In a Moscow TV studio.

A thirty something guy with thick, wavy hair leans forward in his chair.

His name is Artemy Troitzky, the barricade building journalist from the last episode.

He's about to invite you to something revolutionary from my TV offices.

I've made the last announcement alive, saying the Gagart Party is starting very soon.

You are welcome to the first ever Rave in Moscow, the first ever Rave in Moscow, a rager to end all ragers and named after your Gagarin, the first human to journey into space.

And it will be techno music played all night, Russian, Latvian and German and French DJs, and the location also cosmonaut themed.

The Space Pavilion a museum dedicated to the glories of the space program.

It was like Snayland.

You walk in, There's a curved ceiling made of glass.

It's dark, the music so loud you feel it in your chest.

All around you are models and relics from the Soviets glorious space program, satellites, the capsule that sent Gagaren into space, gagaren space suit from his flight.

And the place is packed bodies, sweating, bodies, dancing, throwing their heads up to the sky, young people free at last to party.

I think that the whole of cool Moscow was there, artists, actors, models, the new generation creating something beautiful from the ashes of the old world.

We felt like a brand new country which is aiming at the bright future, which will be totally different from what we've had before.

But what would that mean for the cosmonauts, the Soviet citizens who once represented the future?

What would happen to them in the new Russia.

I'm Lance bass And from Kaleidoscope Exile and iHeart Podcasts.

This is the last Soviet mingling with the rush hour traffic, army armored personnel carriers on the streets of Moscow.

The August nineteen ninety one, a faction of hardline communists just tried to take control of the Soviet government tanks in Red Square.

The official tanks rattled through the streets of Moscow and hundreds of thousands of people stood up to them.

Three civilians had died last night when light tanks tried to slam through a barricade.

In just three days, the coup felled, the hardliners were pushed out, and the people won.

Tonight n Caligorbatrophia is again president of the Soviet Union, the man who tried to bring him down or either under arrest or being hunted.

But as the dust settled and all of the old values and structures of the Soviet world fell away, a brand new system was beginning to take shape.

As if to harold this new dawn, something very unusual was about to happen.

On the Soviet space station, where our man Sarage is still hard at work.

The cosmonauts on Mirror were about to become the face of one of the most famous brands in the world, Coca Cola.

If you taste it, there's the burn and bite at the back of your throat for a moment that then gives you the In the summer of nineteen ninety, Craig Kohan was twenty seven years old, newly single, and ready to take Moscow by storm, one can of Coca Cola at a time.

I was sent to figure out how to build the cocola system in the Sovietinia.

That was the brief.

Craig was the new face of capitalism, the alternative to the old Soviet way of doing things.

Remember, in the USSR, private enterprise had been banned completely for decades.

So Craig was a representative of a totally new mindset, a totally new way of life.

And you could say Craig was born to do this job.

He grew up in Toronto and what he called a McDonald's family, all the panti, sat sauces, cheez pickles, McDonald's big Man.

When he was a kid, his dad, George Cohan, brought the first ever McDonald's to Canada.

Canadians went crazy for it.

Break today at McDonald's where your dollar gets a break every day.

George Cohan even had a bus called the Big Mac Bus, used to raise money for charity.

And then in nineteen seventy six, during the Montreal Olympics, the Canadian government came to Craig's dad with a strange favor.

Would he please let the Soviet delegation use his bus to get around the city And so we met all the Soviets in nineteen seventy six.

They rode the big backbus and in the evening they went out to dinner and what did they eat, Yeah, you guessed it, Big Max.

And that's when Craig's dad had an idea.

Watching these big Russian guys tucking into burghers and fries.

He thought, I know what I'm gonna make my life's mission to bring McDonald's to the Soviet Union.

It became from my father a fourteen year, amazing epic odyssey to get the first McDonald's built in Pushkin Square.

Pushkin Square is a square in central Moscow, a stone's throw from the Kremlin.

