Valentina Tereshkova

Biography

Valentina Tereshkova was born in 1937 in the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo in Yaroslavl Oblast; her father, a tank commander, was killed in the Winter War when she was two. She worked at a tyre factory and a textile mill, finished a light-industry technical school by correspondence in 1960, and trained as a parachutist at the local aeroclub. That experience led to her selection in February 1962 as one of five women for cosmonaut training, and she joined the Communist Party the same year.

On 16 June 1963 she was launched on Vostok 6 and became the first woman in space. Flying alone, she orbited the Earth 48 times in nearly three days before landing on 19 June, and she remains the only woman to have made a solo space flight.

She never flew again. She graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in 1969, stayed on as an instructor after the women's cosmonaut group was disbanded, and retired from the Air Force in 1997 as a major general. Meanwhile she took on political roles: head of the Committee of Soviet Women from 1968, deputy of the Supreme Soviet from 1966 to 1989 and member of its Presidium from 1974.

After the Soviet Union's collapse she twice failed to win a State Duma seat. She sat in the Yaroslavl regional duma from 2008 and was elected to the State Duma for United Russia in 2011. In 2020 she proposed the constitutional change that reset Vladimir Putin's presidential term count.