Valentina Tereshkova

• 1. Introduction

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  It is I, Seagull. Everything is fine. I see the horizon. It's a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is. Those words came from Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile worker, radioing down from orbit on the 16th of June 1963. Her call sign was Chaika, the Russian word for seagull. In a single flight she circled the planet 48 times and stayed aloft almost three days. She remains the only woman ever to fly a solo space mission, and the youngest woman ever to orbit Earth. How did a tractor driver's daughter from a village on the Volga end up sealed inside a Vostok capsule? Why did the woman who once called religion a big evil later push to make Orthodoxy part of Russia's constitution? And why, six decades after she became a symbol of hope abroad, did Ukraine tear down every monument that bore her name?

• 2. Volga Beginnings

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  In the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo, 170 miles northeast of Moscow on the Volga River, Valentina Tereshkova was born on the 6th of March 1937. Her parents had migrated from Belarus to this corner of the Yaroslavl Oblast in central Russia. Her father, Vladimir Tereshkov, drove a tractor before he became a sergeant commanding a tank in the Soviet Army. He died in the Finnish Winter War when his daughter was two years old, one of three children he and his wife Elena Fyodorovna had raised together. After his death, Elena moved the family to Yaroslavl and took work at the Krasny Perekop cotton mill. Enrolled in school at eight and finished at sixteen, Valentina went straight into a tire factory and then a textile mill, studying by correspondence and graduating from the Light Industry Technical School in 1960. A separate passion took hold from a young age: parachuting. She made her first jump at age 22, on the 21st of May 1959, and trained as a competitive skydiver while keeping it secret from her family. She also joined the local Komsomol, serving as its secretary in 1960 and 1961, and became a member of the Communist Party in 1962, the same allegiance that would soon decide her fate.

• 3. Gagarin In A Skirt

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  We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. Nikolai Kamanin, the director of cosmonaut training, wrote those words in his diary after reading in the American press that female pilots were preparing to fly as part of Mercury 13. To beat them, approval was granted for five women cosmonauts, and the women began training before the men to improve the odds. The rules were strict: a parachutist under 30, shorter than 170 centimeters, no heavier than 70 kilograms. Tereshkova had never expressed any desire to go to space. Her skydiving alone got her noticed. By January 1962 the DOSAAF society had gathered 400 candidates, narrowed to 58, then to 23, and on the 16th of February 1962 Tereshkova was chosen as one of five for the female corps. Training meant isolation tests, the centrifuge, thermo and decompression chambers, and flying MiG-15UTI jets. For water recovery she was dropped into a sea churned by motorboats to mimic rough conditions. Kamanin offered the women regular Air Force commissions, and on the advice of the male cosmonauts they accepted, reasoning it would be harder to discard them afterward. All five became junior lieutenants in December 1962. Illness sidelined Tatyana Kuznetsova and poor performance hurt Zhanna Yorkina, leaving Tereshkova, Irina Solovyova, and Valentina Ponomaryova as the front-runners. On the 21st of May 1963 the State Space Commission named Tereshkova to pilot Vostok 6. Kamanin called her Gagarin in a skirt. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, delighted by the propaganda value of a fallen Winter War soldier's daughter, confirmed her.

• 4. Three Days Aloft

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  Following the tradition set by Gagarin, Tereshkova urinated on the bus tire on the way to the launch pad, becoming the first woman to do so. On the morning of the 16th of June 1963 she and her backup Solovyova were dressed in spacesuits, and after a two-hour countdown Vostok 6 launched faultlessly. The name Chaika was later given to an asteroid, 1671 Chaika. Vostok 6 was the final flight of the Vostok program, lifting off two days after Vostok 5 had carried Valery Bykovsky into a five-day mission. The two craft flew in orbital planes 30 degrees apart and, during her first orbit, passed within five kilometers of each other. They could talk by radio, but neither pilot could be certain of glimpsing the other. Cameras inside both ships beamed live footage to Soviet state television. Tereshkova kept a flight log and photographed the horizon, images later used to identify aerosol layers in the atmosphere. In this one flight she logged more time than all American astronauts before her combined. Her mission added comparative medical data on how spaceflight affects women. She suffered nausea and physical discomfort for much of it, yet she completed 48 orbits and spent 2 days, 22 hours, and 50 minutes in space. As every Vostok mission required, she ejected from the capsule about four miles up and parachuted down 385 miles northeast of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, at 8:20 am UTC on the 19th of June. Violent gusts made the descent hard to manage, but she landed with only a bruise on her nose, then ate dinner with local villagers in the Altai Krai who helped her out of her spacesuit. Bykovsky landed three hours after her.