And so that was fourteen years of conversations at home, conversations in the car, conversations at dinner about the Soviets.

Year in and year out, they would host a rotating cast of Soviets at the Kohen Residence, anyone and everyone who could get a word back to the Kremlin about the wonders of McDonald's, whether they're ambassadors or ballet dancers, or artists or politicians.

And then in January nineteen ninety, well, it's been fourteen years in the making, and today finally McDonald's threw open the doors to its first restaurant in Moscow.

Thirty thousand people stood in line that day.

They started lining up this morning at four o'clock.

This woman doesn't know what she just date, but she says it was unusual and delicious.

Clearly George Kohen had been on to something ahead of McDonald's.

Canada waxed the lyric in this day and age, it's nice when the people can come out and get meat, reputations and milk of the highest quality.

Craig watched in amazement at what his dad had just done.

Happiness today in Moscow lay in the communal pursuit of a big mac, but he wanted to do something even bigger.

For Craig, it was about more than just business.

He was an idealist, and he had this vision that capitalism could actually bring Russians together with the rest of the world, that East and West could unite under the banner of a big brand.

In December nineteen ninety, he flew to Moscow to attend the opening of his dad's McDonald's, and while he was there he bumped into the CEO of Coca Cola.

He was drunk one night at the Kremlin after the opening of McDonald's.

The CEO of Coca Cola looked at Craig and had an idea, and he said, Craig, I'm thinking of three things.

You the Soviet Union and you and the Soviet Union.

Big companies like Coca Cola saw an incredible opportunity in the Soviet Union.

It was an open market.

Western products basically didn't exist, so the potential for profit was mouthwatering.

And now the CEO has the perfect man for the job, Craig Cohan, the son of the guy who got McDonald's into Moscow.

But this was a very different challenge.

Craig's dad had opened a single McDonald's.

The CEO of Coke wanted cans in every corner shop in Russia, total domination.

Craig accepted the challenge stage one reconnaissance.

For the first six months June of nineteen ninety December of nineteen ninety, I spent every day going to every single metro stop in the city understanding how people drink beverages.

You know, they used to have these amazing vending machines, or there was a single glass.

Incidentally, just when you expect hard frost, Moscow has a thirsty heat wave.

So buy yourself a cups.

I'd think when you wash the glass and you would get a cool beverage a cavass out of that.

Cavas not my favorite drink, but if sour bread and liquid form floats your boat, you might like it.

And it's probably the second most popular drink in Russia after vodka, which was definitely more my thing, especially the infused ones.

The pineapple very good.

You would wash the glass and put it back in the next person and use the same glass, wash it and put it back and put five copecks in.

So that's how people were experiencing beverages, very different to American vending machines, and so Craig had a ton of questions he needed to ask people lining up for their glass of cavas, although he was careful not to tell them he worked for Coca.

No one really knew that I was working there.

I was this interested guy doing a study on beverages in the Soviet Union.

It was like he was an undercover agent.

People just opened their arms to me for all the information, and that's how I got data.

And then I worked at a chokovskis a vote for two and a half weeks.

It was a champagne factory, and so I saw exactly how they mixed the product.

I saw how they mixed the concentrate.

I saw the rats in the sugar.

I saw the whole system, the whole Soviet system.

After a few months Craig felt like the reconnaissance stage of his mission was complete.

But for Craig and Coca Cola to actually launch themselves in the Soviet Union, they needed a way to get into the hearts, minds, and eventually the mouths of Soviets.

So they were going to have to get creative.

Cocola never been on the North Pole, and so we got colas a North Pole.

The company sponsored a famous Russian Arctic explorer.

He put a Cocacola in his bag, and he took his husky, bringing huskies, and he went up to the North Pole and took a pictures the North Pole crank, and then it was time to head to the Kremlin.

I made sure that when Bush met Gorbachov there was a Coca Cola on that table.

So Craig starts thinking, what's the next frontier.

If you could go to the North Pole and you can get it on the table at the Kremlin, you could certainly get it in space infiltrating the Soviet space station.

This was going to be the most spectacular triumph for Coca Cola and good old fashioned American capitalism.

And so Coca Cola's engineers started working away in a lab in Atlanta trying to create a coke can that could survive on mirror, and after months of work, it was ready, a little red can that looks a lot like the ones we have here on Earth, except it was fitted with a strange white nozzle and a metal button on top.

This was meant to stop it from exploding in ero grabbing.

On August twentieth, nineteen ninety one, the Soviet Space Agency launched their M nine cargo spacecraft from Bikanore in kazakh Stop.

On board is a crate of spaceproof Coca Cola cans, making their groundbreaking journey to the space station.

The next day, Sarage presses a button on top of the can and it squirts the coke into his mouth.

Burn and bite at the back of your throat.

Even in space.

It's a huge moment.

Although Serge wasn't really sure about the taste.

His Ham radio friend Maggie asked him, do you like Coca cola?

What's it taste like in space?

And Sitgay said, It's all right in space, he said, but insduce his better.

No matter, Coca Cola and capitalism had won the day.

It was like integration Finally, of these two opposing Cold War cultures that have come together, and Coca Cola being a little moment that brought people together.

For idealists like Craig, it seemed like the beginning of a new future for Russia, Sergey and the space program.

But there was a problem lurking just around the corner.

Not everyone in the New Russia had such noble intentions as Craig.

I think there's two ways to approach this country, that's Gregg in an NBC interview from the time.

One is to be a pioneer and the others to be a pirate and coming here and try to courage the land.

And it turns out in the New Russia the line between pioneer and pirate was extremely thin.

Why did you put a rock and propelled hand grenade through my office this morning?

And he said, I've been wanting to meet you, and I really didn't know how else to get your attention.

That's after the break.

Just a few months after Surge drank the can of coke on the space station, the Soviet flag came down for the very last time over the Kremlin in Moscow.

The hammer and sickle is lord for the last time, the Soviet Union was over.

The tricolor banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.

Communism was dead, and while men like Craig Cohan saw this as a moment of hope for the future, the lives of ordinary Russians were plunged into uncertainty.

I mean, when you lose the system that you've grown up in and you have no idea wor else to go.

A lot of people went out and planting potatoes at their dotches.

That's Serge Schmimon, the former New York Times correspondent in Moscow.

We've been hearing from throughout this series.

Our office car was a Volvo station wagon.

So some of these people would ask us to go with them to their dotch and bring back their potatoes because you know, big bags to bring them back to Moscow.

They were planting potatoes because at that point in time, potatoes were the safest way to make sure you had food.

The ruble was collapsing, the shops filled up, but the number of people who could afford anything plummeted.

People's life savings were suddenly worthless.

So he went into a period of kind of an elemental primitive economy where factories traded with each other.

You know, I'll give you a window if you give me a banana.

Remember hearing about the Russian black market.

It always sounded so spylike, so covert, so underground.

Well here it is at its lowest level, and strange things gained value.

This man stripped down a TV set, hoping to make enough money just to buy milk or bread a peck of Marlboroughs.

Marlborough's cigarettes was roughly the equivalent of a dollar.

You' Barnert, who was a barter economy and never went anywhere without four or five cartons of Marlborough's.

A cigarette was better value than cash.

Because when communism collapsed, the new government made a drastic decision.

With the help of economic advisors from America, they decided the best way to transition the economy from a communist to a capitalist system was to do it all at once.

In the old Soviet Union, the government controlled prices.

Overnight, those price controls were removed, which meant that the candy that used to cost one rouble now cost two thousand.

Shoppers stead in disbelief at what they now have to pay for the most basic goods.

Ham for example, pull at more than a thousand roubles a kilo.

That's two months worth of wages for most people.

The economists called it shock therapy.

You had to let the system go, and it had to find its own bottom, and it had to start rebuilding.

