Gagarin Is Top Russian Idol

Jan. 21, 2010

Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, who became the first man in outer space in 1961, tops a list of Russians’ idols of the 20th century, a poll showed.

Thirty-five percent of respondents named Gagarin as their “main idol,” up 5 percentage points from 10 years ago, according to the poll conducted by state-run VTsIOM.

Vladimir Vysotsky, a Soviet singer, poet and actor, placed second in the poll with 31 percent, unchanged from a decade before. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, a leader of the Soviet military in World War II, ran third with 20 percent, followed by writer Leo Tolstoy, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The poll of 1,600 people was conducted Jan. 9-10 and had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

(Bloomberg)

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