The official commission, set up hours after the crash, ignored Belotserkovsky's findings and claimed in its final report that no clear cause of the crash had been determined. This engendered numerous false rumors, the most outrageous is that both Gagarin and Seryogin were suffering from severe hangovers during their last flight.

In addition to these official celebrations, several clubs in Moscow plan to organize their own parties to commemorate the anniversary.

Paradoxically enough, Molotok.ru -- Russia's equivalent of the eBay.com auction site -- also plans to celebrate the anniversary. The site announced earlier this month that it will auction off personal belongings of several Russian cosmonauts, with proceeds going to support veterans of the Russian space industry.

"We will of course put up some poster celebrating staff, but I don't plan anything grand," said Vitaly Svershchek, the deputy director of the Zvezda spacesuit manufacturer who personally helped Gagarin adjust himself into his Vostok craft minutes before this Soviet pilot's leap into history.

Back then the task force of Russian space engineers, led by chief of the OKB-1 Design Bureau, Sergei Korolev, had no time to think of the great technological feat they were accomplishing by sending this Soviet air force major off for the first-ever orbital fight, Svershchek said.

And even when Gagarin safely completed his 108-minute flight to land outside the far-flung village of Smelovka near the city of Engels, some of this team felt just "surprised," but not overjoyed, Svershchek said.

Svershchek said after the cosmonaut's return to Earth, he flew to an airport outside Moscow and then rushed back in a motorcade to the Russian capital along with Gagarin. As they drove, they saw fireworks go off in the night sky above the city.

"I remember [wondering] what the fireworks were going off for?" the 69-year old veteran said in a phone interview with SPACE.com from Zvezda's headquarters in the Moscow region city of Tomilino.

Unlike Svershchek, some of the younger figures in the Russian space industry felt overwhelmed by Gagarin's flight. Common people and even many of space engineers had been kept in the dark until the flight was completed.

"There was universal joy, people flooded the streets smiling and greeting each other," said Yuri Grigoryev, deputy designer general of Rocket Space Corporation, which is the main successor to OKB-1.

Grigoryev, who was a 20-year-old scholar of rocket science at the Moscow Aviation Institute when Gagarin flew to space, said "it was the strongest emotion of his life" when he heard news of the successful flight reported to the Soviet people on a nationwide radio broadcast by then-star anchor Yuri Levitan.