Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was born on this day, March 8, in 1934 (d. 1968). Gagarin was the first person to journey into outer space, completing one orbit of Earth in April 1961. Karsh photographed Gagarin during a two-month trip to Moscow in 1963, in the course of which he photographed many subjects, not least of all Leonid Brezhnev, Nina and Nikita Khrushchev, and ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya.