April 12, 1961: a man in a bright orange pressure suit drifts down by parachute into a Kazakh farm field, having just become the first human to survive the vacuum of space. He is instantly the most famous person on the planet. And the first thing his government does about this heroic landing is lie about it, covering up the parachute to satisfy aviation record rules. The flawless shining victory masked a messy, secretive reality, and that tension defined the rest of Yuri Gagarin's short life.

This episode peels the bronze off the statue: the seven-year-old whose school was burned by Nazi occupiers, who lived 21 months in a ten-by-ten mud hut and sabotaged German tank batteries with soil, the short farm kid who needed a seat cushion in flight school, and the 27-year-old who achieved his life's purpose and was then caged as a national symbol, ...