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The Spacewoman Valentina Tereshkova wishing an happy new year to the Soviet people, Moscow, URSS, December 31, 1966

In the same hours as Brexit, the exit of Great Britain from the European Union, becomes a reality, I saw on various social networks a lot of images and humorous jokes about the simplicity with which the British made this choice and in what were, instead, comparisons regarding the impossibility during the years of the Cold War for the various countries under the Soviet orbit to free themselves from the constraints of what was the so-called Warsaw Pact and the 'yoke' that was imposed on these countries by the regime imposed by the USSR. I state, on the merits, that I do not want to negatively comment or necessarily negatively comment on what the Soviet Union experience was. I was born the son of communists, and my grandfather was a communist too, who had not studied and grew up cultivating the land before moving to the city and working as a scullion at the Royal Palace and then going off to war and who, who knows, maybe was communist simply because he didn't have a penny and because he wasn't violent and the fascists had pissed him off and sent him around the world to fight where then the worst enemies he found were among his own ranks, those famous 'picchiatelli', and because the Americans had kept him prisoner and then even took the land where he was born to build a NATO base on it, and all this without him getting a penny; and this is my political formation and the ideology I have always tried to be inspired by regarding politics and the way of interacting with others and seeing things. Of course, this does not mean that I am some kind of maximalist and that concerning a historical view of what has been and what was the USSR and the Cold War, I adopt blinders. On the contrary, I have never considered myself aligned with the old PCI, for instance, I am against that rhetoric which might be typical of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti before his conversion where the approach to religion would be the same as he had with communism (he just changed 'books'), which I have always looked at and analyzed critically, something that perhaps has spared me a traumatic impact with what is the contemporary reality or at least so it should, in the sense that I do not feel I have to miss a damn thing and these are the times in which I truly want to live and that I always and anyway consider better than the past simply because what is past, is past, and I was not even there then...

But there is a magical and undeniable charm that era and that historical phase have given us and left us as an inheritance. Born in time to see the Berlin Wall fall, I can only look with a certain fascination at what was Europe divided into two distinct blocks and that magical romantic world or otherwise necessarily rendered romantic by the stories of older people, leftist literature, and culture and in some way later crystallized in East Berlin by a wise administration that knows how to make money and business and even culture practically with what are just simple buildings. There were those years when the world was divided into two blocks and even if this constituted constant pressure and the danger of a possible outbreak of a third world war, even if violent events and wars followed one another over the years in the name of this clash between the two world superpowers USA and USSR, during those years everything was at least apparently regulated by what constituted two basic ideologies. Even if one can criticize the experience of the Soviet Union, as well as what happened in the West and in the United States and by the United States over the years, it is undeniable that there was a certain force, a push not only ideological but also economic, political, and cultural to do things and of which the space race certainly constituted the most fascinating part and the one that somehow, even if we do not think about it, has truly radically changed the history of man and in potential as nothing ever was such a change in history as the 'discovery' of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, that it matters little if the Vikings got there first and if in any case it had already been inhabited for millennia and millennia and so man had already reached it in another remote era, because it was at that moment that we all humans began to think of a finally round Earth and somehow greatly expanded our horizons. And so it was for the space race and for what was the first man on the Moon. Neil Armstrong, then Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who never set foot on the Moon, these were the three crew members of Apollo 11, the US space mission that on July 20, 1969, first brought men to the satellite that orbits our planet. A feat that would be repeated several times over the years and until December 1972, when Eugene Cernan (Apollo 17) was the last man to walk on the lunar surface.

But the first to go into space were not the Americans but the Russians. Soviet cosmonaut and aviator Yuri Gagarin was the first man to fly into space on April 12, 1961, completing a whole elliptical orbit around the Earth inside the Vostok 1 spacecraft. This happened over fifty years ago now and within the Soviet space program, named precisely Vostok, and guided by one of the most brilliant minds of the last century and probably of all time, that of engineer and rocket designer Sergey Pavlovic Korolev. What the Russians simply remember as 'the best designer'. He was the true architect, the key man of the Soviet space program, which took inspiration (like the American one did) from what the Germans had done during the war years, and he was the one to oversee every aspect of what were the first space explorations. He personally chose Yuri Gagarin and the little dog Laika. Above all, he chose and wanted Valentina. Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly into space. It happened in 1963. She was born on the banks of the Volga River in a Belarusian family, daughter of a tank driver who died during World War II. She had a difficult childhood and worked in a tire factory before performing the job of seamstress and ironer, but without ever abandoning her studies and attending evening classes and achieving a diploma in 1960. In parallel, she developed her great passion for parachuting and as a great admirer of Yuri Gagarin, she applied for the school of aspiring cosmonauts and in 1962 became part of the Vostok program along with four other candidates.

If the feat accomplished by Yuri Gagarin had a central effect in Soviet propaganda, one can perfectly well say the same of what Valentina Tereshkova succeeded in achieving, who aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft, flew for three days in space between June 16 and 19, 1962, when she landed a few kilometers northeast of Karaganda in Kazakhstan, ejecting from the capsule's cabin using a special ejection seat. The flight was the last of the Vostok Program and was also the culmination of Korolev's success, whom a science fiction novel (coincidentally) by Italian writer Paolo Aresi from 2011, imagines as deeply in love with Valentina, this woman who remains a powerful symbol for space exploration and also for breaking down the frontiers and barriers erected by male chauvinism in what is perhaps the most cutting-edge sector possible. Korolev, 'The Chief Constructor', who according to Valentina herself today in Russia would be equivalent to a kind of sacred figure. Russian cosmonauts always carry a photo of Gagarin and one of Korolev, that brilliant and at the same time strong man who even endured years of gulag and imprisonment during Stalin's time. That man who truly knew what it meant to fly into space and who died in 1966 while working on the N1 rocket that was supposed to constitute a further phase in space exploration by the Soviets.

You can find many stories around the web and in books about this feat and about the figure of Valentina Tereshkova. According to many, she was chosen obviously because she was what one could define a good girl and the portrait of the ideal Soviet woman who, daughter of proletarians and indeed a war orphan, worked hard and advanced in her studies. Secondly, it is believed that among the batch of candidate cosmonauts, she was perhaps the least technically prepared, but at the same time the one with the greatest physical stamina. Georgi Mikhailovich Grechko, one of Korolev's most assiduous collaborators, has spoken of her harshly over the years, remembering ironically that she was not very popular among other cosmonauts and that in space she felt unwell during those epic three days blaming all the food, which she defined as spoiled, only to make it disappear before it could be checked upon her return.

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was and remains, will forever remain the first woman to have flown into space. After the feat accomplished aboard the Vostok spacecraft, which also made her the first 'civilian' to fly into space (she was not yet part of the Soviet air force at that time), she clearly entered politics and was part of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party from 1969 until 1991. She married twice, first with pilot and cosmonaut Andrijan Grigorevich Nikolaev, then with orthopedic doctor Yuliy Shaposhnikov. At the 2014 Winter Olympics, she was one of the flag bearers for her Nation, Russia, and in that great theme always open which is progress in space exploration and the so-called one-way trip to Mars, which is a true obsession for the great and very funny Buzz Aldrin, one of the principal historical promoters of the movement 'Get Your Ass To Mars', she declared herself available and interested if ever she were to be offered the opportunity to take part in this new great journey of humanity. What happened and if there was anything between her and Korolev is and will remain legend, just rumors and at most material for some good science fiction novel like the one already mentioned by Paolo Aresi. Looking at her in one of her photos, when she was young, she appears to be a simple woman: she is a beautiful woman, she may appeal or not appeal at all. And yet one cannot help but notice her penetrating gaze and her eyes looking far into space and time.

Here she is, Valentina, in this photo (Getty Images, Inc.), taken in Moscow on December 31, 1966, shortly after Korolev's death, wishing a happy new year 1967 to the Soviet people. How beautiful you were, Valentina. How beautiful you are, inside your eyes I can see the stars and I get lost in them as I drift in this intergalactic space that is life.