Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut and first person in outer space, has had his name removed from an event celebrating his remarkable contribution to space exploration.
The Space Foundation announced last week that its annual ‘Yuri’s Night’ will now be called ‘A Celebration of Space: Discover What’s Next’, citing ‘current world events’.
The foundation’s decision came after they ‘started to receive a number of negative posts about Russia’ following social media posts advertising the event.
The renaming has drawn criticism from some, most notably Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online, who called it an example of ‘anti-Russian jingoism’ and ‘lunacy’, pointing out that ‘Gagarin had nothing to do with Putin’. Indeed, Putin would have been a 16-year-old when Gagarin died in 1968.
The Space Foundation is not the only institution to have distanced itself from Gagarin. Two weeks ago, a bust of Gagarin in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, was covered with plastic sheeting. According to the Mayor, Steve Reckel, this was done after he was contacted by ‘several people’ asking for the bust to be removed.
Gagarin is the latest in a string of cancellations of Russian icons following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some others include the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra’s cancelling a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’, the Munich Philharmonic’s decision to drop a performance by Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev (despite his having condemned the Russian invasion), and the University of Milano-Bicocca’s postponement of a course on selected works of Dostoevsky (a decision they later reversed).
[Painting: Zapista OU]