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Yuri's Night: Russia and the World Celebrate a Space First
By Simon Saradzhyan
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 07:00 am ET
11 April 2001
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Had the flight, which Gagarin began with the now famous "Off, we go!" ended in failure, however, Levitan's trademark baritone might have carried other news that day. According to the Encyclopedia Astronautica Web site, three press releases were prepared, two for failures and only one for the success of what became a major technological triumph and propaganda victory over the West.
In addition to having Russian space engineers scramble to beat the United States by launching the first human being to space, the Cold War had another, rather paradoxical effect on Gagarin's flight. In the frenzy of preflight preparations at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Korolev's team forgot to stamp the U.S.S.R. (C.C.C.P. in Cyrillic) logo on Gagarin's helmet, Svershchek said.
"Just before the flight we discovered [this oversight] and a colleague of ours fetched a can of paint and painted U.S.S.R. on the helmet," Svershchek said.
While the hand-painted initials wouldn't look perfect, they opted to do it anyway for fear that once Gagarin landed he would be mistaken by the common people -- who were kept in the dark about his flight -- for a U.S. spy plane pilot, Svershchek said.
"Powers had been shut down not long before…. We thought there could be some misunderstanding," Svershchek explained, referring to U.S. pilot Gary Powers, who was shot down and seized while flying a secret U-2 spy plane over Russia in one of the defining moments of the Cold War in May of 1960.
Ultimately, the first human to see Gagarin after he landed was Engels resident Anna Takhtarova.
"I was shocked, this man was dressed in too strange [a] way, not like ours, and appeared unexpectedly from the clear sky," Takhtarova was quoted in the Sovetskaya Rossiaya newspaper as saying.
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