📍Gagarin (Gzhatsk), Smolensk Oblast, Russia
1945 – 1951“I grew up in the village of Klushino in the Smolensk region, the third of four children. My father, Aleksey, was a carpenter and my mother, Anna, worked as a milkmaid on the collective farm; she loved reading and passed that love to me. In October 1941 the German army occupied our village and burned the school on the first day, ending my first year of lessons. They took our house, and for a year and a half we lived in a dugout in the garden, heated by a little stove, foraging in the woods for food. My older brother and sister were taken away to labour camps in Germany, and we did not know if we would see them again. During those years, a damaged Soviet fighter plane came down near our village, and I remember the pilots, the aircraft and the sense of courage they carried. In 1945, after the war, my father took our wooden house apart log by log and rebuilt it in the nearby town of Gzhatsk, where I went back to school. My brother and sister came home. I was a cheerful, energetic boy who loved maths, model aeroplanes and sport, and my teachers, many of them war veterans, encouraged me. At sixteen I left Gzhatsk for a vocational school in Lyubertsy near Moscow to become a foundryman, then went on to technical college in Saratov, where I joined a flying club and first flew solo. That led to the air force and, in April 1961, to Vostok 1, when I became the first human in space. Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in my honour, and our rebuilt family home is now part of the town's memorial museum.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today