March 8, 2023 • 28 mins
A woman in suburban Australia makes contact with the Soviet Space Station. Little does she know she’s about to become a lifeline to Sergei as his country collapses.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
It was early one morning. I was back in nineteen
ninety one. It was January, it was hot. I left
the radio on. This is Maggie Iaquinto, a Ham radio
operator in the small town of Kolak, Australia. And I
was up very early in the morning and having a
cup of coffee and I heard this crackle. Oh this
(00:33):
is interesting. And I heard this d heavy rushing going
cq cq cq. This is you two M I R
looking for contacts, you two M I R the Soviet
space station. I was so happy, I was unbelievably happy.
(00:58):
I said, well, this is it, and with great nervousness
I pressed the transmit button and I said, you two
M I R. This is VK three CFI. The handle
is Maggie over. Maggie had been trying to make contact
(01:18):
for years and should anyone have seen me at six
in the morning out on my little street in Kolak dancing,
and I wow, I've done it. She was about to
start a long and pretty special relationship with the Soviet
space station and with a certain cosmonaut, Sira gay K
(01:51):
so Sia gay Let's looted that. But Maggie's connection to
Saragay wouldn't just be a cool story to whip out
it dinner parties. Within an hour, the crowd was heading
to the seat of Soviet power as the Soviet Union
unraveled in nineteen ninety one. At allmy armored personnel carriers
on the streets, it was Maggie's who would tell sarage
(02:11):
the truth about what was happening in his country. Armored
personnel carriers rolled by carrying scores of truths, some of
them brandishing machine guns, and Sarage and the other cosmonauts
were hungry for the news, and they called it Rita Rita,
which is my name in Russian. This is CNN breaking news.
So Rita's information. So I was their information source. Good evening.
(02:35):
I'm Jane Randall in Washington. The information Maggie gave Saragey
proved crucial because it would help him make the choice
of a lifetime to stay or to go. Historians may
have trouble describing a day when Kael Garbato resigned as
the president of the Soviet Union, which had already ceased
to exist. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope, iHeart podcast
(03:00):
an exile content. This is the last Soviet Helen Charmon,
becoming the first Britain in space. She blasted off with
(03:20):
two Soviet cosmonaut repairment on a missions Design chief need
to repair the eighteen Mirrors space station that has been
orbiting the globe for five years now. On May eighteenth,
nineteen ninety one, Helen Sharman, the British woman who won
the TV contest, blasted off into space. Alongside her were
the Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoly Artabaski. They were
(03:42):
leaving behind a country in chaos, a country literally breaking
apart at the seams, the republics Estonia, a human chain
of protests Lithuania. Down in the Baltic Republic of Lithuania,
Latvia flag was raised and they sang the national lands.
They were demanded independence. The parliament in the capital city
(04:02):
of Bakhu voted unanimously to make ourser Bai John an
independent republic. But at that particular moment, flying through space
in a tiny capsule, Helen wasn't really thinking about what
was happening on Earth. She was just enjoying the ride.
(04:25):
A few hundred kilometers above the earth surface, you can
see that the Earth is curved, you can see vasts
sections of the Pacific Ocean, the whole of Western Europe
in Mungo beautiful, inspiring. After forty eight hours, she finally
arrived at the Mere space Station. As Helen Sharman Sawyer's
spacecraft dot with the Mere Station last Monday, it was
(04:48):
the realization of a dream that started more than two
years ago. I remember opening the hatch I went through first.
It was just so nice to float into these long,
thin modules, feeling weightless. I remember being the most natural,
relaxing feeling I'd ever had as she floated in zero
(05:12):
gravity for the first time. Helen discovered her home for
the next week. Tunnels with tight walls and low ceilings, wires, screens, keyboards,
and transmitters stuck to every available surface. The space station
Mirror was a technological marvel, humanity's only outpost in space,
and the Soviets had created it. But in their rush
(05:38):
to get it up there, comfort had to take a
back seat, so the place was kind of a dump,
reeking a mold, mites and body odor. And thanks to
my INSYNCT tour days, I can actually imagine what that
smells like like. Five sweaty teenage boys in a bus
for months. Not pretty. Helen was going up there for
(06:00):
a week, but anatole and sarage for five months. For
it all to work, everything had to be super organized.
Mission control planned. Certainly, my time to the nearest, five minutes,
five minutes, we were told when we needed to awake
around seven am Moscow time, have a space shower, meaning
(06:23):
wipe your body down with a wet towel, and typically
we would have breakfast together chicken with Brunes bread, candy, coffee.
Not my usual breakfast, in fact, I'm not the biggest
fan of Russian food, but I guess it's certainly feeling.
And there was only one toilets in use, so we
have to work around each other in that respect. Yeah,
(06:43):
in space, even something as simple as ping becomes a
whole operation. Everyone gets their own custom shaped funnel which
is attached to a vacuum hose. When you gotta go,
you have to hold the funnel right up against you
unless you want to end up surrounded by droplets of
floating pea, and that as gross. After all that, the showering,
(07:04):
the eating, the peeing, the cosmonauts are ready to get
down to some actual work because the station wasn't in
great shape. There were power outages, computer failures, leaks. It
needed constant maintenance and that is why our guy Sarage
was there. He was the engineer and his job was
(07:24):
to fix all these problems, to keep the station running,
to keep the dream of Soviet space alive. That's without Santatoli,
Arts and Varsity and their Cricolo will spend five months
and plan a record eight walks in space as they
go about repairing the Mirror Station. Helen Charman had her
own special job on Mirror Space farmer. She was growing
(07:45):
wheat potatoes. She even planted a lemon tree, growing food
in space. Been like mad Damon in the Martian the
Scientific Experiment she took part and weren't going to win
any Nobel prizes, but it was nevertheless of British first.
And in the evenings, after they'd finished all their duties,
(08:07):
it was finally time to chill. Sometimes we could just relax.
Is usually a good hour where there's nothing scheduled, where
you can just be together and look out the window,
talk about families and friends that we left behind. The
last couple of years had been strange for Helen she'd
quit her job, broken up with her boyfriend, and let's
(08:28):
face it, I'm going to Russia to train as a
cosmonaut is a pretty good excuse. She'd left her parents
behind in England and moved to the USSR. But she
was twenty seven single. Her whole life was ahead of her.
For Saragey, it's different. He recently got married to someone
in mission control actually, though she wasn't on this mission,
(08:51):
and now they had a baby. Sigey's daughter was born
just a few months before we flew into space, and
he would have missed her terribly. He knew that was
what his mission was assigned to do, and he knew
his wife would look after the door so beautifully. But
your babies grow up very quickly, and Segay was going
(09:13):
to miss a lot of that development. Over five months
in space, sarage was going to watch his daughter Orga
grow up on screen. He could only talk to his
family every two weeks. He'd miss his daughter's first words,
sitting up, crawling, and then her first steps. That's a
(09:36):
big deal, really, but he knew, you know that that
was his job, and he knew he was going to
do that, so he'd thought it all through accepted it,
that isolation from the Earth and the fact that you're
not with all your friends and family anymore. Over that week,
Helen listens to the usually quiet sarage began to open
(09:57):
up about how he's missing summer and Moscow, the long
warm evenings with friends and family, about how his daughter
is growing up without him. Every time, Saragey tells Helen
a little bit more, and Helen found herself looking forward
to their evening chats. But then all too soon it's
(10:20):
time for Helen to return to Earth. It must have
felt weird after so much build up and training, knowing
at twenty seven the first lining for Obit has already
been written. But even stranger was having to leave Space
without Saragey and Anatoly and that final goodbye. It was
(10:43):
heart wrenching because I knew I was leaving them behind
in space. Not only I enjoyed it and I didn't
want to leave to return to Earth just then, but
saying goodbye to what felt like then the two best
friends I had ever had. This morning, it was warm
farewells from the two cosmonauts staying behind, to the mere
crew being relieved, and to Helen. They passed through the
(11:04):
hatch into their Sawyer's craft, which I'm doped from MEA
and just before half past ten this morning fired its
retro rockets. Less than half an hour later they were
parachuting to Earth. Watched firemission control and when Helen landed
back in the USSR before going home to her parents,
she actually visited Saragey's family. I went round to visit
his wife and his baby after I returned from space
(11:27):
while Segey was still in space. That's how close they'd become.
And my hair was, you know, I'd had it cut
quite short, and the baby Auga said dad. When I arrived,
Baby Auga called Helen dad to her. Saragey was just
some stranger with short hair, much like Helen. And that's
(11:50):
when Helen realized exactly how much Sarahgey was missing. And
now Sarah finds himself missing Helen loneliness is starting to
gnaw at him. Downtime on the space station seems to
drag on forever, and one evening, almost out of boredom,
(12:14):
sarage starts flicking through the handover notes left by the
previous crew, and that's when he sees something strange amongst
the detailed log about technical issues and repairs. There's a
series of scribbles, numbers, letters, and symbols, each with dates
and times next to them. It looks like some kind
(12:36):
of call log, but cosmonauts only get one personal call
every week or so these are way more regular. It's
beginning to look like the last crew weren't just using
the radio to call home. They were speaking to people
all over the world, to people in Taiwan or Ireland
(12:59):
or Ohio, to people in their living room, to amateur
radio operators. And there's one call sign that comes up
again and again, and next to it the word Australia
(13:23):
v K three CFI Nervous. He tunes the radio to
the right frequency and waits nothing. The next day he
finds himself going through the motions until he can try again.
