Yuri Gagarin, while famous for being the first human in outer space, really did nothing but sit in a big metal ball and say things like, "Da, everythink she is workink fine" to the ground controllers. In the Soviet space program at that time, the cosmonauts really had almost no involvement in anything, and the flight systems on the spacecraft were all completely automatic (unlike the much less-advanced American spacecraft of the time). They could just as easily have sent the town drunk into space instead of Yuri Gagarin, but having a national hero boosts morale and gives you something to be proud of.