Overnight the cash economy collapsed.

The problem for shoppers here these days isn't the long lines Russians are used to waiting in line.

Their concern is what happens when they reached the end of that line.

There they'll find either bread or milk three or four times higher than they were just weeks ago, or worse, no food at all.

This also led to a wave of crime sweeping through Moscow.

You had a lot of theft.

The streets became dangerous.

They say that some people belong to the mafia here.

Do you know anything about that?

No?

No, no, for us, you know, I mean we were a dressed in Western closing in Western cars.

Our car was stolen twice.

This man's parting shot my favorite.

The mafia is forever.

Organized crime was emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Empire.

A period of straight up banitry set in.

In order to get by in the new Russia, you had to do things that you would never have dreamt of just a few months earlier.

By early nineteen ninety two, Craig Khan is setting up his Coca Cola factory in Moscow, but he's beginning to realize this is not the friendly, hopeful Russia he arrived in back in nineteen ninety.

Things have changed so quickly, and if he's going to succeed, it's becoming clear he's going to have to change too.

I'm on the way to the office at five thirty in the morning to try to start up all the equipment, et cetera, etc.

And I get a note from our security that a Rocca propelled hand grenate just went through my office.

No one's hurt, but Craig is shaken.

This is a far cry from the quiet streets of Toronto, and I said, oh, that's good.

I'm glad it wasn't there.

So I asked the security where was it?

Shot?

From otoshop from the big apartment block across the street.

I have this very clearly in my head, so I said, okay, let's go find out who it is.

So hard thumping Craig climbs into one of those old Soviet elevators, about the size of a porta potty and smelling like one too.

He's got no clue what he'll find at the top.

I go to the twelfth floor and I meet with the head of the San Suski Simia, the san Subski family.

It's like a local racketeering group that started rough enough people.

I sat down with him, just one on one, and I said, why did you put a rock and propelled hand grenade through my office this morning?

And he said, I've been wanting to meet you, And I really didn't know how else to get your attention, because I'd like my guys just to be your drivers.

And I said, perfect, you didn't have to do that, and so I hired a bunch of the guys.

So now these grenade throwing mobster are working for Craig and Coca Cola.

The man who'd come to the Soviet Union as a pioneer started looking more and more like a pirate.

A new breed of person began to take control in Russia.

While most people lost their life savings after the Soviet Union collapsed, a handful saw an opportunity, an opportunity to buy entire industries, oil, gas, raw materials for peanuts.

These people, you might know them as oligarchs, became the rulers of the new capitalist Russia.

And that meant that people who used to be valued in Soviet society, teachers, doctors, cosmonauts, no longer were.

That's when I remember long lines of really well dressed people selling, you know, sweaters and whatever they could choose.

It was terribly said.

Everything had turned topsy turvy.

Those who had been up were now down.

University professors selling socks in the subway, criminals working for Coca Cola, and cosmonauts now making less money than taxi drivers.

In early nineteen ninety two, Serge was making five hundred rubles a month, just two dollars and fifty cents at the new exchange rate.

He was a highly trained engineer, a national hero, still up in space, risking his life for his country, and now struggling to support his wife and baby daughter.

And that's when rumors started going around that things had gotten so bad the cosmonauts were actually going on strike.

There was a silence from Citigay at that point.

He's quite a voluble, garrylous type of man.

He always has something interesting to say.

But there was silence at that point.

That's after the break.

It's a sunny morning on the other side of the world from Moscow.

Ham radio operator Maggie I Quinto is out running errands in Colak, her little town in western Australia.

She parks her car on the wide, flat highway that cuts through the middle of the town and gets her shopping bags out of the trunk.

She's heading towards the bakery when a battered farm truck pulls up next to her.

I would be stopped in the street and people who my heart they knew, would say, how are our cosmonauts?

Our cosmonauts.

It turns out, in the months that Maggie had been talking to Mirror, the whole town of Colak had fallen in love with these Soviet spacemen too.

