On the 65th anniversary of humanity’s first Space flight, we publish our translation of the first chapter of Yuri Gagarin’s book “The Road to Space”, where he tells about his younger years and the War time.

The original text of the book can be found here as an HTML or downloaded as a PDF from our blog. We also embedded the PDF at the bottom of this article.

Today, on April 19 – the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People – this fragment of Yuri Gagarin’s book serves as a sombre reminder of tragedy that befell the Soviet Union before it could lay the road to the Space.

SMOLENSK REGION IS MY NATIVE LAND

…The family in which I was born is the most ordinary one, it is no different from the millions of working families of our socialist Motherland. My parents are simple Russian people, for whom the Great October Socialist Revolution, like for all our people, opened a wide and direct path in life.

My father, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin, is the son of a poor peasant from Smolensk. He had only two classes of parish school education. But he is an inquisitive man and has achieved a lot through self-education; in our village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk, he was known as a jack of all trades. He knew how to do everything in a peasant household, but most of all he did carpentry. I still remember the yellowish foam of the shavings, as if washing over his large working hands, and by the smells I can distinguish the types of wood — sweet maple, bitter oak, astringent taste of pine, from which my father made useful things for people.

In short, I have the same respect for wood as I do for metal. My mother, Anna Timofeevna, told me a lot about metal. Her father, and my grandfather, Timofey Matveyevich Matveyev, worked as a drill biter at the Putilov plant in Petrograd. According to my mother, he was a tough man, a master of his craft — a highly skilled worker, one of those who could, as they say, shoe a flea and forge a flower out of a piece of iron. I did not get to see Grandfather Timofey, but our family keeps the memory of him, of the revolutionary traditions of the Putilovites workers.

Our mother, like our father, was unable to get an education in her youth. But she’s read a lot and knows a lot. She could correctly answer any question the children asked. And there were four of us in the family: the elder brother Valentin, who was born in the year of Lenin’s death; sister Zoya, three years younger; and finally, me and our younger brother Boris.

Childhood years. Yuri Gagarin (sitting in the center), his older brother Valentin, younger brother Boris and sister Zoya.

I was born on March 9, 1934. My parents worked on a collective farm, my father was a carpenter, and my mother was a milkmaid. For her good work, she was appointed head of the dairy farm of the collective farm. She worked there from morning until late at night. She had a lot to do: either the cows were calving, then to worry about the young ones, then she was worried about the feed.

Our village was beautiful. Everything is green in summer, deep snowdrifts in winter. And the collective farm was good. People lived in prosperity. Our house was the second on the outskirts, by the road to Gzhatsk. There were apple and cherry trees, gooseberries, and currants in the small garden. There was a flowery meadow behind the house, where barefoot children were playing “Lapta” (traditional Russian folk team sport, similar to “baseball” and “cricket”) and “Gorelki” (an old Russian folk gane of Spring, similar to “Tag”). I still remember being a three-year-old boy. My sister Zoya took me to school on May Day. I was reading poetry from a chair there:

The cat sat on the window sill,
She purred in her sleep…

The schoolchildren applauded. And I was very proud: after all, the first applause in my life.
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