Gagarin's Night

50 years ago this week, Yuri Gagarin spent 108 minutes in orbit, and when he came down, he had one of the biggest smiles in the world. What's interesting about this particular landmark is the way it has been commemorated here in Brno. There was a parade-cum-performance by one of the local theaters down what used to be Gagarin Street (changed in 1990), and a play was performed later that evening. All in all, it was a fairly light-hearted, amusing event. People wore silly costumes and waited for the grand spaceman to take flight to the stars (using Brno's new rocket-shaped clock, obviously).

What was interesting was the fact that most of the participants were young people. The older generation, as one of my students explained, had "had enough Gagarin. It was always Gagarin as propaganda," Gagarin as a Hero of the Working Class, Gagarin as our Soviet brother. "After 1990, we never heard about him again, and I don't really mind." The younger generation certainly views him as a benign, or possibly ironic reminder of the past, but it's safe to say that his identification with socialist progress has been dialed down a bit.

It is not completely surprising that politics as well as time has changed the nature of the appreciation for Gagarin's legacy. (For an interesting article, click here.) As a symbol, he was certainly an "unpleasant shock" for the West, as one columnist put it yesterday in Mladá fronta Dnes; as a person, he was probably a relatively non-political person who just wanted to fly really fast airplanes. After his parachute landing in a field on the steppes of Russia, he flew experimental jets for the Russians until his MiG-15 crashed. There weren't that many places for a guy like that to get a normal job, and his daughter pointed out that after 1961, neither he nor his wife ever had a moment's peace.

"When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, 'Don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!'"

For young people, he has become a spaceman, rather than a Communist. That's probably not such a bad thing, and it's likely that he himself would have wanted it.