“Russia launches a… ‘cosmonette’” Another brief look at how the francophone press of Québec covered an aspect of the Soviet space program, in this case the journey into space of Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, part 2

Jun 18, 2023

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By: Rénald Fortier

Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation

Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, in the centre of the photograph, at the Fifth World Congress of Women, Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, June 1963. RIA “Novosti,” 612179.

Hello, my reading friend, and welcome aboard the space capsule of our inimitable blog / bulletin / machine, a capsule dedicated to the second part of our article on the flight in space of the first female cosmonaut / astronaut in history, Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna “Valya” Tereshkova.

Do you remember the name of the unnamed male Homo sapiens in the photograph you saw a few billion nanoseconds ago? Lieutenant-Colonel Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky, an officer of the Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily SSSR, in other words the air force of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), just like Tereshkova, you say? Good answer. You will recall that Bykovsky went into space about 45 hours 30 minutes before Tereshkova and returned to Earth about 2 hours 45 minutes after the latter.

It would be useless to ask me the name of the lady who was / is on the right in the photograph taken in Moscow, USSR, at the Fifth World Congress of Women. The research undertaken to date by yours truly have proven fruitless. I know, however, that she was not Nina Vasilievna Popova, head of the Soviet delegation, nor Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk-Khrushcheva, the spouse of the most important nogoodnik in the USSR, the first secretary of the Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. She was also not the Frenchwoman Eugénie Élise Céline Cotton, born Feytis, president of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the organisation behind the Fifth World Congress of Women.

This being said (typed?), may I suggest that we take a look at the Québec content which appeared in the francophone press of Québec during and after Tereshkova’s stay in orbit? That look was / is, after all, the primary purpose of this article.

In the context of a text on a brief stay at the Toronto International Airport, in Mississauga, Ontario, a journalist from the daily Le Devoir of Montréal, Québec, mentioned, on 18 June, a (real?) conversation, translated in the daily, between 2 boys aged 6 and 7:

What do you think, a woman in space will never succeed?

But yes, buddy, they should have thought of it sooner. Women, it is well known, are lighter than men. Maybe this one, she will succeed in going to touch the moon.

We should… Why the puzzled look, my reading friend? Do you not know that the United States and the USSR launched no less than 24 probes (12 + 12) toward the Moon between August 1958 and June 1963? Two of these launches (1 + 1) were partial failures / successes. Another 20 launches (11 + 9) were abysmal failures. Only Luna 2 and Luna 3, both of them Soviet probes by the way, successfully completed their mission. If yours truly may state so, that was a lot of moolah blown to kingdom come.

The Moon, to quote the title of a 1966 science fiction novel by American naval officer / aeronautical engineer / science fiction author Robert Anson Heinlein, is a harsh mistress, but back to our story. After pointing out that Heinlein was mentioned in several issues of our incomparable blog / bulletin / thingee since February 2019, of course.

We, the royal / curatorial we of course, again, should mention at this point a translated editorial entitled, in translation, “Morning remarks – Maurice Chevalier is flattered by it,” which appeared that same 18 June in the daily Montréal-Matin of… Montréal.

Valentina! Maurice Chevalier will be flattered. The first woman in space is named Valentine. She is pretty, they say, but her charm is severe even though she applied lipstick before the big departure.

To prove perhaps that Soviet women do not yield to others when it comes to coquetry, but I am convinced that Valentina is not the Valentine of the song.

And you? Soviet propaganda will not change a thing.

Those brave Russians! They want us to believe that strolling around in space is a walk in the park. They tell us that yesterday morning the two cosmonauts got up fresh and ready and did their little stretching exercises.

Things should not be exaggerated, though.

When you are imprisoned in a very small capsule, when hundreds of instruments surround you with their dials, when gravity no longer has any effect on you, when your flight suits squeeze you like a vice and when robots auscultate you every second of the trip, no one should come to tell us that the two Russians have done their morning gymnastics.

Westerners are not so naive.

And Valentina’s great achievement should not be underestimated. She enters straight into the history of space, she rejoices the hearts of all women in the world, let us at least give her her merit.

Going to dust the stars, as others have pointed out, is still more difficult than dusting one’s furniture.

Your S’Chn T’Gai Spock-esque raised eyebrow tells me that all is not well, my reading friend. It was the reference to Chevalier and Valentine, was it not? It was the very tone of the editorial which annoyed you? Profuse apologies. That text was / is indeed rather underwhelming. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the first Homo sapiens to orbit the Earth, a male Homo sapiens let us not forget, was certainly not treated that way.

Nonetheless, please allow me to pontificate a tad on Chevalier and Valentine.

Valentine was a slightly ribald and, it was / is believed, humorous French song performed for the first time in public in November 1925 by Maurice Auguste Chevalier. That song was a huge success. That success was long lasting. Indeed, the editorial writer for Montréal-Matin did not hesitate to use its title in June 1963. According to many, Valentine made Chevalier a star of French music hall whose international career as a writer / singer / lyricist / imitator / dancer / comedian / columnist / actor continued until 1968.

And yes, some words of Valentine had to be changed at least once, in 1935, when Chevalier sang it in front of an American audience. And yes again, he was probably amused by American puritanism. Mind you, someone with a twisted mind, but not yours truly of course, might wonder if the revamped version of the song was not as naughty as the original. Anyway, let us move on.

A potentially controversial comment if I may. Canada and Québec were probably as puritanical as the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and…

What were / are the ribald / naughty words in question, you ask, my mischievous reading friend? I would rather not go down that road. Go check online, but not right away because we have to get back to our topic.

On 19 June, a weekly from Saint-Jérôme, Québec, L’Avenir du Nord, published a brief commentary which, without directly mentioning Tereshkova, nevertheless deserved to find a place in these parts, once translated:

It rains and it rains almost every day. No surprise with all the cosmonauts who cross space at the speed of 88 minutes to circumnavigate the earth. These poor clouds get busted all the time. The fact is that we get the consequences. If we could let go of the moon and work down here, there is so much to do.

Dare yours truly state that we should let go of the Moon and work down here, in 2023, because there is still so much to do? Broadcasting on the social media screens of the globe images of a handful of privileged American Homo sapiens traipsing on the lunar surface, in 2025 or 2026, will be of no use to the countless people here below who are currently living in pretty appalling conditions. The US $ 93 000 000 000 sunk in that interplanetary gallivanting junket could / should be used to help humankind. Just sayin’.

The first caricature about Tereshkova’s flight to appear in the francophone press of Québec appeared on 19 June, in the major daily newspaper La Presse of Montréal. That work by the great Québec caricaturist and painter Normand Hudon, a gentleman mentioned in a May 2023 issue of our spectacular blog / bulletin / thingee, was entitled, in translation, “The cosmonauts.” It accompanied an article entitled, once translated, “The space couple is back.”

The caricature that the great Québec caricaturist and painter Normand Hudon devoted to the space flights of Lieutenant-Colonel Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky and Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. Normand Hudon, “Les cosmonautes.” La Presse, 19 June 1963, 1.

Other caricatures which approached Tereshkova’s flight from the perspective of a space couple appeared on 20 June in Le Devoir and the daily La Tribune of Sherbrooke, Québec, the homecity of yours truly. The translated title of La Tribune’s caricature, “A new field of action for Cupid,” clarified things for anyone who did not understand the goal of the caricaturist.

The caricature that a caricaturist whose name I cannot read dedicated to the space flights of Lieutenant-Colonel Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky and Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. Anon., “–.” Le Devoir, 20 June 1963, 4.

The caricature that another caricaturist whose name I cannot read devoted to the space flights of Lieutenant-Colonel Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky and Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. Anon., “Un nouveau champ d’action pour Cupidon.” La Tribune, 20 June 1963, 6.

It was once again through humour that Québec author / writer / humourist Albert Brie approached Tereshkova’s flight on 21 June, in one of his many columns, entitled “les propos d’un timide,” in English the words of a timid, published in La Presse. Allow me to quote it in its entirety, in translation.

The orbiting of a female cosmonaut opened the floodgates to Adjutor’s scientific eloquence. Adjutor he is my vegetable supplier. A horticulturist by profession, he lives from the land without having his feet on it. He is as versed in the knowledge of rockets as of turnips; at least he thinks so.

