April 12, 1961 –
Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space in Vostok 3KA-2 (Vostok 1), on this date. During his flight, Gagarin famously whistled the tune The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows The first two lines of the song are: “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky“. This patriotic song was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951 (opus 86), with words by Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky. It was obviously not a big hit on American Bandstand at the time – although it did have a good beat, you could hardly dance to it.
There were speculations in the media that from orbit Gagarin made the comment, “I don’t see any God up here.” There are, however, no such words in the full verbatim record of Gagarin’s conversations with the Earth during the spaceflight.
In a 2006 interview a close friend of Gagarin, colonel Valentin Petrov, stated that Gagarin never said such words, and that the phrase he uttered was, “I don’t see any Goddamn toilet up here and I have to go.”
And So It Goes
The Haus of Dcaligari 