Gagarin

And Gagarin is everything to us. Our whole Soviet everything. Our bright Soviet everything.

For me, Gagarin is the very name of Russia. An absolute sex symbol. The only unquestionably positive figure among our contemporaries.

Underwood put it absolutely brilliantly in their song about him: *As if it were true that the Lord ran the Milky Way down his trouser stripes, His shoulder boards burn like mercury; he is so beautiful it drives us wild. * I'm sorry that Gagarin's 75th anniversary is not observed as a national holiday. He is our Martin Luther King Jr. and our Che Guevara. We need to create a cult of Gagarin. And even the monument to him on Leninsky Prospekt (a major avenue in Moscow) is, for me, the finest monumental work of the Soviet era—except perhaps for "The Motherland Calls."

Hooray! Congratulations to everyone on the fact that we had—and still have—Gagarin!