DOSSIER: ANASTASIA DEZHUROVA

IT WAS THE AMERICANS WHO CALLED HER STACY. HER FATHER’S pet name for her was Nastasia.

Her father was a rocket engineer, a hard-working, sober, humorless man whose job took him away from their Moscow apartment for long months at a time. He travelled mostly to the mammoth launch facility in the dreary dust-brown desert of Kazakhstan and returned home tired and sour, but always with a doll or some other present for his baby daughter. Nastasia was his one joy in life.

Anastasia’s mother was a concert cellist who played in the Moscow symphony, a bright and intelligent woman who learned very early in her marriage that life was more enjoyable when her husband was a thousand kilometers away. She could give parties in their apartment then; people would laugh and play music. Often one of the men would remain the night.

As Nastasia grew into awareness and understanding, her mother swore her to secrecy. “We don’t want to hurt your father’s feelings,” she would tell her ten-year-old daughter. Later, when Nastasia was a teenager, her mother would say, “And do you think he remains faithful during all those months he’s away? Men are not like that.”

Nastasia discovered what men are like while she was in secondary school. One of the male students invited her to a party. On the way home, he stopped the car (his father’s) and began to maul her. When Nastasia resisted, he tore her clothing and raped her.

Her mother cried with her and then called the police. The investigators made Nastasia feel as if she had committed the crime, not the boy. Her attacker was not punished and she was stigmatized. Even her father turned against her, saying that she must have given the boy the impression she was available.

When she was selected for the technical university in Novosibersk she left Moscow willingly, gladly, and buried herself in her studies. She avoided all socializing with men, and found that love and warmth and safety could be had with other women.

She also found that she was very bright and very capable. She began to delight in beating men in areas where they thought they were supreme. She learned to fly and went on to become a cosmonaut, not merely a cosmonaut but the first woman cosmonaut to command an orbital team of twelve men; the first woman cosmonaut to set a new endurance record for time spent aboard a space station; the first woman cosmonaut to go to Mars.