Nothing days pass. Every night he keeps coming back to
(13:47):
the radio, listening to the same old empty cracker. But
one evening, just as he's about to call it quits,
a woman's voice Physics into Life. Two years earlier, nineteen
(14:15):
eighty nine, Australia. Kolak a small town just outside of Melbourne,
twelve thousand people, best known for its dairy farm somewhere
in that town. A woman is in a makeshift radio
shack in her house, trying to get through to the
Soviet space station. It's VK three CFI Maggie aya Quinto.
(14:38):
I can remember her dancing around the kitchen, flinging a
T twel over ahead, dancing to some type of Balkan music.
That's been Maggie's son. Maggie died in twenty fourteen, but
we spoke to her sons and to an Australian radio
producer named Jesse Burrell, who sent us an interview she
did with Maggie in twenty eleven. She had a quirky personality.
(15:02):
She had a fun sense of humor. She liked puns.
She liked bad action movies. She liked playing softball, She
liked Macedonian dancing. She spoke Russian. Maggie was born in
America and learned Russian at college in the early sixties,
during the height of the Cold War. She was just
fascinated with the USSR. Maggie followed the news of the
(15:24):
Soviet Union anyway she could, reading the papers, listening to
the radio, watching TV. She was convinced that one day
she would visit, but then life guide in the way,
she met a guy and moved to Australia with him.
She had two sons and started working as a computer
teacher at the local high school in Colac. The sides
(15:45):
of Colac. It was a good bakery there, not exactly
what Maggie's dreams were made of. Even the bakery was
closed on weekends. No Balkan dancing club, definitely no Russians
to talk to. But Maggie had a secret weapon cable here,
(16:06):
all right, and so that just comes into the radio
shock here Ham radio. I always wanted to be a
Ham radio operator when I was fifteen or sixteen, I
just wanted to do this. Ham Radio a way for
people to talk to each other from home using radio waves,
a more advanced version of the ten can on a string.
(16:27):
It promised freedom, independence, adventure. There's no way that I
can visit every country in the world, but I can
with Ham Radio. Maggie talked to all sorts of people
and even went to Ham Radio conferences on weekends. They
would always be hosted at some sort of basketball court,
and they'd just be tables set up along the walls
(16:48):
stacked with different types of gear, like different types of radios,
and everyone would call each other by their unique call sign.
It's like code names, a jumble of letters and numbers
that shows who's calling and where from. In Australia, all
of the Ham radio call signs start with VK. India's
vu vs Canada. You get the idea, and three represents Victoria,
(17:09):
so I'm VK three. And then the suffix, which is
two letters or three represents your unique identity, so I
was VK three CFI and no one else in the
world can have that call sign. And not these Ham
radio conferences, people would actually address Maggie not by her name,
but by her call sign. This is the level of
(17:31):
geekiness we're talking about. And then at one of these conferences,
she starts hearing a rumor, a whisper going around the
community that a handful of Hams have managed to get
through to space, not just any space, but space behind
the Iron curtain, the space station mirror. Maggie can't get
(17:55):
it out of her head, the idea of speaking to
a real Soviet and she starts thinking, maybe this is
my chance to finally visit the USSR, even if her
little patch of the Soviet Union would be two hundred
and fifty miles up in space, and so Maggie gets
to work. She had already turned her spare bedroom into
(18:16):
a sort of radio shack, like something out of a
seventy science fiction film, cables MIC's audio equipment and the
radio itself. But even this gear isn't sophisticated enough to
pick up the signal she's after from space. The sheer
distance makes it really, really hard. So Maggie buys a
(18:38):
second radio for her kitchen and fixes a giant antenna
to the roof of her house. Then she wires it
all up to an old Tashiba laptop, a real doorstopper.
Everything's set up ready to go. Maggie tunes the transceiver
to the right frequency for the Soviet space station you
Tube M I R and nothing. She does this over
(19:05):
and over again every day. She wakes up before five,
while her sons are still sleeping. She pads into the kitchen,
tunes in and listens. In the middle of the night,
after she's finished work, planned lessons, marked essays, made dinner,
got her sons ready for bed, she sits up in
(19:27):
the dark listening, and usually she's got the TV news
on in the background, and every night the news brings
stories of chaos from the Soviet Union check points across
Berlin had finally buckled. The Berlin Wall falls November nine,
nineteen eighty nine. A few weeks later in Czechoslovakia, the
(19:50):
people overthrow the Communist governed will give offense monopoly on power.
A month later, in Romania, people shoot their dictator. Chow
Ku is dead, so is his wife. Two years pass.
