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Celebrating the first human to journey into outer space.
Yuri Gagarin was born in Klushino, near Smolensk on March 9, 1934. The adjacent town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 in his honour. His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm, his father as a carpenter and his mother as a dairy farmer. Both were laborers but both were well read and fairly educated. Yuri was the third of four children and the family suffered privations when the German Army occupied their home. The Gagarins literally built a mud hut and lived in it while Germans operated out of their home during the war.
After the war he entered the Soviet Air Forces, after he learned to fly as a hobby. He was later trained to fly the MiG-15 fighter. In the late 1950s, he was selected for the cosmonaut program and on April 12, 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first man to fly into space. He ascended and orbited the Earth for 1 hour and 48 minutes in the Vostok 1 spacecraft.
He died on March 27, 1968, testing a MiG-15.
Image restoration: Jean-Baptiste Faure
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