Mission Control just outside of Moscow.

Picture of vast hall with rows of desks and those massive eighties computers.

It's February nineteen eighty five and a few ground controllers are trawling through graphs and signals sent from a space station called Salute seven, the pride and joy of the Soviet space program.

Right now, Salute seven hasn't got any cosmonauts on board.

It's on autopilot, orbiting the Earth, waiting for its next crew.

So the ground control's work is fairly routine.

They record data, talk about their weekend plans.

But then right at the end of the shift, someone notices something weird on one of the dashboards.

There's a light flashing on the control panel, a warning light.

Everyone's on their feet trying to fix it, but then another light goes down, and another.

One by one, the whole dashboard goes dark.

A horrified silence fills the room.

They've just lost the space station.

It's like a dead piece of thing in orbit.

That's also Sadiki, our Soviet space galu heard last time.

They couldn't find any kind of signal, nothing from the station.

It's essentially floating, spinning, probably out of control in Earth.

Orbit, and it's huge, this huge chunk of metal.

If they don't control it, it might fall uncontrollably uninhabited country and it could land on a city, a village somewhere, and so they're very afraid of that.

Thousands of people could die.

It would be a human tragedy and a huge embarrassment for the Soviet Union, and so they need to do something that's never been done before, to land on a dead object in space and out of control chunk of metal and bring it back to life.

I'm Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope.

iHeart podcast and exile content.

This is the last Soviet as y'all know.

I am obsessed with space and with this one particular space movie.

Houston, we have a problem.

Apollo thirteen.

I freaking love this film.

In my books, Tom Hanks can do no wrong.

Power up the level three hours by the checklist.

We don't have that much time.

It tells the story of a space flight going seriously awry.

The rescue mission became live news.

All of America was watching, asking themselves with the astronauts, make it home alive.

The Apoto thirteen to the Moon is in serious jeopardy.

Disasters are one of the big reasons we fall in love with space.

Now coming to the moment, the last moments of Apolo thirteen as it begins it's re entry.

The best thing we can do now is just to listen.

I'm hopeful.

The stakes could not be higher, and it's all beamed into your living room twenty four seven.

They hate it.

All three shoots out great and extremely loud applause here in mission control.

But the story I'm about to tell you now took place in complete secrecy.

No one was allowed to know about it.

And yet it's the Soviet Union's very own Apollo thirteen.

And the man who would lead it from the ground Yep, you guessed it, Sergey Krekolev.

In our last episode, we left our cosmonaut in nineteen sixty one, aged three, the Soviet Union was still recovering from the wreckage of World War Two, but they'd beat the Germans and now, against all the odds, they'd conquered space too.

O.

Space was going to be the future of the Soviet Union, and that generation who grew up in the nineteen sixties were really sort of, I think, encouraged to think in utopian terms.

The Soviet Union putting the first person in space was the defining moment of Saragey's childhood, and there was a sense that this was just the beginning of space exploration, of the Soviet Union's rise on the global stage.

All Russia's just wild about.

Jurica got in, first man, took conquer space.

Please.

For Sarah Gay, life's possibilities must have seemed endless.

So I think it's very much part of his DNA and that generation in particular, growing up in the sixties and seventies as children and then as young teams, to be immersed in that world of future oriented thinking about the Soviet Union.

Future oriented things are good and you only expect them to get better now.

If you grew up in the United States during the tail end of the Cold War, like me, I know what you're thinking, you'd have been fed the same propaganda that the Soviet Union was a cold, gray place where kids go hungry.

Well, in the sixties, that was more likely to be true of America.

Seventy three percent of all Clay County families received less than three thousand dollars.

They're very young, their mothers, the aged are the most numerous inhabitants of this permanent culture of poverty.

Yep, Because in the Soviet Union, basic stuff, food, a roof over your head that was all provided for by the state.

Whether in Communist headquarters in Odessa on the Black Sea or in the Hermitage art gallery in Leningrad, every activity is controlled by directives that originate under the gold domes of the Kremlin.

So if you're Saragai, a young boy coming of age in Leningrad in the sixties and seventies, things would have seemed pretty good.

He didn't grow up in luxury, but it was a care free environment.

He knew everything was going to be just fine.

He went to school, he went swimming, he joined the city's gymnastics team and the local airplane club, all for free and in a spare time.

He was doing what all the other kids were doing.

In the Soviet Union, he would have been leading the same kinds of exciting popular science fiction novels titles like Hard to Be a God, The Land of Crimson Clouds, The Man from Mars.

It was all about space, limitless possibility, utopia, and not just in the pages of his books.

He would have grown up watching these hero cosmonauts being eulogized he was proud of fellow cosmonauts and Russell and doing amazing things in outer space.

After Gagarin, the USSR just kept beating the Americans to it.

First probe to Mars, landing on Mars by an unmanned space probe from US.

First woman in space, space girl, Valentina Tereshkova.

There's one of place in history.

First person to walk in open space.

Man for the first time has stepped forth into the emptiness of space.

Okay, the Americans got to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, obviously a big deal, but the Soviets were working on something bigger, a permanent home in space, a space station where cosmonauts can go live and actually do some science.

The Soviets wanted to spend months up there, maybe eventually forever.

It looked like a weird lego tube with solar panel wings.

They call it Salute one, and over the next decade they upgraded it with better and better versions, Salute two, Salute three, kind of like iPhones, until they got the best version yet, Salute seven.

The Americans were jealous, they had nothing like it.

Once again, the Soviets were winning, and it's in this atmosphere that Sarage finished school and decided he too wants to become a cosmonaut to go and live on a Soviet space station.

And so we went to an engine a university and in nineteen eighty one he graduated top of his class, and because of that he was chosen to work for a very special place, the same place that designed the first space satellite, the first spaceship carrying the first man, a place called Anarkia.

Sarage starts out working on instruction manuals for cosmonauts, not the most exciting work, but it will come in handy because one day in February nineteen eighty five, Serge gets a call the space station Salume seven.

It's lost power.

It's dead.

If we don't rescue it, the Americans will overtake us and win the space race.

So here's the plan.

It's kind of crazy.

We're going to send two cosmonauts to this dead thing and try to turn the power back on.

But we don't really know how to do it because it's never been done before.

So we need someone who can figure out how to do it, someone to lead a mission from the ground, someone who knows the station back to front, and we're thinking this could be you.

June sixth, nineteen eighty five, ten forty am Mission Control, a loud, ominous rumbling starts up on Sarage's radio.

It's a sound of a rocket taking off.

Two cosmouts are launching into space to the dead, empty station.

Sarah has got a big job ahead of it in about forty eight hours, the time it'll take to reach Earth's orbit.

He's gonna have to tell these two cosmonauts how they're going to do this thing no one's ever done before.

How to land on a dead station.

Usually landing on a working station is the easy bed.

It's all done automatically.

But this station is dead, and that means Sarage has to figure out how to do it manually.

How to land on the station with nothing to tell you the way, the speed, the angle.

It's a bit like driving a race car at night with no lights, no markers, but Saragey is on it.

He goes into a simulator, a kind of fake spaceship.

It's the same thing I trained on.

It literally looks and feels like a real spaceship, but it's set up in a warehouse on Earth.

The next best thing to being in space, so he starts practicing how to get the tiny ship to spend at the same angle as the station, how to get the right speed, and his accuracy has to be exact.

If he's off by an inch millimeters, even the rocket will crash into the station and explode.

The cosmonauts are dead.

He tries again and again and again, failing and failing, until he's got it.

He races back to mission control, calls up to the cosmonauts and tells them this is how you do it.

It's now or never.

Hundreds of miles away, the cosmonauts can see the looming bulk of the station through their porthole.

It's spinning out of control, a twenty ton chunk of metals, and they're approaching it fast.

At eighteen thousand miles an hour.

Sarah Gey feels his breathing accelerate.

At any moment, ground control could lose contact.

You can imagine him shutting his eyes, hoping, praying, and then a juttering sound like something's wrong with the radio stating five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, and then he hears it.

The cosmonauts voices on the radio they'd made it, but Sarage knows it's just the beginning.

The cosmonauts still have to enter the ship, find the root of the problem, and bring the station back to life.

And they've got no idea what they're going to find inside.

They didn't know, for example, if the entire station was filled with toxic gases.

They didn't know if the station was frozen, they didn't know if the station was cracked.

They had no idea.

If you open the hatch and there's a big chunk of ice, you know, what would you do if you open the hatch and the led screens are broken, cracked, and there's glass, what do you do?

They opened the hatch and very gingerly, wanting to the what's called a transfer compartment, and they slowly, gingerly again opened another hatch into the main compartment.

And one of the things that I think both cosmonauts remember is that everything was just dead silence.

They'd never been in space before in a completely silent environment, because when you're in a spaceship, things are worrying and clicking and moving and things like that.

It's dead silence, a silence that I don't think any human being had ever really heard.

It's an outer space and they're moving in this dead, dark, pitch black space station in utter silence.

It's also freezing everything.

The walls, the panels are covered in a sheet of ice.

They move by touch.

They have flashlights, of course, and they eventually figure out the lay of the lent.

Through the weak beams of their torches.

They can just about make out the station's long cavernous corridors, filled with lifeless equipment and reams of wires.

Serage instructs them to work very carefully.

All the batteries they check.

They have these instruments, you know, zero volte ibol, ero volt, etc.

All the batteries are dead.

And remember it's really cold, so they can't spend too long on the station.

And every time, you know, they go in there and they come back and they're completely freezing on the ground.

And the Soviet press this mission was really downplayed.

They didn't even say it was a rescue mission at all, just routine going up there and doing some science experiments.

In fact, they had a press conference, a video press conference from space during their mission, these two cosmonauts, and they were told to take off their warm clothes, like their hats and gloves and whatever, because people would be wondering why they're wearing this in space.

So for the duration of the conference, you know, however long twenty minutes or so, they were extremely cold, but pretending everything's fine.

The idea is that nothing ever goes wrong in the Soviet space That's right, nothing ever goes wrong in the Soviet space program, or in the Soviet economy, or in Soviet society.

The system was flawless, that was the party line, and the cosmonauts freezing their asses off, had to stick it out.

The cosmonauts spend days working in pitch black, subzero temperatures trying to find a working power source.

These kind of situations where everything has going sideways, is what they train you for as a cosmonaut.

When I was training, we ran drills where things went perfectly, but I would say eighty percent of the time we were practicing for when things went wrong.

But it still doesn't prepare you fully.

So for a long time there's nothing.

But then finally Sage sees a small number of lights begin to flicker.

The crew had managed to reactivate one of the solar panels.

This means the station finally has some power.

It's gonna be okay.

They can save the station.

Mission control erupts an ecstatic applause.

Saragey finds himself being wrapped into hugs, kissed on the cheeks.

Mob This is a unique, unique event in the history of space exploration where the crew essentially brought their spaceship to a dead object and space and revived the whole thing within weeks.

Saragey had done the near impossible.

He saved the station.

He wasn't going to be a national hero like a garden raiding through Red Square.

The whole thing was top secret, but he was going to get a reward.

I don't think it's a coincidence that very soon after the mission he gets assigned to a crew, a crew to actually go to space see the Earth from above, float around and ero gravity.

His dream, the one he's had since he was a little boy, was finally about to come true.

I think for Krakalio, I think it might have seemed when he's assigned to his first mission.

My guess is, you know, the future is bright, and who knows what's ahead.

That's the boundless future.

But I think we have a better sense of it now that some of this stuff was just kind of the last gasp, the last gasp of a collapsing superpower.

The Soviet Union then was frozen.

The economy who was grinding to a halt.