Adjutor was not surprised to learn that Valentina was circling, for the simple reason that Russian females are viragos. They exercise men’s jobs in Sovietia and vice versa. According to him, we would find in the country of K. female milling machine operators and ‘midinets.’ Everything is upside down, he determines. If tomorrow communist males are not knocked up, it is because impure chemistry will have found a way to get children out of laboratories.

As you can see, Adjutor is at the forefront of scientific anticipation. He knows all about better days to come because he reads ‘Popular Mechanics’, the illustrated strips and ‘Vers Demain.’ Above all, he has a great loquacity, a technician’s vocabulary and an indicative swearword: Jupiter.

That is how Adjutor recently led me on the paths of his ballistics in the middle of his crates of vegetables. I would be remiss if I kept the great premonitions of that scholar of the glebe to myself. They have fattened the dikes of my space culture.

Adjutor foresees that no later than the year 2000, each family will have its interplanetary “wheels” and that during the weekends the roadways of space will be congested with capsulogs, a kind of road hogs of the heavenly ways.

My prophet announces that the Russians will retain the supremacy of astronautical enterprises. He even hopes to live long enough to see all Reds in orbit. Their imperialism would find in the galaxies an ample supply of stars capable of satisfying their appetite for conquest. He believes in peaceful coexistence, but on the condition that the two ideologies, capitalist and marxist, be light years apart.

Adjutor holds that the moon is inhabited. The Moonians could inhabit the fourth dimension where earthlings do not have access to. They are invisible beings à la Wells. He does not want to go to the moon because he fears landing on an unlit area. If you assert that there is no life possible on the moon, he retorts that this is a biased and partial conclusion of human understanding which on the other hand admits that devils live in fire.

From there to believe that Mars is inhabited, there is only a sidereal step that Adjutor crosses in his big boots of aprioristic logician. He regrets not being born Martian for the good reason that the years having over there 687 days, he would be 20 years old instead of 35 here below. Moreover, since he weighs (82 or so kilogrammes) 180 pounds, he calculated that the intensity of gravity being three times less, it would reduce his obesity to the bare minimum of (27 or so kilogrammes) 60 pounds. It was on this vision of his volatile body that he left me.

I cannot wait to see my hortico-scientist again. He sold me inedible tomatoes. They strike me as having a Saturnian taste.

If you do not mind, yours truly will not comment on the small mathematical errors regarding Adjutor’s Martian age and weight contained in that text. You are welcome.

And yes, the Wells mentioned in said text was / is Herbert George “H.G.” Wells, an English writer and science fiction giant mentioned many times in our stellar blog / bulletin / thingee since July 2018, a contradictory / controversial giant who published the novel The Invisible Man in 1897.

If Popular Mechanics was / is all in all quite well known, could you tell me, oh, my well-informed reading friend, if that American monthly magazine devoted to technical, scientific, industrial, etc. novelties was available in other languages in 1963? It was, you state? In German (Populäre Mechanik), Spanish (Mecánica Popular) and French (Mécanique populaire)? Excellent answer.

And yes, the expression country of K. refers to the country of the most important nogoodnik in the USSR, the aforementioned Khrushchev.

This being said (typed?), do you know Vers Demain? No? Know then that it was / is a (monthly?) publication published by the Pilgrims of St. Michael, a marginal / ridiculed far-right social credit-type association of lay roman catholics. Founded in Québec in 1939, said association was / is better known as the Bérets blancs, in English the white berets. It still existed as of 2023, by the way, but is even more marginal and ridiculed than it was in 1963, but back to our cosmonaut. Almost.

Would you believe that the aforementioned Brie’s spouse was named Madeleine Hudon and that this lady’s father was called Rémi Alphonse Hudon? How does this relate to us, you ask, my reading friend? Know that the aforementioned Normand Hudon published a comic strip entitled Julien Gagnon from 16 May to 7 November 1948 in a very popular Montréal weekly, Le Petit Journal. Hudon published that comic strip, mentioned back and forth and sideways in a May 2023 issue of our amazing blog / bulletin / thingee, under the pseudonym of … Rémy. I kid you not. Imagine my joy: Brie and Hudon were brothers-in-law! What a coincidence.

Imagine my disappointment when that turned out to be inaccurate. Madeleine and Normand Hudon were not sister and brother. She and he were at best, perhaps, (very?) distant cousins, but I digress.

