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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 an exile content.

This is the last Soviet Helen Charmon, becoming the first Britain in space.

She blasted off with 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 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 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.

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 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 ero 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings and reviews, so please spread the love wherever you listen,