On 18 May 1991, a Soyuz TM-12 rocket lifted off from the steppe at Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying a 32-year-old flight engineer named Sergei Krikalev to the Soviet space station Mir. The rocket burned Soviet fuel, the launch pad sat on Soviet soil in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and the flight controllers spoke to Krikalev in the language of a country that had existed for 69 years. Ten months later, when he came home, none of those things were true.
The country was gone. The pad was in a foreign nation. His salary, denominated in Soviet rubles, had been shredded by inflation. His home city of Leningrad, founded by Peter the Great and renamed for Lenin, had voted itself back into being St Petersburg while he was in orbit.
He had not moved. The ground moved under him.
A five-month mission that became ten
Krikalev launched with commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British chemist Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. Sharman returned after eight days. Artsebarsky came home in October. Krikalev was scheduled to follow a standard rotation and land after roughly five months.
The rotation broke, and not because a rocket failed. Crewed flights kept going. What stopped was the arrival of anyone qualified to take over Krikalev’s console. The seat that should have carried his replacement flight engineer on the October 1991 Soyuz TM-13 mission went instead to Toktar Aubakirov, the first Kazakh in space, a political concession to the republic that now controlled the ground Baikonur stood on and wanted both prestige and money for it. Aubakirov had not trained for a long-duration stay. He spent eight days on the station and left with Artsebarsky. The next planned crewed launch was cancelled outright for lack of funds. Krikalev was asked to stay. He agreed.
He would not touch grass again until 25 March 1992, 311 days after launch and roughly 5,000 orbits of Earth, long enough that Western newspapers had begun calling him “the last Soviet citizen.”
What he watched from the porthole
Mir traced a path that carried it over the western Soviet Union roughly every 90 minutes. Through the porthole Krikalev could see Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Baikonur. In the summer of 1991 the August coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev unfolded on the ground below, tanks in the streets of a capital that was a bright smear of light from orbit.
The coup failed. Gorbachev returned to power, but only nominally. Boris Yeltsin, standing on a tank outside the Russian parliament building, had become the real centre of gravity. Over the following months the Baltic states declared independence, then Ukraine, then Belarus. In December, Yeltsin met the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and signed a document announcing that the Soviet Union “as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality” had ceased to exist.
Krikalev learned about it by radio. He was above a country that no longer had a name.
The city that became St Petersburg
In June 1991, weeks after Krikalev launched, the citizens of Leningrad voted in a referendum to restore the city’s original name. The change took formal effect that September. Krikalev had launched from one city and would land as a citizen of another, though the Leningrad name lingered in Russian public memory, attached to ships, to the annual commemoration of the wartime siege, to a generation who refused to let it go.
His parents, unchanged, now lived in a city with a different name on the map. His schools had new letterheads. The metro stations kept their Soviet-era mosaics but the announcements would soon shift.
The city’s new administration was also, quietly, assembling the careers that would define the next three decades of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin had been appointed in June 1991 to chair the foreign relations committee of the St Petersburg mayor’s office, and he resigned from the state security service on 20 August 1991, the day after the coup declared a state of emergency. He was 38, a city-hall official rather than a serving intelligence officer, and eight years from the Kremlin. None of this reached Krikalev in any organised way. He heard fragments over the radio and pieced together what he could.
Baikonur belonged to a foreign country now
The Kazakh SSR declared independence in December 1991. The launch complex Krikalev had lifted off from, built by the engineers of Sergei Korolev, the anonymous “Chief Designer” whose name only became public after his death, was now sovereign Kazakh territory. Russia would eventually lease it back, an arrangement that still runs today, but in the winter of 1991-92 nobody was sure who paid for what, who owned what, or who had the authority to sign off on a returning cosmonaut.
The Russian space agency Krikalev would one day help run did not exist when he launched. Its Soviet predecessor was in the middle of being dismantled and reassembled under new flags. Payroll ran late. Fuel was expensive. In the end the money came from abroad: Germany paid $24 million to put its own researcher, Klaus-Dietrich Flade, on the flight that finally brought Krikalev home.
