Episode Details

Yuri Gagarin’s journey from a Nazi-occupied Soviet village into outer space make him one of the most famous people on Earth. In this episode, historian Asif Siddiqi tells Danny Bird about the life behind the legend, revealing how Gagarin came to embody the USSR’s postwar ambitions and why his winning smile still evokes the optimism of humanity’s first steps into the cosmos.

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GO BEYOND THE PODCAST

Two television shows – For All Mankind and Star City – imagine an alternative universe in which Soviet cosmonauts completed the first moon landing in 1969 ahead of US astronauts. But how might global history have unfolded if the space race had taken a different course? This article by Matthew Trask explores that question: https://bit.ly/4vBKywv

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