The discovery of a text entitled, in translation, “The news – Valentina, cosmonaut,” published in Le Devoir on June 27 by the great Québec writer / journalist / humorist / author Rolande Allard-Lacerte quickly extinguished that disappointment. Allow me to share it with you, in a translated form.

She sang in space, exhilarated, free. And all women, her sisters, rooted in daily routine, looked up. All women, secretly proud, applauded Valentina’s exploit and envied her for soaring above the material constraints of the earth; for having escaped from the perpetually repeated arcane tasks to which they have been compelled for millennia.

Poor Valery, despite breaking records, the universe only had eyes for Valentina, who was opening up a new way for women. The Milky Way! Smart people may say, mockingly, that it is within the reach of all light women to… soar! The most wicked will even add that women do not have to climb so high to succeed in shaking respectable political institutions or jeopardising certain governments!

However, alongside a fearless space amazon getting headlines in the newspapers of the universe, there are thousands of other women for whom one creates a conspiracy of silence. However, these other women, wives and mothers, whose smiles or even first names are unknown, change the soul and the face of humanity every day from the inside. Their presence in the home is such that they hold, in the palm of their hands, the happiness of all those who live in orbit around them. And this is not just literature… Every day, they fall back into the web of the same gestures, within the framework of habit; they often do humble jobs and scrub the darkest corners with care, out of a real concern for cleanliness, for the well-being and comfort of those they love. These women, even while carrying out the most modest tasks, testify to a refinement which joins that of the sculptor of Reims who, it is said, in translation, “polished in the attic of the cathedral, an angel that no one would ever go to see, only for the love of art and of God.”

The reference to women who did not have to climb so high to succeed in shaking respectable political institutions or jeopardising certain governments touched on one of the great British political scandals of the 20th century.

Please note that what follows could well be described as disturbing.

To understand that saga, we have to go back to 1961, a year during which John Dennis Profumo had an extra-marital affair of a few weeks / months with an English model named Christine Margaret Keeler. He was 49 and she was 19. And yes, Keeler was a minor at the time.

The British Secretary of State for War was far from suspecting that the Security Service, or MI5 (Military Intelligence, section 5), the intelligence service responsible for the internal security of the United Kingdom, wished to take advantage of the acquaintanceship of Keeler and a well-connected English osteopath / portraitist / socialite, Stephen Thomas Ward, in order to encourage / coerce an officer of the Voenno-Morskoy Flot SSSR, in other words the Soviet navy, Captain Yevgeny Mikhailovich Ivanov, to betray his country. You see, Ward was a friend of that deputy naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London, England, who was also an agent of the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, the Soviet military intelligence service. Indeed, Keeler and Ivanov seemingly started an extra-marital affair in 1961. He was 35 and she was 19.

If Profumo’s attraction to Keeler complicated the Security Service’s shenanigans, the fact that Profumo and Ivanov crossed paths a few times in 1961 (and 1962?), an information provided by Ward, worried somewhat said intelligence service.

While rumours about Keeler and Profumo’s extra-marital affair, and her extra-marital affair with Ivanov, began to circulate no later than July 1962, it was in March 1963 that the Profumo affair really began. Keeler’s absence from the trial of a furious / jealous lover who had riddled with bullets the door of the house she was in (!) gave rise to all sorts of speculation in the London press.

An increasingly worried Profumo denied having had an extramarital affair with the young woman on the floor of the Honorable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, and… Are you really shocked and surprised by that parliamentary lie, my reading friend? Really? How cute. Which reminds me. I have this bridge I would very much like to sell. Real cheap. No? All right, back to our story.

At the beginning of June, Profumo admitted to having lied in said house to Timothy James Bligh, the private secretary of the British Prime Minister, and submitted his resignation. The London press immediately went wild and tore into the governing class of the United Kingdom, deemed decadent and / or perverted.

An investigative report published in September 1963, a report which might not have gone to the bottom of things by the way, concluded that Profumo had not provided any confidential information to Keeler or Ivanov. The deposed minister then began a remarkable career as a volunteer for a charitable organisation in London. He was a man respected by one and all at the time of his death in March 2006, at the age of 91.

