In 1968, on Leninsky Prospekt, Muscovites met Yuri Gagarin, who was going to the government with a report on the conquest of space.

Later, Gagarin Square was arranged on this site, and in 1980, a monument was erected on it in honor of his favorite cosmonaut. It was the first titanium monument of this scale in the world! Previously, only spacecraft were built from titanium.

The height of the monument is 42.5 meters, its pedestal depicts the launch of the spacecraft. At the base is a copy of the Vostok spacecraft, on which the first manned flight into space took place. The monument to Gagarin is made up of 238 cast fragments, which are welded to each other and bolted. One of the most difficult details was the astronaut's face: it weighs about 300 kilograms, which is higher than the permissible norm for the vacuum furnace where the monument was cast.

According to the authors of the project, the monument to Gagarin should be visible from the Moscow Ring Road, for this reason it cannot be moved anywhere, although there have been such attempts, in particular on the part of the government.

There are many myths and legends associated with the monument, for example, that every New Year Gagarin raises his hands to the sky and flies away, and someone claims that he applauds on Cosmonautics Day.

In 2010, a company of creative hooligans, which, with the help of special effects and lighting, “launched” Gagarin's sculpture into space, turned the myth into reality in a peculiar way. A video of this moment can be found on the Internet.

A similar trick is performed by the statue of Gagarin in Renata Litvinova's film “Rita's Last Tale”.