• 5. The Returning Heroine

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  One million flowers were brought into Moscow, according to the newspaper Pravda, to greet the cosmonauts. On the 22nd of June 1963, Khrushchev hugged and kissed Tereshkova, who wore civilian attire, while Bykovsky saluted in uniform, and the Premier announced both had won the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. From atop Lenin's Tomb on Red Square she spoke of the German invasion that began 22 years earlier to the day: My father perished defending our country and my mother brought up her three children. We know the bitterness of that war. We don't need war. Asked later how the country might thank her, she requested that the government find and publish where her father had fallen. It did, and a monument rose at the site in Lemetti, Karelia. Two days after her return, on the 24th of June, Moscow's International Women's Congress drew about 2,000 women from 119 countries to greet her. Of all the Soviet cosmonauts she drew the most foreign requests, making 42 trips abroad between 1963 and 1970. On the 1st of October 1963 she reached Havana and met Fidel Castro in a Cuba reeling from Hurricane Flora. By February 1964 she was pregnant when she visited Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, who was also expecting. In New Delhi she was described as a feminist standard bearer bringing a message of hope for enslaved Indian womanhood. She became a member of the World Peace Council in 1966 and the Soviet representative to the UN International Women's Year conference in Mexico City in 1975.

• 6. Grounded By Politics

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  Against her wishes, Tereshkova was appointed leader of the Committee for Soviet Women in 1968, when she wanted to keep working as a cosmonaut and engineer. After Yuri Gagarin's death, the space program would not risk losing another hero. A few months after she graduated with honors from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in October 1969, the women's cosmonaut team was disbanded. No woman would fly again until Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, a gap of 19 years. Tereshkova did not give up on a second flight. By 1976 she was a colonel in the Soviet Air Forces, and in April 1977 she earned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. She passed the medical examinations to qualify for a new class of women cosmonauts announced in 1978, yet she never returned to orbit, staying on as an instructor at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Her political offices stacked up across these years: member of the Supreme Soviet from 1966 to 1974, member of the Central Committee from 1969 to 1991, and member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1974 to 1989. It was during her medical examinations to re-qualify that she met a surgeon named Yuli Shaposhnikov, the man she would later marry.

• 7. Two Marriages

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  Khrushchev presided over the wedding party when Tereshkova married fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev on the 3rd of November 1963 at the Moscow Wedding Palace, surrounded by top government and space-program leaders. The match was encouraged by Soviet space authorities as a fairy-tale message to the country, and Kamanin called it probably useful for politics and science. On the 8th of June 1964 she gave birth to their daughter, Elena Andrianovna Nikolaeva-Tereshkova, the first person whose parents had both travelled into space. The fairy tale did not last. The couple grew so distant they refused even to stand next to each other in photographs. Tereshkova told the biographer Antonella Kerr that the marriage ended in 1977, and the divorce came in 1982. She then married Shaposhnikov, and they stayed together until his death in 1999.

• 8. From Hero To Sanctioned

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  Religion is a big evil, Tereshkova once said, in line with the official Communist Party position of the Soviet era. Decades later her views inverted completely. She lost a run for the national State Duma in 1995, the same year she gained the honorary rank of major general, and left the Russian Air Force on the 28th of April 1997 at the compulsory retirement age of 60. In 2007, invited to Vladimir Putin's residence at Novo-Ogaryovo for her 70th birthday, she said she would like to fly to Mars even on a one-way trip. After winning a seat in the Yaroslavl Oblast Duma in 2008, she was elected to the State Duma on the 4th of December 2011 as a United Russia representative, then re-elected in 2016 and 2021. In the Duma she joined an inter-factional committee for the protection of Christian values and backed adding to the constitution that Orthodoxy is the basis of Russia's national and cultural identity. During the 2020 constitutional amendments, she proposed lifting the term limits on Putin. Her support for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine carried a steep price abroad. On the 30th of September 2022 the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control added her to its sanctions list, freezing her assets, and that December the European Union followed. Ukraine answered in its own way. Under its 2015 decommunization law, streets bearing her name were renamed, and the monument to her in Lviv was dismantled in November 2023 and moved to the Museum of Totalitarian Regimes.