February 15, 2023 • 38 mins
Traveling at five miles a second, 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev wakes to a message from his handlers on the ground: the Soviet Union is collapsing. And so is the Soviet Space agency. You have a choice: come down as planned and abandon the world’s only space station to an unknown fate. Or stay, protect the final outpost of a falling empire and risk your life?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:19):
Two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, Traveling at
five miles a second, a man completes a perfect circle
around the globe. His name is Serge Krakov. He's a
Soviet cosmonaut, and he's manning the world's only space station,
the Pride and Joy of the U. S. S R.
(00:44):
The year Sarage has been up there for three months
by now on the space station. Every day starts the
same way, with a call at seven a m. Moscow
time from michig Control. He reports his stats, blood pressure,
heart rate, and mood. Sometimes in the evening, when he
(01:08):
feels lonely, he will tune his hand radio equipment to
the right frequency and make contact with his friend in Australia, Maggie.
They chat about what he's done that day, and she
sends some clippings from the newspapers. That's a pleasure, pleasure.
(01:29):
As the days bleed into one another, he's starting to
feel a bit space sick. He's been counting down the
weeks till he's due to come back to Earth, back
to his home, his wife and their one year old daughter.
(01:54):
But then one day, his friend, this woman in Australia, Maggie,
tells him something troubling. She says, Sarage, something bad is
happening in your country. After months strikes, protests, and deepening
economic chaos. People are sleeping in train stations. There is
no food in the shops. I gave them my money
(02:16):
that they should old woman, we won't give you your bread.
Law and order seem to be breaking down, the banding
of the k President Gorbachev's grip on the country is slipping.
The republics that make up the Soviet Union are starting
to break away. There were wild scenes, gun fire, and
three deaths. Soviet forces tried to capture the main center
(02:39):
of opposition. Surage doesn't know what to think. He asked
mischion control, what's going on? But they don't tell him anything,
just parrot the party line. Nothing to be alarmed about.
Everything is fine, And so Sarage is floating around the
space station, struggling to believe that down there on Earth,
(03:00):
everything he knows, everything he believes in, is falling apart.
Wood rippled through the crowds that the army was about
to launch a major assault. Seventy four years of communism,
seventy four years of trying to create a different way
of life, a different society, a different vision of the
(03:21):
world is on the verge of collapse. It's quite time.
Uh Sarah still has to do his job. The station
(03:46):
has to have an engineer on board or it might
shut down, but he's doing it on autopilot, his minds
firmly on his loved ones, wondering if they're okay, if
they're safe. And then one day he wakes up to
a message from his handlers on the ground. They tell him,
(04:08):
we can't keep this from you anymore. It's true. Everything
is collapsing around us, including the Soviet Space Agency. We've
run out of money. We can't send anyone to replace you,
So we're giving you a choice. You can come back
down to Earth is planned and abandon the station to
(04:30):
an unknown fate, or you stay as long as it
takes and protect the station the final outpost of a
falling empire. Sarage knows. The longer you spend in space,
the more your muscles start to disintegrate, your bones weaken, headaches, nausea, vomity,
(04:53):
And then there's what might happen to your mind, something
called space horror. We're being up in space so far
away from home, will literally drive you insane. So what
is Sarage going to do? Go back to Earth, be
with his family, his newborn daughter in these truly desperate times,
(05:18):
or stay in space, save the space station, serve his country.
The very last Soviet. This is the story of one
man who lived through the final days of Empire. But
(05:40):
evening the East Germans of the Knights tarted to tear
down parts of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of one
dream all Russia's just wild about urga In the first
man took conquer space and the birth of another future
for the Russian people. Storians may have trouble describing a
Davin Chile got resigned as the president of a Soviet
union from a unique and perhaps ultimate advantage point space
(06:05):
and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible bond, thin,
beautiful bond an electric blue. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope,
I heard podcast and exile content. This is the last Soviet.
(06:31):
Now you may be wondering why am I Lance Bass
from in synct of all people telling this story about
a Soviet cosmonaut. Well, yeah, probably won't believe this, but
I am a trained Russian cosmonaut. Yeah, you heard that right.
In two thousand two, I was at the end of
(06:53):
an international in SYNCT tour that felt like it had
been going on forever. I was about to have my
first real break in years, six months off to do
what I wanted, like sleep and see my family. And
then I was sitting at home in Orlando, having a
little breakfast, probably a green smoothie and pancakes, and I
(07:13):
get this call on my phone. It's my manager, Lance.
What would you say if I told you I've got
you a ticket on a Russian space rocket. I almost
dropped my phone, to be honest, I thought it was
a prank, but pretty quickly it became clear this was real.
Thank you, John six fifty seven. Now, finally, this morning,
(07:34):
one in Sync band member is one step closer to
saying bye bye bye to planet Earth. I would be
going to Moscow to train for six months to go
on a mission to the International Space Station. The final
deal hasn't been signed yet, but the Russians have named
Lance Bass as a member of the third At just
twenty three years old, I was going to become the
youngest person in history to go to space the Space
(07:58):
Station in October, and he's too young for you. Now,
If that sounds crazy to you, crazy that I would
want to use my precious six months off to take
part in one of the most intense and grueling experiences
of my life, then I think there's something you need
to understand. I am absolutely madly obsessed with the space.
(08:24):
I have been ever since I was a little kid.
When my family drove from Mississippi to Cape Kernaville in
Florida to watch a rocket launch fourteen hours in a car,
hot and humid, like someone was breathing on you. We
arrived in my dad's blue station wagon, pulled up to
(08:46):
the launch side, and that's when I saw it in
front of me, a gigantic rocket and this big clock
in the distance, and it starts counting down from two minutes,
and then as it gets closer to zero, there is
(09:06):
this rumbling that comes from beneath the ground, and then
this burst of fire and an unbelievable noise. As the
rumbling turns into a roar, and the rocket starts rising
up and up. As it keeps climbing, the crowd is
(09:28):
getting more and more excited, until finally it disappears into
the atmosphere, up and away into the great Via. It
was that day in Cape Carnavel when the dream of
(09:49):
going to space took hold of me. It was just
the coolest thing I've ever seen, and since then it's
all I've ever wanted to do. Even when I was
living this incredible life touring within sync, I still had
this desire, this dream to go to space. And that's
why when my manager called me that day, I jumped
at the chance, and just a few months later I
(10:11):
arrived at Sadoc Star City, the home of Russia's top
secret cosmonaut training program. When I got there in two
thousand two, I remember thinking this place, these people are
obsessed with space, even more than we are in America.