These guys would pass me.

I've never seen these farmers before, and they look at me and point to the sky and go are they okay?

But today the farmer driving the truck looks worried.

He's heard things about the cosmonauts.

The cosmonauts salaries are worthless.

Their families can barely afford groceries, so they're gonna stop working.

They're going on strike.

Maggie tries to dismiss the stories as rumors, but soon newspapers or publishing stuff that's even more wild.

Not only are the cosmonauts on strike, they're actually stuck in space.

These newspaper stories have terrifying headlines like junked in space and stuck in endless orbit.

They're being stranded there, They're being punished.

That's what the rumors said, that they were left there deliberately, no one was going to bring them down.

They even say Serage is ill.

The journalists rang up Sigh his wife and asked her about his illness, which is must have been rather devastating for her to listen to.

All this time, Maggie's thinking, what's going on here?

She's been talking to Sergee nearly every day and he seems fine, chatting to her about their kids, his spacewalks, Newham radio technology, but she can't shake this doubt.

Are they okay?

Is there something they aren't telling me?

And then one day Maggie gets a call.

A radio station in Melbourne rang me and said, please, can you find out is it true about all of these things?

Now?

In the past, Maggie has stayed clear of asking Sarage about politics, not wanting to put him on edge.

But today, with the world's press writing these strange stories and people stopping her in the street, Maggie decides she's going to be direct with Sarage.

She's going to ask for the truth.

What is really happening to her friends, her cosmonauts?

So is it okay?

I'll send them a message again electronically, and I'll ask them these questions.

But there's no guarantee.

They're very, very busy up there.

They have much work to do, and I don't know if they'll answer.

Her fingers shaking a little, Maggie started typing.

So the questions.

I asked them, where are you hungry?

Is it true that you're on strike?

Has your supply ship docked?

Do you like being on strike?

And they say, Segay, that you have fallen ill?

Is that true?

And those were the questions.

Maggie hits send and she waits on mirror.

Sarah Gay sees the question flood in.

He's taken aback for months.

Speaking to Maggie had just been a bit of light relief, a bit of fun, But between the lines of her anxious questions, he can see her concern for him.

He knows he has to respond straight away.

Minutes Maggie's old Tshiba is flashing with a new message, Greetings Rita, which is my name, he said.

Australia is located at the other side of the Earth from Moscow.

It's very far so news is greatly changed when it reaches you.

People in Australia and Moscow wok upside down from each other.

Maybe this is the reason your news arrives reversed.

But what about the strike everyone's talking about.

We're Sergey and his colleagues refusing to work, and he said that there was a threatened strike at flight Control.

But it's impossible, he said, for him to go on strike.

And as you can imagine, they have to keep things running on the space station and if they were to go on strike, they would die.

Maggie is relieved, but then she gets another call from a journalist.

Listen, I've got this tip off.

You're not going to believe this, but apparently the Russians are thinking of selling the space station.

Maggie thinks fake news.

She knows things are changing over there, but the Russians would never put their space station up for sale.

This is the crowning glory of Soviet space technology.

But the journalist says to her, look, the next time you're talking to these fellows, asked them about the selling of Mirror the space station, and so I did.

There was a silence from Sergey at that point.

He's quite a voluble, garrulous type of man.

He always has something interesting to say.

But there was silence at that point, and he said, look, I'll talk with mission control.

And at that point I'm going to guess, and I don't really know, but I'm going to guess at that news had not reached them.

After everything Sarage has been through archologically, it must have been devastating.

Look, I reckon it would have been to hear from someone in Australia that the country he'd sacrificed everything for might sell his home from under his feet.

That's next time on The Last Soviet.

The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh had a Kador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas Linos from iHeart executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio are Executive producers are Joe Sikes and Dasha Lissina.

Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sikes.

Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstrin, Mixing and sound design by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando Via Welissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and Isaac Lee.

If you want to hear more shows like this, nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen.