Yuri Gagarin (idea)

A cool example of how contraproductive propaganda can be:
My mother comes from Hungary. At some stage they were sent out in crowds to greet the great Yuri Gagarin, who had shown the supremacy of the so-called communist countries over the imperialist yadda yadda yadda. And the crowds went out to greet Gagarin and cheered and all. But they were not very impressed by him anyway, since they figured it was probably just another propaganda trick.