There are these statutes of cosmonauts everywhere, even the metro
stations are named after them. But back then I didn't
(10:35):
really get a chance to figure out why this was.
I hardly even had time to think. I was so
busy training day and night. So when I first heard
the story of Saragei Krakolov, I was intrigued. We had
both trained in the same place, but we had come
from such different worlds. Me an American pop star, him
(10:55):
a Soviet cosmonaut, and I wanted to know what was
going through his head when he had to make this
choice to go back home and protect his family or
stay in space and protect the station, the crown jewel
of the Soviet space program. Was it just that he
(11:17):
loves space so much like me? Or was there something
bigger driving in Because space isn't just about nerdy kids
thinking it's cool and wanting to go space, it turns
out is always about politics. We go into space because
whatever mankind must undertake, three man must. Billionaire Elon Musk
(11:40):
has sent three batches of SpaceX Starlink satellites over Ukraine.
Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and
we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on
the surface of Mars. Space is a battleground, a symbol
of power. And that's because of this thing that happened
(12:00):
before I was even born, when Sarage was three years old.
And to me, it's the thing that can maybe best
help us understand Sarage and how he could even consider
staying in the space station as his country collapsed below him.
(12:21):
It was the height of the Cold War, and my country, America,
and his country, the Soviet Union, were racing to answer
this one particular question, who would be the first to
put a man into space. The confrontation itself would determine
ultimately which ideology, which worldview, would take over the world.
(12:43):
Stephen Walker is a journalist who wrote a book about
the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The battle began in nineteen At the time, Sarage Kraklov
was a toddler, and the Americans announced to the world,
We're going to put the first man in space, as
if it was a done deal. The Russians weren't even
on their mind. Here's a nation that, as far as
(13:04):
they were concerned, the USSR couldn't build refrigerators that work properly.
It's true Soviet test flights often went wrong. One of
their spacecraft blew up just seconds after taking off, killing
a hundred people, But these disasters didn't matter because the
Soviets were determined. They decided they were going to surprise
(13:25):
the Americans and do it in complete secrecy. They start
looking at the records of USSR Air Force pilots, most
of them in the early to mid twenties. All of
them are sound of limb and mind, incredibly healthy, incredibly
fit and ideologically committed to the Soviet cause. And these
(13:50):
are the guys that formed the nucleus of the top
secret Soviet space program. And one of them is this guy,
Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin, a man who would end up
being the most famous person in Russia and Sarage Gargolov's
(14:11):
hero at the time. He was one of twenty men
chosen by the Soviet authorities to compete to be the
first man in space. Twenty men chosen to be put
through intense physical and psychological training. And when I say intense,
I mean intense, So I mean they do these horrible
(14:32):
heat chamber tests, for example, where they kind of baked
them for hours on end. They put them into pressure
changlers where they depressurized to see when they pass out.
They put an into these unbelievable vibration tests where they
actually anny on these stretches, and then they started to
vibrate the stretcher to the point where you teeth nearly fuller.
(14:55):
But nothing can compare to the isolation chamber. One by one,
over a period of months and months, each of these
twenty men would be introduced into a sealed chamber in
which they were expected to function without being able to
see anybody or hear anybody for what could be days
(15:19):
and days and even weeks totally isolated cuts off. They
would occasionally put horrible sounds in that shrieks or very
loud music, or wake you up in the middle of
the night, you know, anything, so you couldn't sleep properly.
(15:40):
They would twist time upside down so you didn't know
whether it was day or night. The test on these
men were so intense because the Soviet space team had
this problem. They didn't really know what's going to happen
to human being up there. Up to that point, the
idea of human beings in space was only something that
(16:02):
existed in the realms of science fiction. Nothing in the
station has any weight. No, wait, what a wonderful idea
you mean? If I went there, I wouldn't wear anything,
nothing at all. They had this term called space horror.
If you're divorced from the world, traveling around the world
(16:23):
above it not part of it the first to do so,
is there a possibility that you go insane? Because of
these unknowns, the Soviets knew they needed to find the
perfect guy, the guy who could withstand anything, and in
the end it came down to two men. Both were
(16:43):
pretty much as good and tough as each other, but
it was Gagarin that one. For one reason, he has
a perfect communist biography. He's the son of a peasant
from the country who was an iron foundry student who
then became a serving military pilot. He was the best
(17:04):
person to represent the Soviet Union against the United States
because the Soviets knew they needed to beat the Americans
to score the ultimate victory in the Cold War, and
so on April twelfth nine, they pressed the gold button
on Gagarin's flight is em bust out and what looks
(17:26):
like a school bus to the rocket launch site, and
then everybody says goodbye, and the goodbyes go on forever,
because as far as I concerned, this guy is going
to die. That's right. Odds are. Uri Gagarin is not
going to survive the first few minutes of the flight.
(17:46):
So many gruesome deaths awaitsed Euri Gagarine. It's almost like
(18:17):
being on another planet. It just goes on forever and
ever and ever, and then you reach this sort of
walled city. It's in the middle of a desert, a
(18:37):
city with guards standing around the perimeter. You know, you
get these huge buildings with holes in them, and everything's
rusting and it's corroded, and then you see it littered
around the streets, bits of old rocket all over the place.
