Autographed photo of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Photo of class 10 "B" of Chkalovskaya secondary school No. 14 named after Yuri Gagarin, 1963, with an autograph by Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin is a pilot-cosmonaut of the USSR, the first person in world history to fly into outer space.

This signature is not a random autograph in a school photo. From 1960 to 1966, Yuri Gagarin and his family lived in the village of Chkalovsky near Moscow, where school No. 14 is located. It was here, next to the future Star City, which was still under construction, that the most intense years of his life took place: selection for the cosmonaut squad, preparation for the flight, and the flight itself on April 12. 1961 and the first post-Soviet years of glory.

"The school" bears his name, and on this graduation album from 1963 — that is, shot just two years after the flight of "Vostok-1" — it is already included in the title next to a portrait of Gagarin himself and a drawing of a rocket "Vostok-1". In other words, for the tenth graders of this graduation, Gagarin was not a distant legend — he was literally a neighbor in the village, a living celebrity, whose name their school bore during his own lifetime. A similar story is described by old-timers of Chkalovsky: according to their memoirs, Gagarin was open and accessible to communicate with local residents, including schoolchildren, until the family moved to Zvezdny Gorodok in 1966.