Keeler was not so lucky. She was not part of the British ruling class and, moreover, she was a woman. Keeler actually lived more or less in poverty until her death in December 2017, at the age of 75.

From the looks of it, Ivanov, another white male Homo sapiens let us not forget, did not suffer too, too much from his extra-marital affair with Keeler. He was recalled to the USSR in January 1963, when his superiors began to realise that the Security Service was trying to ensnare him. Ivanov went on to have a pretty ordinary career in the Voenno-Morskoy Flot SSSR. He died in January 1994, at the age of 68.

Of all the people closely involved in the Profumo affair, the aforementioned Ward paid the heaviest price. He was put on trial for proxenetism and living off the earnings of prostitution – a rather speedy judicial decision seen by many as an act of political vengeance instigated by members of the British government and ruling class, then quite embarrassed. That scapegoating, possibly accepted by the judge, coupled with the fact that the Security Service and his many friends refused to testify on his behalf, shocked Ward to such an extent that he took his own life in August 1963. He was 50 years old.

The peculiar circumstances surrounding Ward’s death have led some to believe that he was in fact assassinated on order of high ranking people to prevent him from further embarrassing members of the British government and ruling class, up to and including the royal family. I kid you not.

Before going any further, may I suggest that you read a pair of books published in… You are probably right. I will not dare. Why poke… the bore? Sorry.

As you can imagine, the Profumo affair was a serious blow to the credibility of the British government. Prime Minister Maurice Harold “Supermac” Macmillan resigned in October 1963, while recovering from a relatively minor operation. His party was defeated, narrowly it must be admitted, in the general elections held in October 1964, but back to our story.

Let me now share with you another text from 27 June which further extinguished my aforementioned disappointment, that one from Madeleine Doyon Ferland, an eminent professor of ethnology and folklore at the Université Laval in Québec, Québec. A translated text entitled, in translation, “I was told – I believed it,” and published in La Presse.

Valentina Tereshkova carried quite a responsibility on her shoulders. If the medical examinations following her space flight had revealed some disorders, it would immediately have been concluded that women cannot bear interplanetary journeys. Because there were skeptics in the USSR who were only waiting for a failure on her part to cry out that the weaker sex was decidedly weak.

Fortunately, there was nothing. And a physiologist hastened to assert that the female organism tolerates spaceflights. I find it hard to be surprised by that fact, because I well remember that mice, monkeys, dogs and finally men came back safe and sound.

Several months ago, a little girl wrote to President Kennedy asking him how she could become a cosmonaut. And kindly, the head of the United States replied that no one was yet thinking of catapulting any woman into space and that she should think of another job.

In a corps of cheerleaders, there is probably an athlete who manifests a happy disposition for a spectacular profession, cosmonautics. Perhaps our neighbours will jump the gun and seek to prove that children’s organisms tolerate spaceflights.

If that modern job does not particularly appeal to you, it is because you are really not very enthusiastic, or you are not an athlete. Because that job is a kind of sport, it seems.

Will a new school be opened for aspiring cosmonauts? That is possible. And only graduates will then be able to practice. And us, women, let us prepare for a hard struggle to be admitted to that school. We will prove that this specialty has nothing feminine about it.

By the way, the girl who wrote to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a gentleman mentioned several times since September 2019 in our you know what, might have been Linda Halpern – or so yours truly thought initially. She indeed addressed a letter to the President of the United States. She did so at the beginning of 1962, however. In any event, the response that Halpern received actually came from O.B. “Bill” Lloyd, Junior, Director of the Office of Public Services and Information of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – a world-famous organisation which has been mentioned many times in our blog / bulletin / thingee since March 2018.

The letter mentioned by Doyon Ferland was therefore probably not that of Halpern. Indeed, yours truly did not find Halpern’s name in the newspapers of the time. In any event, she was certainly not the only female teenager who sent a letter to someone to underline her desire to become an astronaut. Take, for example, Hillary Diane Rodham. Yes, yes, future senator and secretary of state Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton claimed that she had sent a letter to someone. I kid you not.

And no, cosmonautics does not particularly appeal to me. Am I a Gallus gallus domesticus, you ask, my amused reading friend? You bet.

