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for the two stories – personal and technological – are intimately connected. Several Western experts in space history advised us about the engineering and administrative aspects of our narrative. Phillip Clark, Rex Hall, Brian Harvey and Gordon Hooper were endlessly patient with our questions. Douglas Millard at the National Museum of Science and Technology (London) provided many books and documents, while James Oberg and James Harford gave us advice on key issues and David Baker provided some excellent photographs. Andy Aldrin, John Logsdon and Peter Almquist outlined a particularly important aspect – the shocked American reaction to the first Soviet space triumphs. It is sobering to be reminded just how many exceptionally brilliant scientists and engineers were trained and employed within the Soviet regime.

Here, then, is the story of a moment that can never be repeated: the moment when one of our kind first ventured off the planet and into the cosmos. Many have followed, but only one man was first. Yuri Gagarin was no superman; he was mortal and flawed, just like the rest of us; yet he deserves his status in history: not just for the mere fact of being first into space, but also because he lived his life with decency, bravery and honour.

JAMIE DORAN

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FARMBOY

This is the story of a young man who became famous in 1961, even though the world knew almost nothing about him. The great achievement of his life, celebrated to this day, took him less than two hours to complete, yet required bravery and commitment over a period of years. A triumphant superstar at the age of twenty-seven, he was tired, frightened and haunted by the time of his thirty-third birthday. In that last year of his short life he battled with his country’s government to try and save a colleague destined for almost certain death; he met State security agents in darkened stairwells, avoiding hidden microphones, and passed on documents so sensitive that people could lose their jobs just for glancing at them. This man put his own life at risk, first for his country, then for his friends. Even his childhood required bravery, in the face of terrifying events that few of us could hope to survive.

We remember Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin as the first person in history to travel into space, but there is much more to his life than this.

He was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino in the Smolensk region, 160 kilometres to the west of Moscow. His father, Alexei Ivanovich, and his mother, Anna Timofeyevna, worked on the local collective farm, he as a storesman, she with the dairy herd. Yuri’s brother Valentin was ten years his senior, and a younger brother, Boris, was born in 1936. Despite hardships, the family was reasonably content, given the inevitable harsh conditions of Stalin’s early collectivization programme and occasional unexplained disappearances among their friends and neighbours.

Responsibility for minding Boris and Yuri while Anna worked on the collective farm fell to the couple’s only daughter, Zoya. ‘I was seven when Yura was born, but at seven you already know how to be a nanny, so I got used to that. Of course, as a girl I was more responsible for looking after the littlest children, while Valentin helped out with the cattle on the farm.’

Official Soviet accounts of the Gagarin family as ‘peasants’ do not take into account Anna’s origins in St Petersburg, where her father had worked as an oil-drilling technician, until the 1917 Revolution persuaded him to move his family into the country; nor the fact that she was highly literate, and never went to bed at night without first reading aloud to her children, or helping them to read for themselves.1 As for Alexei, by all accounts he was a loyal husband, a strict but much-loved father and a skilled carpenter and craftsman, although there was a period in the early 1930s when it seemed best not to advertise his talents. Joseph Stalin had a murderous obsession with kulak farmers: anyone who made a reasonable living in agriculture or as a rural tradesman. When the collectivization programme