THE LAST SOVIET - EP 3: No Experience Necessary

A woman is driving home from work one day when she hears an ad on the radio that changes her life. “Astronaut Wanted No Experience Necessary.” This unassuming Brit who worked in the Mars Bar factory in the suburbs would end up traveling with our cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev on the mission he almost didn’t come home from. An effort to save the Soviet space program, birthed commercial space travel. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Twenty seven year old Helen Charman makes her way to
her car. She's a chemist at the Mars Chocolate factory
and she's on the way home. Her days are filled
with questions about the right kind of toffee to use
on chocolate ice cream, or how long a Mars bar
will survive in the heat. She likes her job. Get up,
go to work, come home a regular nine to five

(00:38):
that day. Helen turns out of the factory car park
and quickly hits the rush hour traffic. She sighs and
turns the radio up loud. On it, a newscaster is
going through the day's headlines. It's early summer nineteen eighty
nine and in Hungary, the communist regime has just been overthrown,
which could end forty years of one party rule. An

(00:59):
Ira bar has gone off at a British military base.
Please believe the tech, May Harold as summer of terror.
Two hundred and sixty people arrested at Stonehenge for celebrating
the Summer Solstice. Protesters moving towards Stonehenge. Helen starts flicking
through the channels. I means number one, the new single
yeahde and she just wants to listen to some music,

(01:25):
and that's when she hears it. I was driving my
car home from work and flicking through the stations, trying
to find some music, and I heard an announcement, A
suppose an advert really, and it said started off with
astronaut wanted, no experience necessary. Suddenly Helen's staring at the
radio an astronaut. Now, lots of kids me included dream

(01:52):
of being an astronaut, but not Helen. She might work
for a company called Mars, but she's never thought about
going into space. Being British, who was no job for
an astronaut. Growing up in the nineteen sixties nineteen seventies,
Britain didn't even have a space program, so it wasn't possible.
It wasn't part of my agenda. But now Helen's listening

(02:15):
hard as the voice on the radio continues and then
went on to describe they wanted people to go over
to Star fifteen year Moscow, train with the cosmonauts and
do experiments on the Mere Space station Cosmonauts Star City,
Mere Space Station. These were words Helen hardly knew. They're

(02:37):
looking for someone between twenty one and forty with scientific
training and the ability to learn a foreign language, and
Helen thinks, I'm twenty seven, and I have a degree
in chemistry, and I know French and German. And then
this idea begins to form in the back of her mind.

(03:00):
What if the traffic light turns red before she can
talk herself out of it. Helen reaches for a scrap
of paper and scribbles down the number from the radio.
She has no idea that this moment, stuck in traffic
is about to change her life. That not only will

(03:20):
she be soon going to space, but she's about to
get a front row seat to one of the most
important events of the twentieth century, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and by her side will be a Russian
cosmonaut called Serge Kracole from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcasts and exile content.

(03:50):
This is the last Soviet I'm Lance Bass. So actually,
Helen Sharman and I have pretty similar stories. We grew
up in very different worlds and had very different jobs,

(04:11):
but we both somehow ended up in the same strange place,
a secret town outside of Moscow, doing the same insane thing,
training to go to space. We were both young, myself
twenty three, Helen twenty seven, and we left everything we'd
ever known behind us to see that electric blue light
of our planet from orbit. We were actually at the

(04:34):
frontier of something that today is a familiar idea, paying
to go to space, except in our case it was
TV companies who were paying for us. It was CBS
and MTV fronting the money for my trip and for
Helen a bunch of companies with backing from a British
TV channel. We were fish out of water, and both
of our journeys started completely by chance. For me with

(04:57):
a call from my agent Lance. What would you say
if I told you I've got you a ticket on
a Russian space rocket for Helen? Sitting in her car
one day in nineteen eighty nine, It all began with
that radio ad astronaut wanted new experience necessary. Helen keeps
the application for him in her bag for weeks before

(05:18):
she sends it in a few weeks later, she gets
a call. A woman's voice says, I'm telephoning on behalf
of Air Vice Marshal Peter Howard and would like to
ask if you would come for a medical for the
Anglo Soviet Juno's space mission. Hotline has been buzzing continuously

(05:40):
with hopeful astronauts. The mission was a joint project between
the Brits and the Soviets. They called it Project Juno,
and the idea was to hold a contest to try
to find the best person in Britain to go to space,
retracting applications from, among others, a city brokers, a tax inspective,
a baker. There were commercials on posters, in newspapers, on

(06:01):
TV and of course on the radio. With nearly twelve
thousand enthusiastics making contact, the chance of success is six
thousand to one. There was a selection process and medical
psychological tests and then gradually whittled us down. This morning,
it was only a small step onto the platform for
the four who've beaten thirteen thousand candidates in the space race.

(06:23):
A documentary film crew even followed their every move. It
was kind of like an early version of a reality
show which one would make it to space. Not quite
The Bachelor, but you know what I mean. Helen Sharman's
a research technologist for a confectionery firm and is already
used to comments about her being the woman from Mars.
I know we have to be fit, we have to

(06:44):
be able to run the Russian language. So I have
to be able to be perhapsing scientists fell in sextus annually. Yeah,
I think I've got it now. Helen is pretty understaid.
In fact, I would say she's quite tipathy British. She's
not like US Americans, always saying we are the best
at everything. But she had done pretty damn well to
get to this stage. Thirteen thousand people had applied, and

(07:06):
now she's just one of four. He only obstacle. Three
other equally determined to spurring astronauts or four have the
same ambition to join the Juno mission. They were tested
and tested, intelligence, reasoning power, how they work under pressure.
They asked Helen about her motivations. Why she was doing

(07:29):
this money, fame, the good of science, the thawing of
East West relations. This was, after all, a rare opportunity
for people from the West to go behind the Iron
Curtain to experience a slice of the Soviet way of life.
Helen thought about these questions for a while, and in
the end she answered, honestly, after doing all this work,

(07:52):
all these tests, and getting excited, she just wanted to
go to space, blast off in a rocket, see the
Earth from above. Just like me. She had been bitten
by the space bug from starting out, not really believing
that space was for someone like her. Now it was
all she could think about and it was almost within reach.

(08:16):
The final announcement was made in the Science Museum in London.
There was a big sort of glitzy TV show and
we were being encouraged to tryand and be terribly excited.
Helen isn't really one for the cameras or glitz and glamour,
so she isn't really feeling it. She's sitting there just
trying to remember what to do if they call her name,

(08:36):
and trying not to think about how many people are
watching at home. Helen Charmotte. When day and asked my name,
I just knew I had to stand up, go to
the stage, shake hands, turned to face the cameras, smile
a lot. And it was only really when the whole
thing finished when I could relaxing people. I'm going to
train with the cosmonauts and it could really start to

(08:58):
sink in them. Helen was off to train for eighteen
months with a team of cosmonauts for omission to the
Mere Space Station, the Soviet's most advanced piece of space technology.
It's a huge floating network of tubes and wires in
orbit around the Earth where multiple cosmonauts can live, work

(09:20):
and perform experiments. Helen had forty eight hours to pack
up her life and move to the Soviet Union. I
had to resign from my job. I closed for the
Moscow winter. Eighteen months in Moscow. She was going to
need a thick coat and sell my car. You know
all that. She even got her affairs in order in
case she died in training or on her emission, the

(09:41):
arrange power of attorney. It was before internet banking, before
the internet as we know it now, no emails, no
mobile phones. It was all very very weird, a feeling
of being cut off, I think, very much from everything
that's had known in the UK. For Helen, the Soviet
Union was very much an alien land. It fell very
exotic and very very exciting. It was going to some

(10:04):
other world. Really. Helen had grown up in the nineteen
seventies where we were told that the Soviets were all
nasty and they were going to come in Boma country
with new clibombs. So she was already nervous. Then in
November nineteen eighty nine, just as she's preparing to leave
everything she knows. She hears this news from ABC This

(10:25):
is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings reporting tonight from
Berlin from the Berlin Wall specifically, take a look at them.
They've been there since last night. They are here in
the thousands, They are here in the tens of thousands.
The Berlin Wall was coming down. Thousands and thousands of
West Germans come to make the point that the wall
has suddenly become irrelevant. Earlier that summer, a peaceful revolution

(10:49):
began in East Berlin calling for more freedom, and finally,
on the night of November ninth, the checkpoints were overrun
and the gates of the wall were swung wide. For
the hapless East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie, they
were swamped. They simply gave up, opened the gate and
allowed thousands through the one crossing point that had remained

(11:11):
firmly closed. The news was beamed across the globe in
deep indimenticab Checkpoint Charlie day, the government of East Germany
announced that its borders are open for Helen's family and friends.

(11:37):
It was worrying, would it be dangerous going to Moscow
at this totally uncertain time, and I expected a sort
of harsh exterior, perhaps people who were a bit secretive,
people who didn't want to share much. But Helen was determined.
She realized not only did she have the chance to

(11:59):
become a cosmonaut, but she could find out what was
really happening behind the iron curtain that's coming up after
the break. Star City, the secret cosmonaut training facility. I

(12:35):
remember arriving there in two thousand and two for my
very first days of training. They shipped me out there
in the dead of night, to a place about twenty
miles north of Moscow, in the middle of a forest.
It was a place that until the nineties was completely
off the map. It felt like I was arriving at
the Russian version of Area fifty one. When you get there,

(12:59):
there are these huge iron gates and guards standing there.
Helen remembers the same thing soldiers with their guns at
the gates and bobbed while around the edge of Star City.
But once you got inside the walls of Star City,
I remember it had the feel of kind of a

(13:20):
movie set, cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union.
There was a bank, shops, a movie theater, a railway,
station sports fields. But if that sounds quaint, it wasn't.
All the buildings were gray Brutalis blocks, and let me
tell you, on a cloudy day, the whole place felt
pretty bleak. But there also was this big sense of community.

(13:47):
Everybody knew everybody because the only people allowed to live
there were cosmonauts and their families. The fact that there
were customauts wool king around who I'd read about and
who I could see in space magazines, and something that
I was cute in the post office behind them. Helen
was star struck. But before she could meet her heroes
and her future crew, she had to train. Training to

(14:08):
be a cosmonaut is one of the hardest things I
have ever done, no doubt about it, more physically and
mentally grueling than any INSYNCT world tour. And those were rough.
Days of Star City started at about five am. First
on the schedule was a Russian language class taught by

(14:28):
a teacher that only spoke French and Russian. Yeah, and
I gotta say Russian. It's not easy. In fact, Russian
is one of the most difficult languages in the world
to learn. I didn't even know that I had to
learn a whole new alphabet. I mean it took me
six months to learn Jagabaru, Pruskin and noshka, which means

(14:49):
I speak Russian a little. And that's before we even
started the physical training. There's not so much about running marathons,
but it's building up good muscle strength in general fitness.
All right, Helen's doing that thing we call British understatement
again because the training it's brutal. We had this machine
which is meant to recreate what it feels like when

(15:09):
your rocket is returning to earth. They strapped me into
a chair, spun me around. I got up to five
g's which is basically like a grand piano being pressed
into your chest. Then there was the weightlifting, working so
hard I was puking like every five minutes. And I
haven't even told you what happened in the woods. Sometimes

(15:31):
they would just leave you there after a long run
and say, okay, enjoy your night. And I had to
build a shelter and start a fire and find food
all on my own in the deep dark depths of
a Russian forest. Then there was the technical stuff, which
you had to totally learn from scratch as to navigation ballistics.
Basically the theory of flying really freaking fast through space,

(15:53):
and all of us in Russian. One thing I found
out pretty quickly was that they weren't going to make
any distinctions between the train cosmonauts and us newbies. Every
member of the crew would have responsibilities. I was in
charge of oxygen on the soils, and so I had
to know exactly how much air was needed to keep
my crew made safe. I had to calculate all of

(16:14):
this in my head. And did I mention all of
this was in Russian. Yeah, if you were even a
point off, everyone was dead. Because so much can go
wrong with space travel, we were always having to learn
what you should do in the event of a disaster.
So some simple things, for instance, say the radio might

(16:35):
not work, what if you can't speak to ground control?
But there could be something else more complex, like what
if your spaceship fails to land on the station? What
the hell do you do? Then? What if the electricity
cuts out or one of your fellow crew goes on
a spacewalk and never comes back. So together we would
work through that. Now, that's the kind of thing that
we did in the simulators, and you would practice and

(16:55):
practice and practice, and it really was a case of
practice makes perfect. Years and years of Soviet missions to
space meant that if anything went wrong, there was always
a go to answer. These scenarios are often written down
as well. It's part of our manuals, so we don't
have to remember everything. We just have to remember which
page we've got to quickly moved to for Plan B

(17:15):
or Plan and C instead of Plan A. After months
in Star City, Helen started to believe in herself. She
was strong, she knew a bit more Russian than I did,
and she knew how to save the spaceship from disaster.
And eventually, in the summer of nineteen ninety she was
ready to meet her crew, the famous cosmonauts, the guys

(17:37):
she had been standing behind in the post office. The
commander of her mission would be Anatoly Artabaski, and she
would also ride with an engineer, the hero of the
Salud seven rescue, sarage Crecovat. Sagey starts off when you
meet him. He is a very modest kind of character,

(17:58):
and he's very strong internally, but he's not the kind
of person who would be the loudest in the room
by any stretch of the imagination. You could probably go
into a room. Unless he's standing up, he's quite tall,
but if he was sitting down, you probably could go
pass without even noticing him because he's not shouting, he's
not waving his arms around, so you know, his presence

(18:18):
just sort of creptopotomy. Helen says, there's this thing you
need to understand about cosmonauts. All the cosmonauts have chosen
in many respects. We're all quite similar fairly, I would say,
even tempered, so not too excitable, not too depressive. But
Sarah Gay stood out. I think Sagey has got a
particularly high propensity to deal with stress. He's just outwardly

(18:43):
very calm. He probably deals with it all inside, but
he does deal with it soon. She was being invited
to his house to meet his family, and of course,
the first time that any British person goes to a
Soviet house for dinner, you think this enormous amount of food, Wow,
it's this amazing, and then you're offered more and more
and more. You think, thank you very much, that was
it's just really feeling super full. That's great, and then

(19:03):
they say, oh, now it's the main course. I can
tell you what Helen says about the Russians. Is true,
they love to feed you and they like to get
a drunk on vaca. But the generosity Helen experienced in
Saragey's house also made her think, I know they were
very well off compared to the average Soviet citizen at

(19:24):
that time. I certainly was aware of the difficulty of
many of them. The queues I hate, standing in lines
I hated, and some of the hunger that was going around,
some of the homelessness as well. In Moscow. It caused
the average Russian a full day's pay for a pound
of meat at the private markets. And then compared to
the relatively good standard of living in Star City, and

(19:46):
the fact that I could go to a canteen rude.
Star City has looked curious by Soviet standards. The diet
calculated by scientists to give them and eat my breakfast,
lunch and dinner there, and so could the other cosmonauts
without having to worry about where is that food coming from?
That was a real luxury because in the rest of
the country people were starving, women and children were sleeping

(20:07):
in Moscow's railway stations. So what do you do now,
go into I don't even know what I can do,
I'm going to have to go back to the train
station and spend the night there. Thirty two million Russians
now found themselves below the poverty line. So only one
in six families has a telephone, only one in twenty
four owns a car. The quality of most things people

(20:27):
can buy here is third rate. Helen heard about all
of this from the Western media and her friends from
back home. She knew about the collapse of the Soviet economy,
and she also knew about President Gorbachev and about how
he was trying to change the Soviet Union. So in England,

(20:50):
in the UK, we'd got these two Russian words, and
Glasnost and pedestroca. We talked a little bit about this
in episode to Glasnost generally just means openness and pedestroika
means rebuilding, and they became synonymous with what Gorbutof was
trying to do. He was being more open with the West.
We liked Glasnost and we liked paristroika in the West,

(21:13):
and here was a chance to ask actual Soviets what
they thought. And so she started going up to the
cosmonauts in Star City, What do you think about these
reforms of glasnost of pedestroika, And the response I got
was a bit of a blank. What's odd? I don't
people don't normally kind of sort of stum upon me
when I'm asking them questions and they say, what do

(21:34):
you mean? She replied, well, you know, I mean like
society opening up what President Gorbachev was trying to do.
Aren't we open? We thought we were being quite open
with you. And what about pedestroika rebuilding? Well, but rebuilding
the school down the road. Isn't that's a good thing,
isn't it? The political connotations to these two words just

(21:57):
weren't used in the Soviet Union. This made Helen realize
everything she thought about the Soviet Union was wrong. That
people in Star City, people like Serage Kreklov cosmonauts, they
actually liked their lives because their lives were relatively quite
good and relatively quite stable. They liked the way that

(22:20):
they worked and the way that they lived. They weren't
aware of any other way to do that, and they
were very happy with that. And I kind of, I
suppose I'd always assumed that they would always be trying
to live more like the life in the West was.
And of course they weren't. They were very happy with
their lives, happy with their lives and proud to be
part of the Soviet space program, the most revered men

(22:41):
and the Soviet Union revered and rewarded with comfortable houses,
food and a good life. The only problem is that
comfortable life, the one enjoyed by Soviet cosmonauts since the
age of Uriga Gerin it was in serious jeopardy. So

(23:12):
it's now April nineteen ninety one and the three cosmonauts Sarage, Helen,
and Anatoli are finally ready ready to go to space.
They leave Star City by military plane and three hours
later they start their descent to Bikanir, the secret city
in the desert where the Soviets launched their rockets. From
Helen clings to her seat. Bikenore is everything she pictured,

(23:35):
the closest thing on Earth to a Star Wars planet,
with great hangars and domes jutting out of the reddish
brown Earth, and the cosmonauts are going to have to
spend two weeks there in quarantine. They need to make
sure that they're not carrying any viruses into the space station.
Then they have to go through a series of strange rituals,
rituals that go back to the very early days of

(23:56):
Soviet space travel. There's a huge number of very traditional
things that we do before the space flights itself. On
the day, you wake up whichever bedroom you'd be sleeping,
and you sign the door. Your signature goes on the
door of that room. Goodnessays what they've done with all
these doors. They must be jampactful of signatures. But the

(24:16):
signatures are only the first part of the ritual. Next,
the cosmonauts watch a movie. Picture the scene Helen, Sergei
and Anatolie all gathered around on this little sofa from
movie night, maybe eating some popcorn or probably more like
sunflower seeds. And what was the movie White Sun in
the Desert. I think it's called to some sort of comedy,

(24:38):
White Sun in the Desert, very Russian Harley sounds like
me the parents, But you know anyway, Then the next
day they get up early, get into their spacesuits, they
get on a bus to the launch site, and then
comes another ritual. Your Gagarin forgot to go to the
loo before he went to the rocket, so he needed
to get out of the bus and have a pee

(24:58):
on the back wheels, so you will do that. That's right,
because Juriga Garan forgot to take a leak before his
flight into space in nineteen sixty one. Every cosmonaut who
flies in the Soviet Union still has to do this,
although Helen actually didn't. She's a woman, remember, and she'd
have to take her space suit off. Finally, bathroom bregg Dunn.

(25:20):
They head to the launch site. There's a television on
the bus where they watch video messages from Saragei and
Anatoli's kids. Anatole's little boy tells them, pity you won't
be here this summer. Goodbye. And then there there in
front of the rocket, a rocket plastered with two flags,
one for Great Britain the Union Jack and the other

(25:41):
for the Soviet Union the Hammer and Sickle. They climb
the still stairs and get in the elevator. Up and
up they travel to the top of the rocket to
their capsule. I was sitting on the right hand side,
and the commander toleh he had their middle seat, and
Sigay had this seat on the left. And the hatch

(26:03):
door closes and that's it, just the three of them,
all totally focused on the job at hand. The launch,
the docking, and what they need to do when they
get to the station. After what seems like an age,
they feel it, the rumble, the shaking, the rockets start
to fire, the rookie t engines fire. It takes well

(26:24):
for the thrust to build up one second, two seconds,
three seconds, probably tens of seconds before the thrust bills
up enough. Ten seconds of waiting, neither off the ground
nor attached. If the thrust bills up enough to lift
you off the ground. But as they wait in this
in between state, about to sever gravity's hold on them,

(26:44):
to break the tether with Earth, something at the back
of their mind, something completely out of their control, keeps
intruding on their thoughts. What are they leaving behind? Because
away from the rocket, beyond the Kazakh Desert, outside the
guarded walls of Star City, the Soviet Union is beginning

(27:09):
to break down. It covered it all across East Europe.
That searched Memen again. He was the New York Times
Moscow correspondent who was hungry a few years ago. This
march could not have taken place Czechoslovakia. People were standing
on the roofs above. Whence the fast Square. An hour

(27:30):
before today's demonstration in Romania used the army is now
firmly on the side of the people. Poland. I spent
a lot of time in Poland the euphoria over the
collapse of communism, as it was a period when Gorbatov's
reforms just swept through the former Soviet Empire. The latest
surge in the tide sweeping eastern Europe, demanding communist heads

(27:53):
and knocked down wall after wall. In the old days
when people protested the vie sin in tanks, but Gorbchef
was all about freedom, and so we said, go ahead, protest,
take to the streets, and people did in the millions.
That was at the Hungarian border when people started flooding across.

(28:14):
I was in Prague when hundreds of thousands of people
went out to wed Sislas Square and jangled their keys,
a dissidence and becoming much more confident, which was assigned.
You know, the keys are gone and the doors are open.
R if the freedom had been getting loud a here
all week, there was a feeling of change in the
air and the Soviet system. The main glue had been fear,

(28:37):
the thing that held people in check and enthralled. Then
now the fear was gone. What I think nobody understood
was that this was a system built on repression, that
if you loosen one grew, they're all going to start loosening,
and then you can't hold this thing together. The empire

(28:59):
was rap would lead disintegrating. So as the cosmonauts took off,
they knew what they were leaving. They knew that they
were leaving a country that was in deep into Surrey,
in deep in existential crisis. That's next time on the

(29:26):
Last Soviet. The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in
partnership with iHeart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama'
Dat Audio and hosted by me Lance Bass. Executive produced

(29:48):
by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh had A Kador with Oz
Wallashan and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina
Norvelle and Nikki Atore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive
producers or Joe Sykes and Dasha Lissina. Produced by Asia Fuchs,
Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sykes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research

(30:13):
by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz. Music by Will Epstein.
Themed by Martin or string sound designed by Richard Ward,
and special things to Nando Villa, Lyssa Pollock, Will Pearson,
Connel BYRNE, Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lead if you want
to hear more shows like this. Nothing is more important
to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews,

(30:38):
so please spread the love wherever you listen.