You heard that right, Two years And all this time
(20:12):
Maggie keeps trying to reach the Soviet space station, getting
up on the roof to tinker with her antenna, buying
and barring every piece of equipment she can. But still
her chances are slim because Mirror is in constant rotation
around the Earth. It's only above Australia for ten minutes
a time, a few times a day. To catch it,
Maggie has to be on the right frequency at the
(20:33):
exact right time, and she starts to feel like she's
running out of options, like nothing she tries is working.
Until one warm morning in January nineteen ninety one, the
sun is just beginning to spread across the roofs of
Colac and Maggie sits in her radio shack, sipping a
(20:55):
warm cup of coffee, and I heard this deep hey
Russian going c q c q c q. This is
you too, am I r looking for contacts? Oh, I
have been waiting two years to talk to you. Yahoo
(21:18):
shoo to talk to you. So I am such a
happy person. I am very very happy. And what can
I tell you about us? To it over? Finally, Maggie
(21:51):
had reached the Soviet Union, and soon the person she
was speaking to almost every day was Sergei Krakov. I
remember waking up one morning, There'll be this loud static
it'd be five in the morning, five thirty in the morning.
Are times when they're having their free time they go
(22:13):
talk to us. See this deep, powerful Russian voice calling
my mother. Rico, you just get shocked into a wiking
and he hears the thick Russian accent, this guy, and
so you know, you put in your class and it
kind of stumble down the hall into the radio shack.
(22:36):
Oh yeah, good morning, good evening. They would speak in
a mixture of English and Russian. Maggie called it runglish.
I have too little, sir over Do you have a wife?
Do you have any children? He even talked to the
students in her computer class. The house would be packed
(23:00):
if with students from school, and they would line up
to ask questions and Maggie would translate. I can remember
they were speaking in these really strong Australian accents, like
Sarah Gay, what do you eat in spice? What do
(23:20):
you do when? The communication wasn't always the smoothest, but
that didn't matter. The desire to communicate, that was the
truly wonderful part about being a him radio operators. Gay
was really into him radio Oh my goodness. In fact,
(23:41):
he called her more than she called him. Sire Gay
and I had this relationship and he wanted to communicate
with me. Sarah Gay needed Maggie because deep down he
(24:02):
was struggling. When Sarage left the Soviet Union, the country
was in turmoil, food was in short supply, millions were
taking to the streets and protest. There was this tinderbox
feeling like anything could happen. And now whenever he asks
Mission control what's going on back home, he gets a
(24:22):
breezy it's fine, a brush off, a change of subject.
So he gets uneasy, frustrated. But then Sarage realizes there
is a way he can get information, information that isn't
filtered through mission control, and he can get that from
his friend in Australia, from Maggie, and so he asks her,
(24:47):
what's going on in my country? What are you hearing now?
We just scour the newspapers and I'd rewrite articles in
very simple English, and I would leave it in my system.
She figured out a way to send the computer on
her written messages, which meant she could type up news.
It was easier than reading out whole articles over a
bad connection. My own system was a tiny bulletin board.
(25:09):
They would read those articles. They loved reading all that stuff.
They didn't get that information from their own central so
I was their information source. Moscow was losing its grip
on the Soviet Union. The rebels are using every kind
of weapon they can lay hands for seventy two years
of foreign domination. Armenia has declared itself independent from the
(25:32):
Soviet Union. Sarage starts to feel like he's losing it,
far away from home, floating in a black void, left
in the dark, until finally, in July nineteen ninety one,
(25:53):
mission control calls him. They say, look, there's a problem.
States are breaking away and we're worried Kazakhstan will be next.
If we lose Kazakhstan, we lose our launch pad bikan Nor.
If we lose Biknor, we lose our access to space.
(26:16):
But they say, we've got an idea. We want to
send a Kazak cosmonaut to Mirror as an olive branch,
a way to keep the Kazakhs on our side. The
thing is, and here's the hitch. He's not experienced, and
he's not an engineer. He definitely won't be able to
take care of the station. So, Sarah game, we're giving
(26:38):
you a choice. You can come back to Earth, back
to your family as planned, and abandon the station to
an unknown fate. Or you can stay as long as
it takes and protect the station, our last hope. You
have three hours to decide to stay or to go.
(27:10):
That's next time on The Last Soviet. The Last Soviet
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and
(27:31):
Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dat Audio and hosted by
me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh Hadakador,
with Oz Wallisham and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive Produced
by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki E Torre from Sama's Dad Audio.
(27:53):
Our executive producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Listsina. Produced
by Asia Fuchs, Dasha litz Sa and Joe Sykes. Writing
by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz,
Music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstring, mixing and
sound designed by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando
(28:16):
villa We, Lissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel BYRNE, Bob Pittman
and Isaac Lee. Many thanks to Ben and josh Iya
Quinto for letting us use some of their mom Maggie's
incredible recordings, and to Australian radio producer Jesse Barrell for
the interview she did with Maggie in twenty eleven. If
you want to hear more shows like this, nothing is
(28:37):
more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers,
ratings and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen,
It was early one morning. I was back in nineteen
ninety one. It was January, it was hot. I left
the radio on. This is Maggie Iaquinto, a Ham radio
operator in the small town of Kolak, Australia. And I
was up very early in the morning and having a
cup of coffee and I heard this crackle. Oh this
(00:33):
is interesting. And I heard this d heavy rushing going
cq cq cq. This is you two M I R
looking for contacts, you two M I R the Soviet
space station. I was so happy, I was unbelievably happy.
(00:58):
I said, well, this is it, and with great nervousness
I pressed the transmit button and I said, you two
M I R. This is VK three CFI. The handle
is Maggie over. Maggie had been trying to make contact
(01:18):
for years and should anyone have seen me at six
in the morning out on my little street in Kolak dancing,
and I wow, I've done it. She was about to
start a long and pretty special relationship with the Soviet
space station and with a certain cosmonaut, Sira gay K
(01:51):
so Sia gay Let's looted that. But Maggie's connection to
Saragay wouldn't just be a cool story to whip out
it dinner parties. Within an hour, the crowd was heading
to the seat of Soviet power as the Soviet Union
unraveled in nineteen ninety one. At allmy armored personnel carriers
on the streets, it was Maggie's who would tell sarage
(02:11):
the truth about what was happening in his country. Armored
personnel carriers rolled by carrying scores of truths, some of
them brandishing machine guns, and Sarage and the other cosmonauts
were hungry for the news, and they called it Rita Rita,
which is my name in Russian. This is CNN breaking news.
So Rita's information. So I was their information source. Good evening.
(02:35):
I'm Jane Randall in Washington. The information Maggie gave Saragey
proved crucial because it would help him make the choice
of a lifetime to stay or to go. Historians may
have trouble describing a day when Kael Garbato resigned as
the president of the Soviet Union, which had already ceased
to exist. I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope, iHeart podcast
(03:00):
an exile content. This is the last Soviet Helen Charmon,
becoming the first Britain in space. She blasted off with
(03:20):
two Soviet cosmonaut repairment on a missions Design chief need
to repair the eighteen Mirrors space station that has been
orbiting the globe for five years now. On May eighteenth,
nineteen ninety one, Helen Sharman, the British woman who won
the TV contest, blasted off into space. Alongside her were
the Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoly Artabaski. They were
(03:42):
leaving behind a country in chaos, a country literally breaking
apart at the seams, the republics Estonia, a human chain
of protests Lithuania. Down in the Baltic Republic of Lithuania,
Latvia flag was raised and they sang the national lands.
They were demanded independence. The parliament in the capital city
(04:02):
of Bakhu voted unanimously to make ourser Bai John an
independent republic. But at that particular moment, flying through space
in a tiny capsule, Helen wasn't really thinking about what
was happening on Earth. She was just enjoying the ride.
(04:25):
A few hundred kilometers above the earth surface, you can
see that the Earth is curved, you can see vasts
sections of the Pacific Ocean, the whole of Western Europe
in Mungo beautiful, inspiring. After forty eight hours, she finally
arrived at the Mere space Station. As Helen Sharman Sawyer's
spacecraft dot with the Mere Station last Monday, it was
(04:48):
the realization of a dream that started more than two
years ago. I remember opening the hatch I went through first.
It was just so nice to float into these long,
thin modules, feeling weightless. I remember being the most natural,
relaxing feeling I'd ever had as she floated in zero
(05:12):
gravity for the first time. Helen discovered her home for
the next week. Tunnels with tight walls and low ceilings, wires, screens, keyboards,
and transmitters stuck to every available surface. The space station
Mirror was a technological marvel, humanity's only outpost in space,
and the Soviets had created it. But in their rush
(05:38):
to get it up there, comfort had to take a
back seat, so the place was kind of a dump,
reeking a mold, mites and body odor. And thanks to
my INSYNCT tour days, I can actually imagine what that
smells like like. Five sweaty teenage boys in a bus
for months. Not pretty. Helen was going up there for
(06:00):
a week, but anatole and sarage for five months. For
it all to work, everything had to be super organized.
Mission control planned. Certainly, my time to the nearest, five minutes,
five minutes, we were told when we needed to awake
around seven am Moscow time, have a space shower, meaning
(06:23):
wipe your body down with a wet towel, and typically
we would have breakfast together chicken with Brunes bread, candy, coffee.
Not my usual breakfast, in fact, I'm not the biggest
fan of Russian food, but I guess it's certainly feeling.
And there was only one toilets in use, so we
have to work around each other in that respect. Yeah,
(06:43):
in space, even something as simple as ping becomes a
whole operation. Everyone gets their own custom shaped funnel which
is attached to a vacuum hose. When you gotta go,
you have to hold the funnel right up against you
unless you want to end up surrounded by droplets of
floating pea, and that as gross. After all that, the showering,
(07:04):
the eating, the peeing, the cosmonauts are ready to get
down to some actual work because the station wasn't in
great shape. There were power outages, computer failures, leaks. It
needed constant maintenance and that is why our guy Sarage
was there. He was the engineer and his job was
(07:24):
to fix all these problems, to keep the station running,
to keep the dream of Soviet space alive. That's without Santatoli,
Arts and Varsity and their Cricolo will spend five months
and plan a record eight walks in space as they
go about repairing the Mirror Station. Helen Charman had her
own special job on Mirror Space farmer. She was growing
(07:45):
wheat potatoes. She even planted a lemon tree, growing food
in space. Been like mad Damon in the Martian the
Scientific Experiment she took part and weren't going to win
any Nobel prizes, but it was nevertheless of British first.
And in the evenings, after they'd finished all their duties,
(08:07):
it was finally time to chill. Sometimes we could just relax.
Is usually a good hour where there's nothing scheduled, where
you can just be together and look out the window,
talk about families and friends that we left behind. The
last couple of years had been strange for Helen she'd
quit her job, broken up with her boyfriend, and let's
(08:28):
face it, I'm going to Russia to train as a
cosmonaut is a pretty good excuse. She'd left her parents
behind in England and moved to the USSR. But she
was twenty seven single. Her whole life was ahead of her.
For Saragey, it's different. He recently got married to someone
in mission control actually, though she wasn't on this mission,
(08:51):
and now they had a baby. Sigey's daughter was born
just a few months before we flew into space, and
he would have missed her terribly. He knew that was
what his mission was assigned to do, and he knew
his wife would look after the door so beautifully. But
your babies grow up very quickly, and Segay was going
(09:13):
to miss a lot of that development. Over five months
in space, sarage was going to watch his daughter Orga
grow up on screen. He could only talk to his
family every two weeks. He'd miss his daughter's first words,
sitting up, crawling, and then her first steps. That's a
(09:36):
big deal, really, but he knew, you know that that
was his job, and he knew he was going to
do that, so he'd thought it all through accepted it,
that isolation from the Earth and the fact that you're
not with all your friends and family anymore. Over that week,
Helen listens to the usually quiet sarage began to open
(09:57):
up about how he's missing summer and Moscow, the long
warm evenings with friends and family, about how his daughter
is growing up without him. Every time, Saragey tells Helen
a little bit more, and Helen found herself looking forward
to their evening chats. But then all too soon it's
(10:20):
time for Helen to return to Earth. It must have
felt weird after so much build up and training, knowing
at twenty seven the first lining for Obit has already
been written. But even stranger was having to leave Space
without Saragey and Anatoly and that final goodbye. It was
(10:43):
heart wrenching because I knew I was leaving them behind
in space. Not only I enjoyed it and I didn't
want to leave to return to Earth just then, but
saying goodbye to what felt like then the two best
friends I had ever had. This morning, it was warm
farewells from the two cosmonauts staying behind, to the mere
crew being relieved, and to Helen. They passed through the
(11:04):
hatch into their Sawyer's craft, which I'm doped from MEA
and just before half past ten this morning fired its
retro rockets. Less than half an hour later they were
parachuting to Earth. Watched firemission control and when Helen landed
back in the USSR before going home to her parents,
she actually visited Saragey's family. I went round to visit
his wife and his baby after I returned from space
(11:27):
while Segey was still in space. That's how close they'd become.
And my hair was, you know, I'd had it cut
quite short, and the baby Auga said dad. When I arrived,
Baby Auga called Helen dad to her. Saragey was just
some stranger with short hair, much like Helen. And that's
(11:50):
when Helen realized exactly how much Sarahgey was missing. And
now Sarah finds himself missing Helen loneliness is starting to
gnaw at him. Downtime on the space station seems to
drag on forever, and one evening, almost out of boredom,
(12:14):
sarage starts flicking through the handover notes left by the
previous crew, and that's when he sees something strange amongst
the detailed log about technical issues and repairs. There's a
series of scribbles, numbers, letters, and symbols, each with dates
and times next to them. It looks like some kind
(12:36):
of call log, but cosmonauts only get one personal call
every week or so these are way more regular. It's
beginning to look like the last crew weren't just using
the radio to call home. They were speaking to people
all over the world, to people in Taiwan or Ireland
(12:59):
or Ohio, to people in their living room, to amateur
radio operators. And there's one call sign that comes up
again and again, and next to it the word Australia
(13:23):
v K three CFI Nervous. He tunes the radio to
the right frequency and waits nothing. The next day he
finds himself going through the motions until he can try again.
Nothing days pass. Every night he keeps coming back to
(13:47):
the radio, listening to the same old empty cracker. But
one evening, just as he's about to call it quits,
a woman's voice Physics into Life. Two years earlier, nineteen
(14:15):
eighty nine, Australia. Kolak a small town just outside of Melbourne,
twelve thousand people, best known for its dairy farm somewhere
in that town. A woman is in a makeshift radio
shack in her house, trying to get through to the
Soviet space station. It's VK three CFI Maggie aya Quinto.
(14:38):
I can remember her dancing around the kitchen, flinging a
T twel over ahead, dancing to some type of Balkan music.
That's been Maggie's son. Maggie died in twenty fourteen, but
we spoke to her sons and to an Australian radio
producer named Jesse Burrell, who sent us an interview she
did with Maggie in twenty eleven. She had a quirky personality.
(15:02):
She had a fun sense of humor. She liked puns.
She liked bad action movies. She liked playing softball, She
liked Macedonian dancing. She spoke Russian. Maggie was born in
America and learned Russian at college in the early sixties,
during the height of the Cold War. She was just
fascinated with the USSR. Maggie followed the news of the
(15:24):
Soviet Union anyway she could, reading the papers, listening to
the radio, watching TV. She was convinced that one day
she would visit, but then life guide in the way,
she met a guy and moved to Australia with him.
She had two sons and started working as a computer
teacher at the local high school in Colac. The sides
(15:45):
of Colac. It was a good bakery there, not exactly
what Maggie's dreams were made of. Even the bakery was
closed on weekends. No Balkan dancing club, definitely no Russians
to talk to. But Maggie had a secret weapon cable here,
(16:06):
all right, and so that just comes into the radio
shock here Ham radio. I always wanted to be a
Ham radio operator when I was fifteen or sixteen, I
just wanted to do this. Ham Radio a way for
people to talk to each other from home using radio waves,
a more advanced version of the ten can on a string.
(16:27):
It promised freedom, independence, adventure. There's no way that I
can visit every country in the world, but I can
with Ham Radio. Maggie talked to all sorts of people
and even went to Ham Radio conferences on weekends. They
would always be hosted at some sort of basketball court,
and they'd just be tables set up along the walls
(16:48):
stacked with different types of gear, like different types of radios,
and everyone would call each other by their unique call sign.
It's like code names, a jumble of letters and numbers
that shows who's calling and where from. In Australia, all
of the Ham radio call signs start with VK. India's
vu vs Canada. You get the idea, and three represents Victoria,
(17:09):
so I'm VK three. And then the suffix, which is
two letters or three represents your unique identity, so I
was VK three CFI and no one else in the
world can have that call sign. And not these Ham
radio conferences, people would actually address Maggie not by her name,
but by her call sign. This is the level of
(17:31):
geekiness we're talking about. And then at one of these conferences,
she starts hearing a rumor, a whisper going around the
community that a handful of Hams have managed to get
through to space, not just any space, but space behind
the Iron curtain, the space station mirror. Maggie can't get
(17:55):
it out of her head, the idea of speaking to
a real Soviet and she starts thinking, maybe this is
my chance to finally visit the USSR, even if her
little patch of the Soviet Union would be two hundred
and fifty miles up in space, and so Maggie gets
to work. She had already turned her spare bedroom into
(18:16):
a sort of radio shack, like something out of a
seventy science fiction film, cables MIC's audio equipment and the
radio itself. But even this gear isn't sophisticated enough to
pick up the signal she's after from space. The sheer
distance makes it really, really hard. So Maggie buys a
(18:38):
second radio for her kitchen and fixes a giant antenna
to the roof of her house. Then she wires it
all up to an old Tashiba laptop, a real doorstopper.
Everything's set up ready to go. Maggie tunes the transceiver
to the right frequency for the Soviet space station you
Tube M I R and nothing. She does this over
(19:05):
and over again every day. She wakes up before five,
while her sons are still sleeping. She pads into the kitchen,
tunes in and listens. In the middle of the night,
after she's finished work, planned lessons, marked essays, made dinner,
got her sons ready for bed, she sits up in
(19:27):
the dark listening, and usually she's got the TV news
on in the background, and every night the news brings
stories of chaos from the Soviet Union check points across
Berlin had finally buckled. The Berlin Wall falls November nine,
nineteen eighty nine. A few weeks later in Czechoslovakia, the
(19:50):
people overthrow the Communist governed will give offense monopoly on power.
A month later, in Romania, people shoot their dictator. Chow
Ku is dead, so is his wife. Two years pass.
You heard that right, Two years And all this time
(20:12):
Maggie keeps trying to reach the Soviet space station, getting
up on the roof to tinker with her antenna, buying
and barring every piece of equipment she can. But still
her chances are slim because Mirror is in constant rotation
around the Earth. It's only above Australia for ten minutes
a time, a few times a day. To catch it,
Maggie has to be on the right frequency at the
(20:33):
exact right time, and she starts to feel like she's
running out of options, like nothing she tries is working.
Until one warm morning in January nineteen ninety one, the
sun is just beginning to spread across the roofs of
Colac and Maggie sits in her radio shack, sipping a
(20:55):
warm cup of coffee, and I heard this deep hey
Russian going c q c q c q. This is
you too, am I r looking for contacts? Oh, I
have been waiting two years to talk to you. Yahoo
(21:18):
shoo to talk to you. So I am such a
happy person. I am very very happy. And what can
I tell you about us? To it over? Finally, Maggie
(21:51):
had reached the Soviet Union, and soon the person she
was speaking to almost every day was Sergei Krakov. I
remember waking up one morning, There'll be this loud static
it'd be five in the morning, five thirty in the morning.
Are times when they're having their free time they go
(22:13):
talk to us. See this deep, powerful Russian voice calling
my mother. Rico, you just get shocked into a wiking
and he hears the thick Russian accent, this guy, and
so you know, you put in your class and it
kind of stumble down the hall into the radio shack.
(22:36):
Oh yeah, good morning, good evening. They would speak in
a mixture of English and Russian. Maggie called it runglish.
I have too little, sir over Do you have a wife?
Do you have any children? He even talked to the
students in her computer class. The house would be packed
(23:00):
if with students from school, and they would line up
to ask questions and Maggie would translate. I can remember
they were speaking in these really strong Australian accents, like
Sarah Gay, what do you eat in spice? What do
(23:20):
you do when? The communication wasn't always the smoothest, but
that didn't matter. The desire to communicate, that was the
truly wonderful part about being a him radio operators. Gay
was really into him radio Oh my goodness. In fact,
(23:41):
he called her more than she called him. Sire Gay
and I had this relationship and he wanted to communicate
with me. Sarah Gay needed Maggie because deep down he
(24:02):
was struggling. When Sarage left the Soviet Union, the country
was in turmoil, food was in short supply, millions were
taking to the streets and protest. There was this tinderbox
feeling like anything could happen. And now whenever he asks
Mission control what's going on back home, he gets a
(24:22):
breezy it's fine, a brush off, a change of subject.
So he gets uneasy, frustrated. But then Sarage realizes there
is a way he can get information, information that isn't
filtered through mission control, and he can get that from
his friend in Australia, from Maggie, and so he asks her,
(24:47):
what's going on in my country? What are you hearing now?
We just scour the newspapers and I'd rewrite articles in
very simple English, and I would leave it in my system.
She figured out a way to send the computer on
her written messages, which meant she could type up news.
It was easier than reading out whole articles over a
bad connection. My own system was a tiny bulletin board.
(25:09):
They would read those articles. They loved reading all that stuff.
They didn't get that information from their own central so
I was their information source. Moscow was losing its grip
on the Soviet Union. The rebels are using every kind
of weapon they can lay hands for seventy two years
of foreign domination. Armenia has declared itself independent from the
(25:32):
Soviet Union. Sarage starts to feel like he's losing it,
far away from home, floating in a black void, left
in the dark, until finally, in July nineteen ninety one,
(25:53):
mission control calls him. They say, look, there's a problem.
States are breaking away and we're worried Kazakhstan will be next.
If we lose Kazakhstan, we lose our launch pad bikan Nor.
If we lose Biknor, we lose our access to space.
(26:16):
But they say, we've got an idea. We want to
send a Kazak cosmonaut to Mirror as an olive branch,
a way to keep the Kazakhs on our side. The
thing is, and here's the hitch. He's not experienced, and
he's not an engineer. He definitely won't be able to
take care of the station. So, Sarah game, we're giving
(26:38):
you a choice. You can come back to Earth, back
to your family as planned, and abandon the station to
an unknown fate. Or you can stay as long as
it takes and protect the station, our last hope. You
have three hours to decide to stay or to go.
(27:10):
That's next time on The Last Soviet. The Last Soviet
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and
(27:31):
Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dat Audio and hosted by
me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh Hadakador,
with Oz Wallisham and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive Produced
by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki E Torre from Sama's Dad Audio.
(27:53):
Our executive producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Listsina. Produced
by Asia Fuchs, Dasha litz Sa and Joe Sykes. Writing
by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz,
Music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstring, mixing and
sound designed by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando
(28:16):
villa We, Lissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel BYRNE, Bob Pittman
and Isaac Lee. Many thanks to Ben and josh Iya
Quinto for letting us use some of their mom Maggie's
incredible recordings, and to Australian radio producer Jesse Barrell for
the interview she did with Maggie in twenty eleven. If
you want to hear more shows like this, nothing is
(28:37):
more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers,
ratings and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen,
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