Word: valentina
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...sort of technical junior college) at Saratov on the Volga. While there, he learned to fly at the Saratov Aero Club and was admitted to the Soviet air force's cadet academy at Orenburg. He graduated with top honors in 1957 and married a pretty medical graduate, Valentina Ivanovna. They have two children, both girls: Elena, 2, and Galya, one month. It was all so pat and proper and bourgeois that White Russian refugees from South America to Tyrone, Pa., recalling that Gagarin was the name of a princely family, felt free to claim Yuri as one of their...
Reporters, trying to put some flesh on the bare bones of official handouts, interviewed Valentina Gagarina in her two-room-and-kitchen apartment near Moscow. The place was bulging with excited neighbors, and as the newsmen arrived, word came over the radio that Valentina's husband felt fine. She turned off the radio and wiped away her tears, while her older daughter nibbled stolidly on an apple. Valentina explained that the whole affair was news to her; she had not even known her husband was a major until she heard it on the radio. She had known, she said...
There were no such secrets now. Whenever she turned on her radio, Valentina Gagarina could hear her husband's voice, or glowing reports about his achievement. The newspapers, which were on the streets with special editions, were full of him, too. Over and over they printed his story: the first eyewitness report from outer space...
Gagarin arrived in a turboprop airliner escorted by a swarm of jet fighters. Along with his parents and Wife Valentina, the entire upper crust of the Soviet hierarchy was on hand to greet him. The nuzzling, the bear hug and the long kiss he got from Premier Khrushchev seemed even more active than Valentina's warm embrace. Other dignitaries greeted the cosmonaut in their turn. Then, in a column of flower-decked cars, the official party drove slowly toward Red Square and a 20-gun salute from Red artillerymen...
...What has been most striking for us," said Valentina Titova, leader of the group of eight Russians visiting the University, "has been to see how much alike Russians and Americans really are." An American, expecting the Ninotchka stereotype of the Soviet Woman and meeting Mrs. Titova, might be similarly impressed. Hampered by a language difficulty which somehow proved disarming, she spoke openly and often warmly of her impressions of America...