[Yuri GARGARIN (through translator):] Allow me, comrades, to inform our Soviet Government,
our Communist Party,
and all the Soviet people
that I accept with honor the task assigned to me
to open the first path into space,
and if during the execution of this assignment I encounter any difficulties,
I shall overcome them as the Communists do.
[Sergei KHRUHCHEV:] First man in space – it was the dream,
but it's close, 50/50, the threat that it can be failure.
[Radio Moscow:] Today, the 12th of April, 1961,
the first cosmic spaceship named Vostok with a man on board
was orbited around the Earth from the Soviet Union.
He is airman Major Yuri Gargarin,
an air force pilot,
a citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
[Radio Moscow:] That was the voice of Yuri Gagarin
recorded from the first space ship with the first man to fly into the cosmos.
[Edwin Newman:] The Soviet Union has today laid claim
to one the greatest scientific achievements,
one of the greatest engineering achievements,
and incidentally one of the most courageous ventures of all time.
It has sent a man into space and brought him back alive.
[Sergei KHRUHCHEV:] This man in space became the most important event in the world.
And my father want to make it very public relations.
So he told yes, we will bring Gagarin to Moscow.
I will meet him in the airport
and then we will drive to the Red Square.
There were the roofs and the windows and the balconies, cheering, shouting.
For me, I was a professional, I’m working in this field,
so all this is just the propaganda.
For the ordinary people it was sensation.
But after that Gargarin became the public figure.
And we are lucky that he has so attractive face and he smile.
And of course Soviet Union sent him everywhere.
He represented the Soviet Union and the great technological country.