Someone calculated that the power of the rocket engines, which put the red-star "Vostok" into orbit, was equal to the combined power of the entire horse population of pre-revolutionary Russia. This coincidence, although witty, is sad. A country of backwardness and despotism, such as tsarist Russia, could not have escaped into space ... To ascend to the stars, it is not enough to break the fetters of gravity - it was first necessary to throw off the shackles in which labor, reason, and human soul languished before October! It was not for nothing that the Communards were called “people storming the sky” ... The storming of space did not begin on April 12, 1961, when man saw the open universe, and not even on October 4, 1957, when the first satellite took off from the Earth. It all started with the Aurora shot, with the storming of the Winter Palace.

Yuri Gagarin