Dancing for Gagarin: The USSR Celebrates the ‘First Man in Space’

Neil Armstrong’s historic “small step” on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, is often seen as the final act in the decades-long Space Race between the United States and the USSR—and most Americans today would certainly say, if asked, that the United States, by way of Apollo 11, won that race. But victory meant quite different things at different times during the Cold War, a reality that LIFE photographer James Whitmore captured while on assignment in Moscow in the spring of 1961.

On April 15, 1961, thousands gathered in Red Square to celebrate Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. A few days earlier, Gagarin, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, had orbited the earth—a 108-minute flight that made him the first human in space. The Soviet achievement stoked fears of inferiority, even irrelevance, among Americans. “Everyone remembers Lindbergh,” one U.S. congressman was quoted as saying, “but who remembers the second man to fly the Atlantic?”

How did Armstrong’s stroll on the moon’s surface eight years later come to eclipse Gagarin’s milestone as the Space Race’s crowning achievement? Throughout the 1960s, divergent paths of technological development reframed the competitive narrative in the United States’ favor. Heavy U.S. government spending on NASA underwrote the creation of the Command Service Module, Apollo 11’s hardware prototype. Meanwhile, various military crises within the Eastern bloc, coupled with economic recession at home, forced the USSR to disinvest from its space program. A race between two rival powers gave way to a final sprint with a single competitor—and, ultimately, a single victor; the original struggle to explore the limitless cosmos transmuted into a striving to feel moon dust beneath one’s feet.

[See all of LIFE.com’s coverage of the Space Race]

Yana Skorobogatov is a doctoral student studying history at the University of California, Berkeley.