On the 28^th of December, 2012 Oleg Dmitrievich Kononenko, a cosmonaut-explorer and a Hero of Russia visited State Research and Production Space Centre “TsSKB-Progress”.

Oleg Dmitrievich Kononenko met with the staff of the centre, shared impressions of his work during the 30/31 flights to the International Space Station and answered the questions of the workers.

Oleg Kononenko presented the issue of the newspaper “Volzskaya Kommuna” dated April 13, 1961 to the General Director Alexander Nikolaevich Kirilin. This issue contains an autograph of the first cosmonaut Yury Gagarin and is also signed by six cosmonauts participated in the 30/31 ISS flights. From now on, this newspaper is set out in the museum of “TsSKB-Progress”.

Oleg Dmitrievich Kononenko is one of the cosmonauts of Samara. He worked at “TsSKB-Progress” from 1988 till 1998.

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The issue of the newspaper “Volzskaya Kommuna” dated April 13, 1961 with an autograph of Yury Gagarin was signed the day after his space flight. For years this newspaper was kept in the family of Viktor Yakovlevich Litvinov, the legendary director of “Progress” plant. Lyudmila Viktorovna, Litvinov’s daughter, handed this newspaper over to “TsSKB-Progress” centre in a year of the 50th Anniversary of Gagarin’s Flight (in 2011). The authorities of “TsSKB-Progress” centre, in their turn, handed it to Oleg Kononenko and he took it to the International Space Station. Besides Yury Gagarin’s signature, the newspaper contains now the autographs of all the crew members of the 30th and 31st flights to ISS (Shkaplerov A., Ivanishin A. and Burbank D., Kononenko O., Kuipers A., and Pettit D.) as well as the ISS stamps.