Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Britain Exhibition at the British Council

Written by Dorothy Lassing Wednesday, 20 July 2011 22:05

LONDON.- In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight and the installation of the Yuri Gagarin statue on the Mall, the British Council presents Gagarin in Britain, an exhibition on the life of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the early Soviet space programme. A special section is devoted to Gagarin’s visit to Britain from 11 to 15 July 1961, with photographs of the extraordinary welcome given to him by the British public, and of his meeting with politicians and people alike.

This exhibition is part of a wider programme of cultural and educational links between the UK and Russia organized by the British Council. It showcases items from the Vostok (“East”) manned space programme rarely seen in Britain: the first space suit – SK-1, including the padded inner lining, blue rubberized pressure-suit and outer orange layer; and an ejector seat of the model used by Gagarin when he parachuted out of Vostok 1 at an altitude of 7 km.

These exhibits are complemented by Soviet posters from the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics; a film made by Roscosmos showing original footage of the early training programme and the 1961 launch itself; a model of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in the world, launched in October 1957; an array of space food; and one of the earliest dog space suits, used prior to man’s first spaceflight to test the capacity of living creatures in space.

Accompanying the artefacts is a photographic exhibition telling the story of Gagarin’s life, featuring more than 80 photographs from the Gagarin family archive and other sources, many never published before. They show the small town of Klushino where Gagarin was born; the devastation brought about by the Nazi occupation; and the tale of a young man of modest beginnings gradually becoming a pilot, then a cosmonaut, then – within an instant of his return to earth – the most famous man on the planet.

Back in the day, as far as the United States was concerned and much to its chagrin, those pesky Ruskies managed to beat them to several firsts. Of the two, at the end of WWII the USSR was the first to enter Berlin, it was the first to launch a satellite that left the earth and, yes, it was the first to hold the Olympics (Moscow 1980 beat the Los Angeles event by just four short years). Mind you, what perhaps really stuck in the Yanks’ throats and, thus, so publicly fuelled the flames of the Cold War, is the fact that, 50 years ago this very month, the Soviet Union became the first of the two to put an actual man into space.

That man, of course, was Yuri Gagarin. A name that surely has so fundamentally gone down in the annals of history it’s as instantly recognizable as those of Alexander the Great, Wm. Shakespeare and Casanova. Oh, and Neil Armstrong, of course. For, let’s not kid ourselves, Gagarin’s achievement (and that of his important collaborators) is among the most extraordinary the human race has ever pulled off. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made the first powered human air-flight; just 58 years later, thanks to a heady mix of scientific and mathematical genius, heavy industry, a nuclear arms race and global and ideological rivalry, Gagarin became the first human being to be powered beyond the Earth itself.

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