Ten months of muscle loss and radio friends
Inside Mir, the day-to-day was routine and grinding. Krikalev exercised two hours a day on a treadmill and a bungee-cord resistance rig to slow the bone and muscle loss that microgravity inflicts on the human skeleton. He ran experiments. He repaired equipment. Mir was beginning to show its age, and leaks, failed gyroscopes and computer glitches were part of the schedule.
His main lifeline to the world below was Mir’s amateur radio setup. Krikalev used the station’s ham rig to talk with operators on the ground around the world, building an informal network of contacts who relayed news and sometimes just chatted. With the official Soviet media apparatus collapsing beneath him, a stranger with a shortwave set was sometimes the first person to tell him something had happened in Moscow.
The salary that evaporated
Krikalev launched earning a Soviet cosmonaut’s salary, paid in rubles. When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of December 1991, the ruble began a collapse that would strip away the vast majority of its value against the dollar over the following years. Price liberalisation ordered by Yeltsin’s reformist government in January 1992 sent the cost of bread, milk and vodka up by multiples in weeks.
By the time Krikalev landed, his accumulated back pay was worth a small fraction of what it had been at launch.
Landing in Kazakhstan, March 1992
The Soyuz descent capsule came down on the snow of the Kazakh steppe near Arkalyk on 25 March 1992, carrying Krikalev, commander Alexander Volkov and Flade. Recovery teams pulled Krikalev out and sat him in a chair, wrapped in fur, because he could not stand. His face was pale and puffy from fluid redistribution, a standard side-effect of return from microgravity. Someone brought him broth. He was smiling.
Photographs from the landing show the letters USSR and the red Soviet flag still on the flight suit he had launched in. He had been issued no replacement. It was the last time that insignia came back from orbit on a living crew, worn by two men whose country had stopped existing three months earlier while they were still in transit.
Readapting to gravity took weeks of physiotherapy. His bones needed months to remineralise. His inner ear had to relearn which way was down. Within days of landing he was telling reporters that the change in his country did not feel radical to him: he had lived on Russian territory before, and he had come back to Russian territory.
A career that outlasted an empire
The strangest twist is that Krikalev kept flying. He was not broken by the mission. He became the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a US Space Shuttle, aboard Discovery in 1994. He was part of the first crew to enter the International Space Station under construction, switching on the lights inside the Unity module. He then flew on Expedition 1, the mission that began the station’s continuous human occupation, now stretching past 25 years.
By the time he retired from active flight in 2007, he had spent 803 days in space across six missions, and he was the holder of the world record for cumulative time spent in space, a record he kept for a decade before another Russian cosmonaut passed it in 2015. The Soviet cosmonaut who had been left in orbit by a dissolving country became, in the second half of his career, the most experienced spacefarer of the international era.
From 2009 to 2014 he ran the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre at Star City outside Moscow, and he later served as executive director for human spaceflight at Roscosmos, the agency that did not exist when he launched in 1991.
The photograph that stays
The image that lingers is not the landing or the medals. It is the view from Mir in late December 1991. The Earth rolls past below. Somewhere in the frame is the border between what was still called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 25 December and what became the Russian Federation on 26 December, a border invisible from orbit, drawn only in language and law.
Krikalev was looking down at a country in the act of ceasing to be. He had a good seat. He also had no way home until someone on the ground found the money to send a rocket.
Thirty-four years later, the launch pad he lifted off from is leased from a foreign country. His home city carries the name Peter the Great gave it. The flag on the ISS Russian segment is white, blue and red, not red with a hammer and sickle. And somewhere in an archive in Moscow there is a payroll record for a Soviet cosmonaut whose final month’s wages, in the currency of a state that no longer existed, would not have bought him a loaf of bread on the day he landed.