Space, the final frontier and the battlefield on which the Cold War was fought, has long been a beacon for mankind.

On  April 12, Russia is celebrating Cosmonautics Day, marking the anniversary of man’s first flight into space.

“Yury’s night”, as it became known internationally, is celebrated on April 12 every year to commemorate two separate space exploration milestones.

The first milestone was the launch of the first human into space, Yury Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. The second milestone was the launch of the first Space Shuttle, STS-1, on April 12, 1981. In 2004, people celebrated Yury's Night in 34 countries with over 75 individual events.

In Russia, however, the day was established long before it became a popular world celebration. Following Yury Gagarin’s first successful manned flight on the Vostok space ship into Earth orbit on the 12th of April 1961, the day was established as an official celebration.

In the Soviet Union, even postage stamps marking Cosmonautics Day were released in 1965, so potent was the nation’s inspiration with the figure of Gagarin and space exploration in general.

Symbols of space flooded the country: monuments dedicated to heroes of space became popular in cities all around the country. Gagarin’s hometown was renamed in his honor and, to this day, is marked on the map of Russia as the city of Gagarin.

Science fiction became the most popular reading material among the Soviet public and most little boys around the giant country would inevitably answer “cosmonaut” to the question of what they wanted to become when they grew up.

The space fever overtaking the Soviet Union was not merely a propaganda war, although the Space Race was very much at the heart of the Cold War.

The successes and the woes of the space programme were celebrated all over the USSR. Each cosmonaut immediately received national recognition.

The whole country celebrated, as one, for the success of Valentina Tereshkova as the first woman in space in 1963 and mourned together the tragic death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov during landing in 1967.

Although space co-operation has lately replaced a feeling of space antagonism, there are still tight edges in country relations over being in orbit.

Cosmonautics Day today

The commemoration ceremony held on Cosmonautics Day traditionally starts in the city of Korolyev in the Moscow region near the Gagarin statue in the town center. The city is home to the Russian space programme and the backdrop to the Russian space Mission Control Centre.

Participants of the celebrations then proceed to central Moscow under police escort to Red Square in central Moscow. There, they visit Yury Gagarin’s grave in the Kremlin Wall, the final resting place of many Soviet heroes.

The procession then follows down Cosmonauts Alley. The boulevard is lined with the busts of Russian and Soviet cosmonaut heroes as well as statues of space symbols of the era.

This year, the festivities commemorating Cosmonautics Day include the re-opening of the Space Museum in Moscow. Valentina Tereshkova, the world’s first woman in space, and Aleksey Leonov, a leading Soviet spacecraft designer, participated in the museum’s opening ceremony on Saturday.

Moscow’s mayor Yury Luzhkov stated that the administration was trying to create a more hands-on museum in an environment in which people, especially the younger generations, will be able to discover the wonders of space and the achievements of Russian technology for themselves.

“Here, you can try it all for yourself. Probably not as realistically as cosmonauts in space or the engineers in the Mission Control Centre, but it’s close enough,” the mayor said.

The Russian city of Kazan in Western Russia, on the other hand, boasts a Yury Gagarin of its own. According to the “Evening Kazan” newspaper, the local academic who shares his name with the popular Soviet space hero does take Cosmonautics Day to be a celebration of his own, albeit with a dash of irony.

The son of an aircraft designer, Gagarin from Kazan is, nevertheless, far from the final frontier. His studies focus on law and economics.

He confesses, however, that he has always been fascinated with the more famous man connected with his name, especially now that the “top secret” mark has been lifted off many of the files concerning the world’s first cosmonaut.

Despite enjoying the attention given to him due to his evocative name, Yury Gagarin is not eager to give any of his potential sons the same name.

“They say that the father’s problems are passed on to the son together with his name, and I wouldn’t want that. Besides, there should be only one Yury Gagarin in the family,” the space name holder says.

Anna Bogdanova, RT.