Event was (and still is) celebrated in USSR (Russia) since 1962 as "Day of Cosmonautics", from 2001 to 2022 as "Yuri's Night" in US (https://futurism.com/space-conference-censors-yuri-gagarin) and since 2017 as "International Day of Human Space Flight" by the UN.
Pictured: Yuri Gagarin with daughters Galya & Lena, and Ira Komarova. 1965, New Year's Eve.
Well, Chekhov fits well between Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin.
To be fair - Johnny Silverhand we meet is a heavily modified verison. Both memories, personality and (possibly) appearance are altered by someone, who may or may not be Yorinobu Arasaka.
Then there is base tabletop, creator of which (M. Pondsmith) is said to favour Nomads.
There are already good advices here - but I would like to suggest something that seems obvious, but might still be overlooked: consider several most likely questions your professor will ask, and prepare answers for them.
Thank you for sharing this; have not actually finished reading just yet. Some "political" connecctions author makes do seem... Very particular. Search for "Marx", "Lenin", "Communism" in the document if you would like.
Actually after having done that myself, perhaps it does, in part, belong to TL;DR. Thankfully the author did account for that.
Gentlemen.
Somehow missed this thread. Huzzah to Yuri!