It really looks like a disused enormous missile site, because
(19:01):
really that's what it is. It's in Kazakhstan and it's
called Biknor. It's the place that would have become the
launchpad for the Soviet space program, but originally it was
built a house their most advanced and deadly missiles. I mean,
it's quite extraordinary. They've built the biggest rocket site in
the world. I mean, the Americans didn't know about it,
(19:22):
had no idea that the site even existed. We're talking
about a site that is probably about the same size
as the state of Kentucky. The secret it's a place
where the conditions are extreme. It's incredibly hot in the
summer and in the winter it goes down to the
minus forties. I mean, it's really horrible. But every year
(19:48):
in April, something extraordinary happens there. Out of this dead
ground springs something new. Every spring. The whole of the
step is covered with a compit of tulips, these incredible
(20:10):
pink and purple and yellow tulips springing up from the dirt.
And so it was in April, as the tulips started
to peek their heads out from under the earth, and
the desert was filled with a riot of color. Jory
(20:31):
Gagarin stood at the base of an enormous rocket, ready
to change the course of world history. And so he
walks up to the steel steps and enters the elevator. Up.
He goes so high up it feels like it takes
minutes rather than seconds. But eventually he gets there, walks
(20:54):
out of the elevator, and straps himself into his seat.
The hatch is closed, and then he's on his own garret.
Actually remains really cool through this process. In fact, he
starts asking for some music from what we would now
call mission control, and they start supplying him with songs
and music, and there's music that's piped through into his
(21:16):
headends and he starts singing. He starts singing Lilies of
the Valley, a popular song about the first flowers coming
out of the ground, a song about spring, about new horizons.
And he's quite cool action in there, given what was
(21:37):
about to happen, and then he's ready for launch. He
could die in the next few seconds. Now, he could
die in the next hour. God only knows the different
ways he could die. Eight making stranded in space. Seven
could blow up on launch pad six if he burnt
to a crisp coming back to Earth. Five, four, three,
So many systems not properly tested, Some wish he doesn't
(22:00):
even know about. Two Does he know everything about what
could go wrong in that rocket? One? And then he's
lashed the Garin. Here is a whistling noise, then a
deafening warl. The rocket and everything in it begins to tremble.
Garon's stomach flips and his head feels full of pressure,
(22:24):
like he's being slowly sucked up into the air. He
tries to move his arms and legs, but nothing, like
his body's not his anymore. He takes a long, deep breath,
and then from nowhere he shouts, which means let's go,
(22:46):
and off he went. Upputs and uppoints and uplots, And
as the rocket heads upwards, the booster rockets fall away.
The Garin keep gathering speed fifteen thousand miles an hour
sixteen thousand, seventeen thousand until he reaches eighteen thousand miles
(23:12):
an hour, the speed of rocket needs to get past
the pool of Earth's gravity and out of the atmosphere
and down below, the engineers are beside themselves, downing our
springs like nobody's business down in the bunker. Everybody I've
spoken to engineers that that talk about being drenched in sweat.
(23:33):
There was incredible feeling of fear as well as exhilaration.
This this, this excitement, fear, sense of danger, potentially disaster,
all happening. But Gagarin keeps going nine minutes, ten minutes,
faster and faster, higher and higher until he reaches for
(23:58):
a bit. Yeah, something completely incredible happens. He suddenly feels
himself lifting from his seat and he's just held in
by the straps. He's experiencing the effects of weightlessness in orbit.
(24:25):
And then he looks to his right and he says,
I can see the Earth. I can see the Earth,
and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible band, thin
(24:46):
beautiful band, a sort of translucent and electric. I think
he describes it blue. It's the Earth's atmosphere. And he
is the first man ever to see it the first
man to break the shackles of Earth, and it was
(25:06):
a Soviet who had done it. As you can imagine,
it's not a secret the Soviets want to keep anymore.
They had a very famous announcer called Levitan who would
(25:26):
announced all the very big moments, like the beginning of
World War two, the death of Stalin, all of that
he had announced. He was brought in to announce this.
His voice came on the radio and all over Russia
(25:47):
people were listening to Garin's father, who had no idea
his son was in space, his wife, who also was
never told about his flight, and little boys like Sarage
Cracow crowded around the radio in their homes, their parents
proudly telling them that the Soviet Union has put a
man in space. And pretty soon the news starts to rock.
(26:13):
It around the world and it reaches the United States,
where President Kennedy is sleeping. He was working up by
his butler in the White House to a battery of news.
All Russia's just wild about Uri Gagarin, the first man
took conquer space, modest, just a family man. It was
(26:33):
on every television stage, it was called everywhere. It was
the news, and later that afternoon he had to go
before members of the press in a massive press conference
where he was unable even to utter the name Uri Gagarin. Well,
(26:53):
it is a most impressive scientific accomplishment. And also I
think that we uh, all of us as members of
the race, have the greatest admiration for the Russian who
participated in this extraordinary feat. I have already sent to
congratulations to Mr Crucial. In one hour and twenty nine minutes,
(27:41):
Uriga Garran completes one full orbit of the planet. But
now the engineers in the control room are biting their
nails again because Uriga Garran has to make it home alive,
and to do that he has to break back through
the Earth's atmosphere. He starts his descent. Almost immediately, the
(28:03):
porthole window fills with hot orange gas, and Gagarin suddenly
feels like he's being pushed back into a seat. He
tries to breathe, working hard to get the air into
his lungs, his heart rates sores. To calm himself, he sings,
(28:23):
the Motherland, here's the Motherland knows. He sits back and
grips the seat. A rushing noise feels his ears, and
then he's through. At twenty three feet Gagaran is ejected
(28:44):
from the capsule. He feels the cold air on his
face and a rough tug on his shoulders as the
parachute is deployed, and he drifts slowly down to a field.
And there he nots a hundred and six minutes after
he starts, having traveled all the way around the planet,
(29:04):
in a plowed field, and there's absolutely nobody there to
greet him except a very old woman and a little
five year old girl who are planting potatoes, and who
both see him and start running away. But he shouts
to the old lady, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet. Comrades,
and very very cautiously, the grandmother planting potatoes and her
(29:27):
five year old daughter come back. So here's a guy
has gone around the world in a hundred six minutes.
