Yuri Gagarin (1934 - 1968), the first Russian cosmonaut.
Yuri Gagarin was born in a village near Smolensk. He spent his childhood in a big family, he had a sister and two brothers. In 1951 Yuri finished a vocation school, then a school of aviation and an Airforce Academy in Moscow. On the twelfth of April 1961 Yuri Gagarin made a space flight on board the spaceship «Vostok». The cosmonaut made a flight around the Earth that lasted 1 hour 48 minutes. Yuri Gagarin was the first man on Earth to fly into space.