Oakland, Calif.

SOVIET sculpture renders all its subjects larger than life, but few more so than Yuri Gagarin, who became the first man in space on April 12, 1961, nearly 50 years ago. A gleaming, 125-foot-tall titanium statue of the world’s most famous cosmonaut stands at the nexus of three freeways in Moscow, arms outstretched like a cold war superhero.

Gagarin’s achievement, and the Soviet playbook that shaped it, made him the most celebrated Soviet hero since Lenin, a triumph of nationalist glory, a role model for the young, a hypermasculine sex symbol. His deification set the “right stuff” tone that NASA would follow with its own astronauts: the lumbering icons in their puffy, complicated suits, incapable of error or weakness or even, it sometimes seemed, emotion.

In reality, Gagarin was 5 feet 2 inches tall and nice as heck. He was chosen because of his willingness to follow orders, to be a small part of the technological immensity of the Soviet space program. It is this quality, rather than courage or bravado, that makes him, in a sense, a most modern spacefarer.

Gagarin was, to be sure, the model Soviet citizen. When I visited the Yuri Gagarin museum in Star City, near Moscow, the curator showed me his childhood report cards, “all with excellent marks,” and a toy airplane he made at the industrial school he attended as a boy.