The head of Roscosmos, the Russian state-owned company responsible for space programs, Dmitry Rogozin, took a jab at the US State Department for not mentioning Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in their Facebook post in Russian when commemorating the first human journey to space.
Rogozin slammed the post, saying that "efforts to erase the Russian mark from world history" would not be successful and will only backfire against the "overseas felons" who made that attempt.
Космос без Гагарина, Первая мировая война без Русской армии, Берлин 45-го без советских флагов, таблица Менделеева без Менделеева... Попытки затереть русский след в мировой истории лишит памяти не нас, а тех заокеанских пакостников, кто это делает https://t.co/hnTVubshzu
— Дмитрий Рогозин (@Rogozin) April 12, 2020
A tweet reads: "Space without Gagarin, the First World War without the Russian army, Berlin of 1945 without the Soviet flags, Mendeleev's table without Mendeleev... Any efforts to erase the Russian mark from world history will not deprive us of memory, but of those overseas felons trying to do that".
His comment comes after Russian Foreign Ministry reacted to the State Department's publication of their own post in Twitter, reminding American colleagues of the name and importance of Yuri Gagarin.
Напоминаем коллегам из Госдепартамента США (@USApoRusski), что первым человеком в космосе стал советский космонавт, его зовут Юрий Алексеевич Гагарин. Не упомянуть об этом - это дезинформация и подлый приём эпохи пост-правды #ДеньКосмонавтики pic.twitter.com/0iUeGgqU4b
— МИД России 🇷🇺 (@MID_RF) April 12, 2020
A tweet reads: "We remind our colleagues from the US State Department that the first person in space was a Soviet cosmonaut, his name is Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin. Not to mention this is disinformation and a base trick of the post-truth epoch".
The State Department's post on their Russian-language Facebook page dedicated to Cosmonautics Day simply reads "59 years ago the first flight of a man to space was carried out".
This is not the first time that the Russian Foreign Ministry has called on the US to stop "rewriting history". In January, the US Embassy in Moscow and the State Department attempted to take credit for the liberation of Auschwitz, tweeting that Auschwitz was liberated by the Americans.
"We asked you not to erase the memory of Auschwitz liberators - Red Army soldiers. Now you 'substitute' Soviet soldiers with Americans? Shameful!", the Russian envoy tweeted in January.