Before I forget and just to bust your chops a bit, the eminent Piotr Kuzmich Anokhin was the Soviet physiologist and biologist mentioned by Doyon Ferland, and… No, not Anakin, Anokhin. The guy was a Soviet physiologist and biologist, not a Star Wars character. You are a real firecracker today, my reading friend. Keep that up and I might find a way to turn this peroration into a five part article.

Yours truly will return to our topic by inserting the following caricature, whose title, once translated, was “As long as there is a world… women will rule it.” Said caricature appeared on 27 June, in La Presse.

The caricature by which yet another caricaturist whose name I cannot read made a connection between the fate of Junior Lieutenant Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova and that of the English model Christine Margaret Keeler. Anon., “Tant qu’il y aura un monde… les femmes le gouverneront.” La Presse, 27 June 1963, 4.

If the tiny space capsule with Valentina’s name was self-explanatory, the nuclear mushroom cloud with Christine’s name is now just as self-explanatory, is it not?

And I believe that the time has come to conclude this presentation.

And you have a question, my reading friend. Did Tereshkova participate in the aforementioned Fifth World Congress of Women held in Moscow from 24 to 29 June 1963? Err, have you net seen the photograph at the beginning of this issue of our superb blog / bulletin / thingee? In any event, the answer to that question was / is a yes just as resounding as the applause of the approximately 2 000 delegates from approximately 120 countries and colonial territories, including Canada, present in Moscow. Would you believe that Montréal-Matin announced that fact in an article entitled, in translation: “The cosmonette received by the suffragettes,” hum? And yes, Tereshkova was elected to the presidium of said congress.

The individual who headed the 30 or so Canadian representatives, and not delegates, a subtle distinction the Soviet authorities did not a give a hoot about, who attended the congress was the founding president of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace of Toronto, Ontario, Texan Canadian Helen Boorman Tucker. And yes, it is all but certain that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spied on that organisation.

This being said (typed?), one could argue that the most famous member of the group which went to Moscow was none other than Simonne Monet-Chartrand, a Québec writer / trade unionist / pacifist / feminist who happened to be the spouse of a Québec typographer by trade who was himself none other than Joseph Michel Raphaël Chartrand, a defender of the disadvantaged / vulnerable and leading figure of trade unionism in Québec who never minced his words and always spoke his mind, with several swear words and a contagious laughter.

At the risk of overstepping the bounds of objectivity, an objectivity that privileged white male Homo sapiens have often used (abused?) to undermine / stifle voices of protest mind you, yours truly really liked / like Chartrand. The world could use far more people like him, people willing to rattle the gilded and diamond studded cage of the 1% club and its minions

And you have another question, my concerned reading friend who is desperately trying to move the conversation toward a less controversial topic? What happened to Tereshkova after her historic flight in 19 June 1963? Well, that eminent member of the Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza became an aerospace engineer and cosmonaut instructor. Despite her efforts to do so, Tereshkova would never return to space.

According to an altogether usual procedure, she was retired by the Russian government, in March 1997, on her 60th birthday. She was then a major-general in the Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii, in other words the Russian air force. That was apparently an honorary title in the reserve forces.

A member of the Gosudárstvennaya Dúma, the puppet and ridiculous Russian equivalent of the House of Commons of Canada, since December 2011, under the banner of the Putinian political party Yedínaya Rossíya, Tereshkova was / is a strong supporter of Russian president / dictator Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the abominable values he stands for.

And yes, that dish of fries and cheese curds topped with gravy was mentioned in December 2019 and May 2020 issues of our blog / bulletin / thingee.

Would you believe that, in March 2020, Tereshkova proposed a last-minute constitutional amendment which reset the clock for presidential terms, a reinitialisation which would allow Putin to run in the presidential elections of March 2024 and March 2030? Yes, yes, that paragon of virtue could be president of Russia until March 2036. Oh, joy!

Tereshkova was among the sc*mb*gs of the Gosudárstvennaya Dúma who supported the criminal / illegal / monstrous invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

If yours truly may paraphrase, out of context and in the original English (!), the French encyclopaedist / historian / philosopher / playwright / poet / writer François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, in his 1727 An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, Extracted from Curious Manuscripts, and also upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer down to Milton, it is wonderful how she fell so low from so high a flight.

Путин должен уйти. Терешкова должна уйти в отставку. Слава Украине!