Yuri Gagarin: The Man Behind the Iconic "Let’s Go!" That Changed the World — As Told by His Niece

Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the maternity hospital of the small town of Gzhatsk. Though modest in size, the town was remarkably industrious: it boasted its own sawmill, flax and brick factories, a weaving mill, a power station, and even a cinema with sound.

In 1968, the town was renamed Gagarin in honor of the man who flung open the doors of the cosmos. Today, the entire place breathes the spirit of space. Yuri Gagarin’s face greets you at every turn — on bus-stop posters, street signs, and the towering monument that dominates the square beside the Vostok Hotel, named after the very spacecraft that carried him beyond the Earth.

It is here, in this town saturated with his memory, that his niece Tamara Dmitrievna Filatova lives and works — the devoted keeper of stories about the uncle she adored beyond measure.

“He had a beautiful smile and tremendous charisma,” Tamara recalls. “He wasn’t classically handsome in the Greek sense. It was a purely Russian face — yet it radiated such warmth and charm!”

Their bond was extraordinary. When she was a child, thirteen-year-old Yuri stood as her godfather at her christening. For the rest of his life, he watched over her, spoiling her with generous gifts. Only years later, while working at the museum and speaking with his former teachers in Saratov, did Tamara discover how her young uncle had earned the money for those presents.

“I looked through his old school journals and saw so many absences,” she says with a smile. “I told the teachers they praised him too highly — after all, he was a truant! They explained that he used to slip away to the Volga River to unload barges and work as a loader on the night shift, because the pay was better.”

As an outstanding student, he was allowed to miss morning classes after those exhausting nights. Only then, Tamara confesses, did she truly understand the sacrifice behind every childhood gift she had received from him.

She learned that her beloved Uncle Yura had flown into space while she was at school. The news came as a thunderbolt.

“During the break, our class teacher came in and asked whether I really had an uncle who was a pilot. ‘Is it Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin? Tamara, he is in space right now,’ she said. I was terrified. I collapsed onto my desk and cried through the entire lesson. At the next break, she returned and gently asked why I was still sobbing — Uncle had already landed safely.”

Today, walking through the tiny rooms of the Gagarin family home, it is hard to imagine how a large household — parents, brothers, and an older sister with her own family — once lived here. Every piece of furniture was crafted by Yuri’s father; every curtain and patchwork quilt sewn by his mother. Yuri shared this modest room with his younger brother Boris, sleeping head-to-toe on a small bed. Here they studied, did homework, played, and read.

In Gzhatsk, young Yuri proudly became a Pioneer and considered the title a solemn duty — an example for others to follow.

Museum staff say his love of books came from his mother, while his passion for music came from his father, a self-taught harmonica virtuoso. Yuri himself preferred to listen rather than play; the house still holds many of his personal records, each carefully marked with the letter “Yu.”

“He could do anything with his hands, read voraciously, played sports, and thirsted for knowledge,” notes Anna Burchik, head of the memorial department at the Yuri A. Gagarin Museum-Reserve. “He was remarkably well-rounded. That breadth of talent, I believe, played a decisive role in his selection as the first cosmonaut.”

When the Great Patriotic War broke out, Yuri was just seven years old. The family lived in the nearby village of Klushino, twenty kilometers from Gzhatsk. They survived by a miracle. Under German occupation, the Gagarin home was seized. First, they sheltered in a shed; then the father built a dugout with his own hands and constructed a traditional Russian stove that gave them both warmth and the means to cook. The family lived in that earthen shelter for a year and a half until the town was liberated in March 1943.

It was during the war that the boy fell in love with the sky — witnessing a dogfight between Soviet and German pilots. Later came the DOSAAF flying club in Saratov, the aviation school in Orenburg, service in Murmansk, and finally, secret selection for the first cosmonaut detachment. Out of twenty candidates, six were chosen; the honor — and the immense responsibility — of becoming the very first fell to Yuri Gagarin.

His legendary “Let’s go!” — echoed around the world. The Soviet Union opened the era of manned spaceflight. With his dazzling smile and open gaze, Yuri won the hearts of millions. Few at the time understood what an extraordinary feat this truly was. Of the seven test flights leading up to his historic voyage, only three had succeeded — those of the dogs Belka and Strelka in August 1960, and Chernushka and Zvezdochka in March 1961. Gagarin’s own flight encountered eleven emergencies, the first of which began on the ground.

Pavel Gaiduk, deputy head of the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow, explains: “The day before the rocket was rolled out to the launch pad, a routine weighing of the cosmonaut in full gear — ejection seat and spacesuit — revealed an unexpected fourteen-kilogram overweight. Subsequent problems followed because the ship had to be lightened. Thirty kilograms of excess cable were cut, along with some rocket automation and the integrator; the orbit was raised. The rocket had already been placed on the pad and verticalized when they hurriedly severed extra connections inside the capsule.”

The descent was equally dramatic. The capsule’s heat shield burned, outside temperatures reached 3,000–5,000 °C, molten metal streamed past the portholes, and the cabin itself began to creak. Gagarin re-entered the atmosphere at eight kilometers per second; the g-forces multiplied his 70-kilogram weight twelvefold — to 840 kilograms.

When the news of the first human spaceflight broke, schools closed and factories fell silent across the country. Tamara could barely push her way through the crowd of cars to reach her house. Inside, the rooms overflowed with people. Three new telephones — never seen before in the home — rang nonstop with calls from every corner of the Earth. Her mother and brothers Valentin and Boris answered every single one.

After the flight, Yuri was presented with a Volga car — the 21st model. Outwardly an ordinary production vehicle, it carried special touches: a personalized license plate 78-78 MOD, a rare black exterior, and most strikingly, a sky-blue interior — as if even on Earth, he should always remember the heavens.

Another gift was a new house for his parents. Due to the fame, Yuri could not return to his hometown immediately after the flight. The authorities decided that a simple wooden cottage no longer suited the first cosmonaut of Earth. In just two months, a new house was built, and an entire garden was transplanted from Klushino. Trees in full bloom were carefully carried on lorries, and they continued to blossom and bear fruit that same year. Yuri arrived on June 17, 1961, to a house surrounded by a blossoming orchard. The town had planned a grand welcome, even to carry him in on their shoulders, but he slipped in quietly a little earlier.

Yuri Gagarin did much for his hometown. Thanks to him, the Dinamik factory was built — employing 1,200 people in a town of only 12,000. Under his influence, Gzhatsk transformed from a district center into a well-appointed town with central water supply, paved roads, new schools, apartment blocks, a cinema, a cosmonautics center, and the Vostok Hotel. He dreamed of doing even more but was not granted enough time.

Sixty-five years after that first flight, every resident of what is now the town of Gagarin still remembers the man who opened the road to the stars. More than 600 people from forty countries have since followed him into space — among them many from Belarus. The country’s own milestone came in March 2024, when Marina Vasilevskaya became the first citizen of sovereign Belarus to fly beyond the Earth.

Yet, for those who knew him, Yuri Gagarin remains far more than the first cosmonaut. He is the boy from a wooden house who never forgot his roots — the young man whose radiant smile and single, joyful “Let’s go!” lifted the whole of humanity toward the heavens.