Space is ours

In my understanding, Cosmonautics Day is not just a date on the calendar. This is a monument. After all, monuments are not necessarily made of bronze or stone, and not necessarily on a pedestal. April 12 is not a meaningless symbol (like the extremely unfortunate, in my opinion, monument at the intersection of Leninsky Prospekt and 60th Anniversary of October Street), but a forever recorded memory of a time of hope and freedom.

In the early 90s, I often heard the phrase: «So what? Yes, there was no sausage, but we had Gagarin!» Back then I still didn’t understand a lot of things and didn’t understand everything (as I still do now); such a position seemed to me nothing more than a Soviet burp. But this is probably not the case after all.

Gagarin's flight in 1961 is not about the Soviet Union, not about the competition of systems, not about the victory of Soviet design ideas over Western ones. This is about much more — about the destruction of the usual framework, about a leap into the impossible.

There are still borders on Earth, we can’t get over the Iron Curtain yet, and in some places it is just being built (that’s what the intersection of historical paths is like — exactly 4 months after Gagarin’s flight to the GDR, West Berlin will be surrounded along the entire perimeter), but we have already learned that dreams definitely come true!

35 years after Mayakovsky’s legendary lines «To live in one human community in one world, without Russia and Latvia, ” they instantly lost their relevance. We are now in space, it’s much cooler!

And it doesn’t matter that the competition of systems was lost, that instead of the Korolevs we have Rogozins. Gagarin definitely has nothing to do with this.

Thank you, Yura! Space is ours! In the sense — universal.