UKRAINE IS UKRAINE
Channel: Daniele Zordan
Date: 2022-04-01

The last citizen of the Soviet Union: the cosmonaut who was in orbit when the USSR collapsed.
Sergej Krikaljov took off on May 19, 1991 and was to remain in space for five months. Instead, between various postponements, he only returned to Earth on March 25, 1992. On his suit and helmet he had written CCCP, but his country no longer existed, and his hometown, Leningrad, had changed its name.
Sergej Krikaljov was the flight engineer of the Soyuz TM-12 mission, which left on May 19, 1991 from the Baikonur cosmodrome. In July he agreed to remain aboard the Mir space station also during the stay of the next crew, until October, due to the cut of one of the scheduled flights. Then, between the 19th and 21st of the following month, the “August Putsch” broke out, the attempted coup of the old guard of the PCUS. And while Krikaljov was in orbit, Mikhail Gorbachev was held against his will in the Crimea, and tanks appeared on the streets of Moscow. The coup was destined to fail and lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but in that climate of instability, Krikaljov's mission was also destined to lengthen.
How did it happen?
“The coup was completely unexpected for us,” Krikaljov would later recount. “We didn't understand what was happening. And when we discussed what had happened between us, we tried to realize how all this would affect the space sector ".
He influenced and strongly. Initially he should have stayed on the Mir for five months, but between cancellations and mergers of flights, they ended up taking the opportunity to study the adaptation of the human organism on him during long-duration space flights. "They told me that it was heavy for me and could be harmful to my health, but that now the country was in great difficulty and we had to do as much as possible". He stayed up there.

In fact, he too could have flown away. The "Mir" was equipped with the "Raduga" ("Rainbow") capsule for a single return to Earth. But using it would have meant the end of the orbiting station and no one would be able to go there (it remained active for another ten years).
“I often wondered if I would have the strength to survive to complete the program. And not infrequently I doubted, ”he admits. His muscles atrophied, and the radiation increased his oncological risks, while his immune defenses were lowered day by day, and this was only part of the dangerous consequences of too long a mission.

In his case it lasted 311 days and 20 hours (complete with 7 spacewalks), that is, he remained ten months in space, willy-nilly establishing (in the West the legend spread, fueled by some mass media, that he could not return to due to the political situation in his country) the world record. During that time, the four planned missions were reduced to two and in neither case did they find a free folding seat to bring him back to Earth.
The Soviet Union, which at that time was looking for every way to find foreign currency to stop the ruble's galloping inflation, in fact sold the seats on the Soyuz up to the orbiting station to other states. For example, Austria sent its first astronaut, Franz Viehböck, into space on October 2, 1991, for $ 7 million. While from Japan they sent an astronaut for 12 million dollars into orbit. The others came and went and he stayed up there, and, according to legend, when he asked for honey, he was told that there was none. And they sent him lemons and horseradish.
The return
He returned to our planet on March 25, 1992. From the capsule of the Soyuz came a tried man, with the four letters "CCCP" on his helmet and overalls and a red flag with the hammer and sickle of a state, the USSR, which, meanwhile, from 26 December 1991, it no longer existed. He had departed from the Soviet Union and now landed in Kazakhstan, a new independent republic.
And the city where he was born and raised, Leningrad, had changed its name, returning to St. Petersburg from 7 September 1991. As it circled the Earth, his country had split into 15 new states, and if when he left his 600 rubles per month were the excellent salary of a cosmonaut, now double, 1,200 were few even for a bus driver.
On 11 April 1992 he was made Hero of the Russian Federation (he who, following his first space flight, was already Hero of the Soviet Union since 27 April 1989: he is one of only four people to have both honors). He later made four more space flights, two with NASA and two with the new Russian space agency. He was also the first to enter the new International Space Station. In total, in his career, he has totaled a stay in Space of 803 days, 9 hours and 38 minutes, a world record only surpassed in 2015 by another Russian, Gennadij Pàdalka (over 878 days).