Gagarin's 108-minute mission on April 12, 1961, took the Space Age to a new level and marked a historic achievement for the Soviet Union, which beat the United States in a tight race to launch a man beyond earth's atmosphere.

His space flight has remained a source of national pride ever since, a symbol of the country's bravery and technological prowess.

Gagarin died seven years after he orbited the planet, with the first monuments glorifying his pioneering achievement erected while he still was alive.

A titanium obelisk depicting a starting rocket and dedicated to the first Soviet cosmonauts was unveiled in Moscow in 1964.

Standing 107 metres high, it includes a Gagarin relief.

The Cosmonauts Alley near the Conquerors of Space monument that opened in 1967 features bronze busts of Gagarin and other Soviet cosmonauts.

Another towering monument, built in 1980, also became a Moscow landmark: a titanium statue of Gagarin standing on a pedestal formed to resemble a rocket exhaust. It is 42 metres high and weighs 12 tonnes.

After Gagarin died in a training-jet crash in March 1968, he was buried near the Kremlin alongside former Soviet leaders. The field near Moscow where his plane crashed also got a memorial.

Other Gagarin monuments include a statue in Star City just outside the capital, home to the spaceflight training centre where Gagarin and many other cosmonauts lived.

Dozens of others are spread across Russia, including one in the settlement of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island.

Sakhalin Island is based off the east coast of Russia, to the north of Japan.

A statue of Gagarin also marks the Baikonur space launch facility, the place he blasted off from in then-Soviet Kazakhstan.

After the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia leased Baikonur for piloted space missions and satellite launches.

A field near the Volga River where Gagarin landed after his historic 1961 flight bears an obelisk and a Gagarin statue added later.

Australian Associated Press