He's been traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour, you know,
ten times, has been of a rifle bullet. He's seen
things that no one has ever seen before. Now he's
in a plowed field, and he has only a horse
and cart in which to get to a telephone. Just
(29:54):
days later, he's back in Moscow, being paraded through the
streets in a convertible covered with hours. The scenes are unbelievable.
People line the sidewalk, and I'm not just talking thousands
or hundreds of thousands. There are millions of people out there.
I've seen footage and it looks like there is not
a single empty space along the whole parade route. People
(30:16):
are clambering on top of lamp post and leaning out
of balconies and screaming and waving the Soviet flags. White
doves are set free, Confetti is thrown from helicopters, Women
break the barriers, the hand in flowers. It's thought to
have been the biggest party in Soviet history. When Gagarin's
motorcade reaches the Kremlin, he's kissed on the cheek by
(30:36):
the Premier Nikita Kushtev and awarded the title Hero of
the Soviet Union. This was their moment. This was and
it still is probably to this day. This is Russia's
great moment in history, and they made the most of it.
This was a real feeling of my God, We've beaten
(30:59):
the most powerful and the most technologropy advance nation on us.
We can do anything. The Soviet Union won the race
to put the first man in space. It was a
huge deal for everyday Russians, and it turned the cosmonaut
at the center, Uriga Garon, into an icon. So I
(31:22):
think it's important for us to understand the level which
Yuriga Garden was a star, a superstar, at the level
I don't think we can even imagine. This is Assif Sadiki.
He's a professor of space history at Fordham University. There
were posters of Yuriga Garden. There were magazines, there were postcards,
there were trinkets, there were toys, there were models, there
(31:44):
were a record albums. Agaren was like the Soviet version
of Lance Bass and justin timber Lake. Okay, maybe more
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They even made Gagaran albums,
although they sounded a little different to Love Me Do.
(32:06):
The Soviet Union essentially created a cult of personality around
this guy. And I can tell you this is true.
And Star City and Moscow, I remember seeing statues of
Gagern everywhere. He became the ideal figure in Soviet society, quiet,
unassuming and totally dedicated to the cause of being a
(32:26):
Soviet cosmonaut. They were a political and they were young
and dynamic and handsome and good looking, and I think
they operated on that level a kind of quasi Hollywood culture.
For young Soviet people. Space was freedom, Space was success.
Space became embedded in the day to day lives of
(32:47):
Soviet citizens. It was everywhere in the kitchens and bedrooms
of Soviet men, women and children. Children grew up not
wanting to be pop stars or soccer players, but to
be cosmonauts. Every Soviet or later Russian cosmic I've spoken
to have all said the same thing. This was the
(33:08):
enduring legend that was for them an inspiration. It was
the thing that helped launch them on this unbelievable career
of cosmonauts. Sarage was three years old when Gagarin went
(33:30):
to space. His early years were filled with that astonishing success,
a symbol of what his country, the Soviet Union, was
capable of, and he would follow in Gagern's exact footsteps,
becoming one of an elite class of Soviets to go
to space. And so perhaps it's Ury Gageron who Sage
Cracklf is thinking of as he floats in space, his
(33:52):
country crumbling beneath him, his friends, his family, his fellow
Soviets living through chaos, and now he has to decide
what to do. Stay in space and man the station,
protect what has left of the Soviet Union, or go
down to a country in crisis. Now, to be upfront
(34:16):
about this, we know a lot about Sir Game. We
had it all set up. We were going to Moscow
to talk to him. It was scheduled for February, and
then Putin's war gotten away. Vladimir Putin has just addressed
the Russian people a moment ago, announcing what Putin called
the start of a military special operation. And so the
(34:36):
Russian Space Agency, in part a military organization, shut down.
The interview frustrating but fitting for a story about the
way space and politics are so intertwined. Space has become
a political battleground again. Russia's war is putting years of
collaboration at risk, and the astronauts in the situation they
(34:57):
did not ask for. America and Russia, once more on
opposite sides. The Russia space program has cut ties with
the West on almost every front. It's now unthinkable for
a high profile cosmonaut like Surrogate to go on an
American podcast. But we have spoken to Saragate's friends and
his colleagues, to people who have worked with him, and
(35:18):
people who have been to space with him, to try
to understand how he made the decision he did to
stay or to go. And so he spends hours thinking
of what to do about his family, about his baby daughter,
about his country falling apart, but also about the space
(35:39):
station he is manning. It's the first and only space
station orbiting the world. Without him, it will die. He
looks out the window at the world two fifty miles
below him, and then he's ready. He calls down to
mission control and tells them I'll stay. And now, over
(36:02):
the next seven episodes, we're going to tell the story
of Sergei Krikov, of those three and thirteen days he
spent circling the earth as his country collapsed. Three hundred
and thirteen days that changed our world. Thanks crushed cars
like flimsy toys. Soldiers used nightsticks, slope bombs. It was
(36:24):
an earthquake. It was a daily earthquake in Moscow. The
hammer and Sickle is lord for the last time, and
an era comes to an end. Your pay changed, the rank,
the status, everything changed. It was rather like he was
a time traveler. That's coming up on the Last Soviet.
(36:47):
Oh and by the way, we're gonna be telling my
story as well. This is the pioneering stage everyone should
and we'll have the opportunity to travel into space. The
(37:14):
Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with I
Heart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio
and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate
Osbourne and Mangesh had Akador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas
Linos from My Heart Executive produced by Katrina Norville and
(37:37):
Nikki Torre from Sama's Dad Audio are executive producers or
Joe Pikes and Dasha Listina. Produced by Assia Fuchs, Dasha
Litzitza and Joe Pikes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by
Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed
by Martin or Strich, Sound designed by Richard Award and
(38:00):
special things to Nando Villa, Melissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Burne,
Bob Pittman and Isaac Lee and thanks to Stephen Walker.
His book is called Beyond the astonishing story of the
first human to leave our planet and journey into space
if you want to hear more shows like this. Nothing
is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings,
(38:23):
and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen.
Two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, Traveling at
five miles a second, a man completes a perfect circle
around the globe. His name is Serge Krakov. He's a
Soviet cosmonaut, and he's manning the world's only space station,
the Pride and Joy of the U. S. S R.
(00:44):
The year Sarage has been up there for three months
by now on the space station. Every day starts the
same way, with a call at seven a m. Moscow
time from michig Control. He reports his stats, blood pressure,
heart rate, and mood. Sometimes in the evening, when he
(01:08):
feels lonely, he will tune his hand radio equipment to
the right frequency and make contact with his friend in Australia, Maggie.
They chat about what he's done that day, and she
sends some clippings from the newspapers. That's a pleasure, pleasure.
(01:29):
As the days bleed into one another, he's starting to
feel a bit space sick. He's been counting down the
weeks till he's due to come back to Earth, back
to his home, his wife and their one year old daughter.
(01:54):
But then one day, his friend, this woman in Australia, Maggie,
tells him something troubling. She says, Sarage, something bad is
happening in your country. After months strikes, protests, and deepening
economic chaos. People are sleeping in train stations. There is
no food in the shops. I gave them my money
(02:16):
that they should old woman, we won't give you your bread.
Law and order seem to be breaking down, the banding
of the k President Gorbachev's grip on the country is slipping.
The republics that make up the Soviet Union are starting
to break away. There were wild scenes, gun fire, and
three deaths. Soviet forces tried to capture the main center
(02:39):
of opposition. Surage doesn't know what to think. He asked
mischion control, what's going on? But they don't tell him anything,
just parrot the party line. Nothing to be alarmed about.
Everything is fine, And so Sarage is floating around the
space station, struggling to believe that down there on Earth,
(03:00):
everything he knows, everything he believes in, is falling apart.
Wood rippled through the crowds that the army was about
to launch a major assault. Seventy four years of communism,
seventy four years of trying to create a different way
of life, a different society, a different vision of the
(03:21):
world is on the verge of collapse. It's quite time.
Uh Sarah still has to do his job. The station
(03:46):
has to have an engineer on board or it might
shut down, but he's doing it on autopilot, his minds
firmly on his loved ones, wondering if they're okay, if
they're safe. And then one day he wakes up to
a message from his handlers on the ground. They tell him,
(04:08):
we can't keep this from you anymore. It's true. Everything
is collapsing around us, including the Soviet Space Agency. We've
run out of money. We can't send anyone to replace you,
So we're giving you a choice. You can come back
down to Earth is planned and abandon the station to
(04:30):
an unknown fate, or you stay as long as it
takes and protect the station the final outpost of a
falling empire. Sarage knows. The longer you spend in space,
the more your muscles start to disintegrate, your bones weaken, headaches, nausea, vomity,
(04:53):
And then there's what might happen to your mind, something
called space horror. We're being up in space so far
away from home, will literally drive you insane. So what
is Sarage going to do? Go back to Earth, be
with his family, his newborn daughter in these truly desperate times,
(05:18):
or stay in space, save the space station, serve his country.
The very last Soviet. This is the story of one
man who lived through the final days of Empire. But
(05:40):
evening the East Germans of the Knights tarted to tear
down parts of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of one
dream all Russia's just wild about urga In the first
man took conquer space and the birth of another future
for the Russian people. Storians may have trouble describing a
Davin Chile got resigned as the president of a Soviet
union from a unique and perhaps ultimate advantage point space
(06:05):
and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible bond, thin,
beautiful bond an electric blue. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope,
I heard podcast and exile content. This is the last Soviet.
(06:31):
Now you may be wondering why am I Lance Bass
from in synct of all people telling this story about
a Soviet cosmonaut. Well, yeah, probably won't believe this, but
I am a trained Russian cosmonaut. Yeah, you heard that right.
In two thousand two, I was at the end of
(06:53):
an international in SYNCT tour that felt like it had
been going on forever. I was about to have my
first real break in years, six months off to do
what I wanted, like sleep and see my family. And
then I was sitting at home in Orlando, having a
little breakfast, probably a green smoothie and pancakes, and I
(07:13):
get this call on my phone. It's my manager, Lance.
What would you say if I told you I've got
you a ticket on a Russian space rocket. I almost
dropped my phone, to be honest, I thought it was
a prank, but pretty quickly it became clear this was real.
Thank you, John six fifty seven. Now, finally, this morning,
(07:34):
one in Sync band member is one step closer to
saying bye bye bye to planet Earth. I would be
going to Moscow to train for six months to go
on a mission to the International Space Station. The final
deal hasn't been signed yet, but the Russians have named
Lance Bass as a member of the third At just
twenty three years old, I was going to become the
youngest person in history to go to space the Space
(07:58):
Station in October, and he's too young for you. Now,
If that sounds crazy to you, crazy that I would
want to use my precious six months off to take
part in one of the most intense and grueling experiences
of my life, then I think there's something you need
to understand. I am absolutely madly obsessed with the space.
(08:24):
I have been ever since I was a little kid.
When my family drove from Mississippi to Cape Kernaville in
Florida to watch a rocket launch fourteen hours in a car,
hot and humid, like someone was breathing on you. We
arrived in my dad's blue station wagon, pulled up to
(08:46):
the launch side, and that's when I saw it in
front of me, a gigantic rocket and this big clock
in the distance, and it starts counting down from two minutes,
and then as it gets closer to zero, there is
(09:06):
this rumbling that comes from beneath the ground, and then
this burst of fire and an unbelievable noise. As the
rumbling turns into a roar, and the rocket starts rising
up and up. As it keeps climbing, the crowd is
(09:28):
getting more and more excited, until finally it disappears into
the atmosphere, up and away into the great Via. It
was that day in Cape Carnavel when the dream of
(09:49):
going to space took hold of me. It was just
the coolest thing I've ever seen, and since then it's
all I've ever wanted to do. Even when I was
living this incredible life touring within sync, I still had
this desire, this dream to go to space. And that's
why when my manager called me that day, I jumped
at the chance, and just a few months later I
(10:11):
arrived at Sadoc Star City, the home of Russia's top
secret cosmonaut training program. When I got there in two
thousand two, I remember thinking this place, these people are
obsessed with space, even more than we are in America.
There are these statutes of cosmonauts everywhere, even the metro
stations are named after them. But back then I didn't
(10:35):
really get a chance to figure out why this was.
I hardly even had time to think. I was so
busy training day and night. So when I first heard
the story of Saragei Krakolov, I was intrigued. We had
both trained in the same place, but we had come
from such different worlds. Me an American pop star, him
(10:55):
a Soviet cosmonaut, and I wanted to know what was
going through his head when he had to make this
choice to go back home and protect his family or
stay in space and protect the station, the crown jewel
of the Soviet space program. Was it just that he
(11:17):
loves space so much like me? Or was there something
bigger driving in Because space isn't just about nerdy kids
thinking it's cool and wanting to go space, it turns
out is always about politics. We go into space because
whatever mankind must undertake, three man must. Billionaire Elon Musk
(11:40):
has sent three batches of SpaceX Starlink satellites over Ukraine.
Russia's war is putting years of collaboration at risk, and
we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on
the surface of Mars. Space is a battleground, a symbol
of power. And that's because of this thing that happened
(12:00):
before I was even born, when Sarage was three years old.
And to me, it's the thing that can maybe best
help us understand Sarage and how he could even consider
staying in the space station as his country collapsed below him.
(12:21):
It was the height of the Cold War, and my country, America,
and his country, the Soviet Union, were racing to answer
this one particular question, who would be the first to
put a man into space. The confrontation itself would determine
ultimately which ideology, which worldview, would take over the world.
(12:43):
Stephen Walker is a journalist who wrote a book about
the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The battle began in nineteen At the time, Sarage Kraklov
was a toddler, and the Americans announced to the world,
We're going to put the first man in space, as
if it was a done deal. The Russians weren't even
on their mind. Here's a nation that, as far as
(13:04):
they were concerned, the USSR couldn't build refrigerators that work properly.
It's true Soviet test flights often went wrong. One of
their spacecraft blew up just seconds after taking off, killing
a hundred people, But these disasters didn't matter because the
Soviets were determined. They decided they were going to surprise
(13:25):
the Americans and do it in complete secrecy. They start
looking at the records of USSR Air Force pilots, most
of them in the early to mid twenties. All of
them are sound of limb and mind, incredibly healthy, incredibly
fit and ideologically committed to the Soviet cause. And these
(13:50):
are the guys that formed the nucleus of the top
secret Soviet space program. And one of them is this guy,
Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin, a man who would end up
being the most famous person in Russia and Sarage Gargolov's
(14:11):
hero at the time. He was one of twenty men
chosen by the Soviet authorities to compete to be the
first man in space. Twenty men chosen to be put
through intense physical and psychological training. And when I say intense,
I mean intense, So I mean they do these horrible
(14:32):
heat chamber tests, for example, where they kind of baked
them for hours on end. They put them into pressure
changlers where they depressurized to see when they pass out.
They put an into these unbelievable vibration tests where they
actually anny on these stretches, and then they started to
vibrate the stretcher to the point where you teeth nearly fuller.
(14:55):
But nothing can compare to the isolation chamber. One by one,
over a period of months and months, each of these
twenty men would be introduced into a sealed chamber in
which they were expected to function without being able to
see anybody or hear anybody for what could be days
(15:19):
and days and even weeks totally isolated cuts off. They
would occasionally put horrible sounds in that shrieks or very
loud music, or wake you up in the middle of
the night, you know, anything, so you couldn't sleep properly.
(15:40):
They would twist time upside down so you didn't know
whether it was day or night. The test on these
men were so intense because the Soviet space team had
this problem. They didn't really know what's going to happen
to human being up there. Up to that point, the
idea of human beings in space was only something that
(16:02):
existed in the realms of science fiction. Nothing in the
station has any weight. No, wait, what a wonderful idea
you mean? If I went there, I wouldn't wear anything,
nothing at all. They had this term called space horror.
If you're divorced from the world, traveling around the world
(16:23):
above it not part of it the first to do so,
is there a possibility that you go insane? Because of
these unknowns, the Soviets knew they needed to find the
perfect guy, the guy who could withstand anything, and in
the end it came down to two men. Both were
(16:43):
pretty much as good and tough as each other, but
it was Gagarin that one. For one reason, he has
a perfect communist biography. He's the son of a peasant
from the country who was an iron foundry student who
then became a serving military pilot. He was the best
(17:04):
person to represent the Soviet Union against the United States
because the Soviets knew they needed to beat the Americans
to score the ultimate victory in the Cold War, and
so on April twelfth nine, they pressed the gold button
on Gagarin's flight is em bust out and what looks
(17:26):
like a school bus to the rocket launch site, and
then everybody says goodbye, and the goodbyes go on forever,
because as far as I concerned, this guy is going
to die. That's right. Odds are. Uri Gagarin is not
going to survive the first few minutes of the flight.
(17:46):
So many gruesome deaths awaitsed Euri Gagarine. It's almost like
(18:17):
being on another planet. It just goes on forever and
ever and ever, and then you reach this sort of
walled city. It's in the middle of a desert, a
(18:37):
city with guards standing around the perimeter. You know, you
get these huge buildings with holes in them, and everything's
rusting and it's corroded, and then you see it littered
around the streets, bits of old rocket all over the place.
It really looks like a disused enormous missile site, because
(19:01):
really that's what it is. It's in Kazakhstan and it's
called Biknor. It's the place that would have become the
launchpad for the Soviet space program, but originally it was
built a house their most advanced and deadly missiles. I mean,
it's quite extraordinary. They've built the biggest rocket site in
the world. I mean, the Americans didn't know about it,
(19:22):
had no idea that the site even existed. We're talking
about a site that is probably about the same size
as the state of Kentucky. The secret it's a place
where the conditions are extreme. It's incredibly hot in the
summer and in the winter it goes down to the
minus forties. I mean, it's really horrible. But every year
(19:48):
in April, something extraordinary happens there. Out of this dead
ground springs something new. Every spring. The whole of the
step is covered with a compit of tulips, these incredible
(20:10):
pink and purple and yellow tulips springing up from the dirt.
And so it was in April, as the tulips started
to peek their heads out from under the earth, and
the desert was filled with a riot of color. Jory
(20:31):
Gagarin stood at the base of an enormous rocket, ready
to change the course of world history. And so he
walks up to the steel steps and enters the elevator. Up.
He goes so high up it feels like it takes
minutes rather than seconds. But eventually he gets there, walks
(20:54):
out of the elevator, and straps himself into his seat.
The hatch is closed, and then he's on his own garret.
Actually remains really cool through this process. In fact, he
starts asking for some music from what we would now
call mission control, and they start supplying him with songs
and music, and there's music that's piped through into his
(21:16):
headends and he starts singing. He starts singing Lilies of
the Valley, a popular song about the first flowers coming
out of the ground, a song about spring, about new horizons.
And he's quite cool action in there, given what was
(21:37):
about to happen, and then he's ready for launch. He
could die in the next few seconds. Now, he could
die in the next hour. God only knows the different
ways he could die. Eight making stranded in space. Seven
could blow up on launch pad six if he burnt
to a crisp coming back to Earth. Five, four, three,
So many systems not properly tested, Some wish he doesn't
(22:00):
even know about. Two Does he know everything about what
could go wrong in that rocket? One? And then he's
lashed the Garin. Here is a whistling noise, then a
deafening warl. The rocket and everything in it begins to tremble.
Garon's stomach flips and his head feels full of pressure,
(22:24):
like he's being slowly sucked up into the air. He
tries to move his arms and legs, but nothing, like
his body's not his anymore. He takes a long, deep breath,
and then from nowhere he shouts, which means let's go,
(22:46):
and off he went. Upputs and uppoints and uplots, And
as the rocket heads upwards, the booster rockets fall away.
The Garin keep gathering speed fifteen thousand miles an hour
sixteen thousand, seventeen thousand until he reaches eighteen thousand miles
(23:12):
an hour, the speed of rocket needs to get past
the pool of Earth's gravity and out of the atmosphere
and down below, the engineers are beside themselves, downing our
springs like nobody's business down in the bunker. Everybody I've
spoken to engineers that that talk about being drenched in sweat.
(23:33):
There was incredible feeling of fear as well as exhilaration.
This this, this excitement, fear, sense of danger, potentially disaster,
all happening. But Gagarin keeps going nine minutes, ten minutes,
faster and faster, higher and higher until he reaches for
(23:58):
a bit. Yeah, something completely incredible happens. He suddenly feels
himself lifting from his seat and he's just held in
by the straps. He's experiencing the effects of weightlessness in orbit.
(24:25):
And then he looks to his right and he says,
I can see the Earth. I can see the Earth,
and the colors are unbelievably beautiful. This incredible band, thin
(24:46):
beautiful band, a sort of translucent and electric. I think
he describes it blue. It's the Earth's atmosphere. And he
is the first man ever to see it the first
man to break the shackles of Earth, and it was
(25:06):
a Soviet who had done it. As you can imagine,
it's not a secret the Soviets want to keep anymore.
They had a very famous announcer called Levitan who would
(25:26):
announced all the very big moments, like the beginning of
World War two, the death of Stalin, all of that
he had announced. He was brought in to announce this.
His voice came on the radio and all over Russia
(25:47):
people were listening to Garin's father, who had no idea
his son was in space, his wife, who also was
never told about his flight, and little boys like Sarage
Cracow crowded around the radio in their homes, their parents
proudly telling them that the Soviet Union has put a
man in space. And pretty soon the news starts to rock.
(26:13):
It around the world and it reaches the United States,
where President Kennedy is sleeping. He was working up by
his butler in the White House to a battery of news.
All Russia's just wild about Uri Gagarin, the first man
took conquer space, modest, just a family man. It was
(26:33):
on every television stage, it was called everywhere. It was
the news, and later that afternoon he had to go
before members of the press in a massive press conference
where he was unable even to utter the name Uri Gagarin. Well,
(26:53):
it is a most impressive scientific accomplishment. And also I
think that we uh, all of us as members of
the race, have the greatest admiration for the Russian who
participated in this extraordinary feat. I have already sent to
congratulations to Mr Crucial. In one hour and twenty nine minutes,
(27:41):
Uriga Garran completes one full orbit of the planet. But
now the engineers in the control room are biting their
nails again because Uriga Garran has to make it home alive,
and to do that he has to break back through
the Earth's atmosphere. He starts his descent. Almost immediately, the
(28:03):
porthole window fills with hot orange gas, and Gagarin suddenly
feels like he's being pushed back into a seat. He
tries to breathe, working hard to get the air into
his lungs, his heart rates sores. To calm himself, he sings,
(28:23):
the Motherland, here's the Motherland knows. He sits back and
grips the seat. A rushing noise feels his ears, and
then he's through. At twenty three feet Gagaran is ejected
(28:44):
from the capsule. He feels the cold air on his
face and a rough tug on his shoulders as the
parachute is deployed, and he drifts slowly down to a field.
And there he nots a hundred and six minutes after
he starts, having traveled all the way around the planet,
(29:04):
in a plowed field, and there's absolutely nobody there to
greet him except a very old woman and a little
five year old girl who are planting potatoes, and who
both see him and start running away. But he shouts
to the old lady, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet, I'm Soviet. Comrades,
and very very cautiously, the grandmother planting potatoes and her
(29:27):
five year old daughter come back. So here's a guy
has gone around the world in a hundred six minutes.
He's been traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour, you know,
ten times, has been of a rifle bullet. He's seen
things that no one has ever seen before. Now he's
in a plowed field, and he has only a horse
and cart in which to get to a telephone. Just
(29:54):
days later, he's back in Moscow, being paraded through the
streets in a convertible covered with hours. The scenes are unbelievable.
People line the sidewalk, and I'm not just talking thousands
or hundreds of thousands. There are millions of people out there.
I've seen footage and it looks like there is not
a single empty space along the whole parade route. People
(30:16):
are clambering on top of lamp post and leaning out
of balconies and screaming and waving the Soviet flags. White
doves are set free, Confetti is thrown from helicopters, Women
break the barriers, the hand in flowers. It's thought to
have been the biggest party in Soviet history. When Gagarin's
motorcade reaches the Kremlin, he's kissed on the cheek by
(30:36):
the Premier Nikita Kushtev and awarded the title Hero of
the Soviet Union. This was their moment. This was and
it still is probably to this day. This is Russia's
great moment in history, and they made the most of it.
This was a real feeling of my God, We've beaten
(30:59):
the most powerful and the most technologropy advance nation on us.
We can do anything. The Soviet Union won the race
to put the first man in space. It was a
huge deal for everyday Russians, and it turned the cosmonaut
at the center, Uriga Garon, into an icon. So I
(31:22):
think it's important for us to understand the level which
Yuriga Garden was a star, a superstar, at the level
I don't think we can even imagine. This is Assif Sadiki.
He's a professor of space history at Fordham University. There
were posters of Yuriga Garden. There were magazines, there were postcards,
there were trinkets, there were toys, there were models, there
(31:44):
were a record albums. Agaren was like the Soviet version
of Lance Bass and justin timber Lake. Okay, maybe more
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They even made Gagaran albums,
although they sounded a little different to Love Me Do.
(32:06):
The Soviet Union essentially created a cult of personality around
this guy. And I can tell you this is true.
And Star City and Moscow, I remember seeing statues of
Gagern everywhere. He became the ideal figure in Soviet society, quiet,
unassuming and totally dedicated to the cause of being a
(32:26):
Soviet cosmonaut. They were a political and they were young
and dynamic and handsome and good looking, and I think
they operated on that level a kind of quasi Hollywood culture.
For young Soviet people. Space was freedom, Space was success.
Space became embedded in the day to day lives of
(32:47):
Soviet citizens. It was everywhere in the kitchens and bedrooms
of Soviet men, women and children. Children grew up not
wanting to be pop stars or soccer players, but to
be cosmonauts. Every Soviet or later Russian cosmic I've spoken
to have all said the same thing. This was the
(33:08):
enduring legend that was for them an inspiration. It was
the thing that helped launch them on this unbelievable career
of cosmonauts. Sarage was three years old when Gagarin went
(33:30):
to space. His early years were filled with that astonishing success,
a symbol of what his country, the Soviet Union, was
capable of, and he would follow in Gagern's exact footsteps,
becoming one of an elite class of Soviets to go
to space. And so perhaps it's Ury Gageron who Sage
Cracklf is thinking of as he floats in space, his
(33:52):
country crumbling beneath him, his friends, his family, his fellow
Soviets living through chaos, and now he has to decide
what to do. Stay in space and man the station,
protect what has left of the Soviet Union, or go
down to a country in crisis. Now, to be upfront
(34:16):
about this, we know a lot about Sir Game. We
had it all set up. We were going to Moscow
to talk to him. It was scheduled for February, and
then Putin's war gotten away. Vladimir Putin has just addressed
the Russian people a moment ago, announcing what Putin called
the start of a military special operation. And so the
(34:36):
Russian Space Agency, in part a military organization, shut down.
The interview frustrating but fitting for a story about the
way space and politics are so intertwined. Space has become
a political battleground again. Russia's war is putting years of
collaboration at risk, and the astronauts in the situation they
(34:57):
did not ask for. America and Russia, once more on
opposite sides. The Russia space program has cut ties with
the West on almost every front. It's now unthinkable for
a high profile cosmonaut like Surrogate to go on an
American podcast. But we have spoken to Saragate's friends and
his colleagues, to people who have worked with him, and
(35:18):
people who have been to space with him, to try
to understand how he made the decision he did to
stay or to go. And so he spends hours thinking
of what to do about his family, about his baby daughter,
about his country falling apart, but also about the space
(35:39):
station he is manning. It's the first and only space
station orbiting the world. Without him, it will die. He
looks out the window at the world two fifty miles
below him, and then he's ready. He calls down to
mission control and tells them I'll stay. And now, over
(36:02):
the next seven episodes, we're going to tell the story
of Sergei Krikov, of those three and thirteen days he
spent circling the earth as his country collapsed. Three hundred
and thirteen days that changed our world. Thanks crushed cars
like flimsy toys. Soldiers used nightsticks, slope bombs. It was
(36:24):
an earthquake. It was a daily earthquake in Moscow. The
hammer and Sickle is lord for the last time, and
an era comes to an end. Your pay changed, the rank,
the status, everything changed. It was rather like he was
a time traveler. That's coming up on the Last Soviet.
(36:47):
Oh and by the way, we're gonna be telling my
story as well. This is the pioneering stage everyone should
and we'll have the opportunity to travel into space. The
(37:14):
Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with I
Heart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio
and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate
Osbourne and Mangesh had Akador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas
Linos from My Heart Executive produced by Katrina Norville and
(37:37):
Nikki Torre from Sama's Dad Audio are executive producers or
Joe Pikes and Dasha Listina. Produced by Assia Fuchs, Dasha
Litzitza and Joe Pikes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by
Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed
by Martin or Strich, Sound designed by Richard Award and
(38:00):
special things to Nando Villa, Melissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Burne,
Bob Pittman and Isaac Lee and thanks to Stephen Walker.
His book is called Beyond the astonishing story of the
first human to leave our planet and journey into space
if you want to hear more shows like this. Nothing
is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings,
(38:23):
and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen.
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