a trophy, and continued to tour and attend state dinners. This figurehead status began to grate on Yuri, worrying his friends. Nickolay Kamanin, overseer of cosmonaut training, wrote in his journals in 1968:
“There were many situations when Gagarin miraculously escaped big troubles. These
situations often occurred when he attended parties, drove in cars or boats, or when
hunting with the big bosses. I was particularly concerned about his driving cars at high
speeds. I did a lot of talking with Yura on this issue. The active lifestyle, endless
meetings and drinking sessions were noticeably changing Yura's image and slowly but
steadily erasing his charming smile from his face.”
Yuri lobbied the government to let him fly again. In 1967, they finally relented, and Yuri was designated backup for the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission. The Soyuz 1 capsule was supposed to orbit the Earth, dock with another spacecraft (Soyuz 2, to be launched a day later), and exchange passengers. It had been two years since a Soviet-manned space flight, and during that time NASA flew ten successful manned Apollo missions. Immense pressure from the embarrassed government forced the Soyuz 1 project through despite four failed test launches, numerous documented errors, and a faulty parachute system.
Although the Soyuz 1 launch went smoothly, several problems emerged almost immediately during flight. Komorov made an emergency reentry, but his main parachute failed to deploy. His two backup parachutes tangled together and the capsule hit the ground going 90 miles per hour. Komorov was killed on impact in a blaze of fire and molten steel, devastating the cosmonaut community and other residents of Star City. Even as he mourned Komorov’s death, Yuri threw himself into his flight training—he argued, “If I stop flying, I will have no moral right to lead other people whose life and work are connected with flying.”
Yuri’s Night
On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin and his copilot/instructor, Soviet war hero Vladimir Seryogin, took off in a MiG-15 jet for a training flight. Communications with the jet ended abruptly after half an hour. A search team found their wreckage about four hours later.
The cause of the crash has been hotly debated and the source of conspiracy theories ever since. Theories have ranged from deliberate sabotage to alien abduction.
In 2010, Igor Kuznetsov, a retired Soviet air force colonel, released a nine-year investigation which concluded that Gagarin noticed a faulty cockpit air vent at 10,000 feet, threw the jet into a steep dive to safety, and lost control. The official 1968 Soviet government investigation, publicly released in 2011, concluded the “most likely cause of the catastrophe was a sharp maneuver to avoid a balloon probe."
Gagarin and Seryogin’s deaths ignited an outpouring of grief that brought the country to a standstill. When their funeral urns were laid at the Central House of the Soviet Army in Moscow, 40,000 people came to pay their respects. The two pilots were interred in the Kremlin Wall on March 30th, with hundreds of thousands of people attending their funeral march.
The world eulogized him, but their tributes were not immune to the Cold War’s American/Soviet rivalry. Yuri’s obituary in the New York Times emphasized his roles in the Communist Party and reminded its readers that he circled the Earth “only once,” followed by “greater achievements, including multi-manned multiple-orbit flights.” This snide attitude, however, has been largely abandoned, and Yuri remains a beloved source of national pride in the former Soviet Union.
His popularity has only grown in recent years—Russian, American, and Italian astronauts on board the International Space Station celebrated “Yuri’s Night” in 2011, the 50th anniversary of his flight, along with thousands of people across the world.