About the first flight into space on behalf of the first cosmonaut. The Presidential Library marking Yuri Gagarin’s birthday

March 9 marks the birthday of the world's first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968). The electronic collection of the Presidential Library Open Space contains a large number of materials dedicated to the conquest of space: periodicals, books, fragments of newsreel, reflecting various milestones in the development of astronautics, as well as books by Gagarin himself, his memoirs.

Yuri Gagarin's childhood passed in the village of Klushino, Smolensk Region. The school years of the future astronaut fell on the Great Patriotic War. After the Victory there was a vocational school in Lyubertsy near Moscow and the Saratov Industrial College. It was there that he began to dream of the sky and enrolled in the flying club.

After graduating from the K. E. Voroshilov 1st Chkalov Military Aviation School, Gagarin worked in the aviation unit of the Northern Fleet in the Arctic. In December 1959, the young pilot turned to the Cosmonaut Training Center (today it bears his name) with a request to enroll him in a group of candidates. Having passed all the necessary examinations, he began training.

And then came April 12, 1961. The Presidential Library’s collections contains several books written by the first cosmonaut and telling about this day.

Thanks to newsreel footage it is now possible return to a significant day and feel the incredible delight that millions of people have experienced. The film captures Yuri Gagarin before the start of the flight: the future first cosmonaut of the Earth rides in a bus to the launch site, says goodbye to the designer Korolev, then settles in the cockpit, and the spacecraft takes off. In other frames, we see Sergei Korolev at the control panel, anxiously waiting for radio contact with Yuri Gagarin. Seconds stretch languidly until the moment when he hears Gagarin's words: "I feel myself fine".

In the newspaper Smena of 1961, No. 88 of April 13, 1961, "N. S. Khrushchev's conversation with the first cosmonaut Yu. A. Gagarin" was published. It took place shortly after the announcement of the successful completion of the first space flight and Gagarin's landing in a given area. Khrushchev first of all asked: “Tell me, Yuri Alekseevich, how did you feel in flight? How was this first space flight? “I felt good in the spaceship. The flight was successful, all the equipment of the spacecraft worked accurately. I saw the Earth from a great height. Seas, mountains, big cities, rivers, forests were visible. “I am very glad that your voice sounds cheerful and confident. Let the whole world look and see what our country is capable of, what our great people, our Soviet science can do”.

For obvious reasons, the newspapers did not report on emergency situations that arose at all stages of space exploration. However, over time, information about them became less dosed, which further emphasized the astronaut's courage and fortitude. The book-album “Cosmos” refers, in particular, to some technical interference that occurred during Gagarin’s landing in the descent vehicle: “Although the landing was successful, it was not without troubles, which were not reported then, so as not to spoil the overall picture. Only much later did it become known that the separation of the ship's compartments took place with a delay of 10 minutes, during which the instrument compartment literally dragged behind the descent vehicle. And that after the ejection of the ship in Gagarin's spacesuit, the breathing valve was pinched. Fortunately, these were trifles that could not replace the main thing - a man escaped into space.

The Presidential Library’s portal features a video recording of a lecture by writer and journalist Anton Pervushin "106 minutes of Yuri Gagarin: declassified details of the first space flight". It, among other things, tells about the dangerous situations that occurred before and during Gagarin's "star journey", and which he courageously overcame.

Everyone then was interested in how a person in space flight endures weightlessness. “At first, this feeling was unusual”, - Gagarin recalls on the pages of his book “The Road to Space: Notes of a Pilot-Cosmonaut”, “everything suddenly became easier to do. And the arms, and legs, and the whole body became as if not mine at all. They weighed nothing. You don’t sit, you don’t lie, but you seem to hang in the cockpit. All loose objects also hover. And the drops of liquid that spilled from the hose took the form of balls and, touching the cabin wall, stuck to it like dew on a flower. ... All the time I worked: I watched the equipment, watched through the windows, kept notes in the logbook. Forgetting for a moment where and in what position I am, I put the pencil next to me, and it immediately floated away from me.

“At 10 hours 55 minutes, Vostok, having circled the globe, safely landed in a given area on a plowed field of the Leninsky Put collective farm southwest of the city of Engels, not far from the village of Smelovka. It happened, as in a good novel, - my return from space took place in the very places where I flew on a self-propelled plane for the first time in my life.

The Presidential Library’s portal features more interesting materials related to the topic of space exploration and the name of Yuri Gagarin, the first person to whom he submitted. In total, the volume of the Presidential Library's collections is more than a million depository items - electronic copies of books and periodicals, archival documents, audio and video recordings, photographs, scientific and educational materials and others.