It was a time of total stagnation.

Nothing was changing, and if it didn't change soon, it would come crashing down.

That's Sergechmimon.

He's a reporter for the New York Times.

In nineteen eighty he was working as a journalist in South Africa when he was told by his editor, we want you to go and cover Moscow from the peak of summer to the depth of winter.

Serge and his family stopped over in Helsinki and bought warm clothes, then took a slow train to Moscow on New Year's Eve.

We had one kind of beer to celebrate, and if the train was empty, nobody was traveling.

On New Year's night, December thirty first, early in the morning on January first, they pulled into Moscow Central Station.

It was dead.

Everybody was asleep after a night of revelry.

Dawn was just breaking and the station clock tower was bathed in this beautiful golden light, and the square was covered in a fresh layer of untouched snow.

It was like a storybook.

Moscow a storybook Moscow.

But soon enough reality hit.

Shops were largely empty.

You know, there was very little.

There was you could survive.

There was spread, there was me, but it was all on an elemental level, the bare minimum, because by the eighties the Soviet economy had stopped working for decades.

All decisions about what to spend and how much to produce were made in a single office building in Moscow for millions of people.

And while these bureaucrats in this office building put a ton of money towards flashy space projects, they didn't pay much attention to how people were going to feed themselves.

And eventually, by the eighties this caught up with him.

The system had become inefficient and corrupt.

The Soviet Union couldn't produce enough grain to feed its own population.

There were chronic shortages all around.

Look look how expensive these carrots are, and there's nothing else in this stage store.

But when things did occasionally appear, people went nuts.

This could be toilet paper, this could be you know, toothpaste, it could be anything.

News spread fast.

Your neighbor would tell you, Hey, there's a cheese delivery at the store two streets over.

You'd stop whatever you're doing and go.

People whould rush to the store in line up.

People spend up to three hours a day waiting in line.

The longest lines are at the vodka shops.

So there was you know, like an army of people who walked around Moscow all day trying to find things to buy and getting in line.

And I would join those lines.

The Soviet system was at breaking point, but people felt like they couldn't do anything about it.

You had absolutely no saying politics and who ran your country and who ran your life, and to think about it, to talk about it was dangerous.

Surges storybook Moscow turned into a nightmare, and this was very bad news for Serage as well, because if there was no money and the Soviet Union, then there was no money for the space program, and that meant his dream of going to space might be over before it had even begun.

It seemed that the country was stuck, that nothing would change, but then it did.

This time, the Soviet seemed to have opted for a long term change.

The man who took charge within hours of Constantine Chernienko's death, the new Soviet leader, Michael Go Mikhail Gorbach Mikhael Get used to the name Mika in the mid eighties, the gray suit of bureaucrats who had been running the country for decades began to well die off, one by one in quick succession.

Andrewpov Chernenko, people you'd probably never heard of footnotes in history.

Another Soviet leader who was too old and too sick when he took power to hold on to it has died.

And then they chose a great and sort of fateful act.

They chose a young man, well educated, well spoken, charming, smile Mikhail Gorbachev.

Get used to the name Mikhail.

He presented himself differently to the very formal, stuffy leaders that came before.

He's got charisma, I mean, he's got charisma, Western style, much more aware of Soviet weaknesses, much more open to new ideas by Soviet standards.

He was revolutionary.

It was an almost immediate and Emma say, enormously exciting change.

The change Gorbach would bring to the Soviet Union was seisman.

This is the story of the emergence of Michael Segeevich Gorbachev, of the most sweeping changes in the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution.

In February nineteen eighty six, he delivered a speech that shook the country.

Gaim was that we had to reform the way we live, to reform the way we live in order to survive, to survive as the Soviet Union, and the reform had to be radical from the bottom up.

Gorbachev said that the people should be able to speak their minds, that people should be able to make money.

He called it pedistroica, a restructuring and Glasnos openness is something like fresh It's a great treaty.

I think that Rosness is a st step to us.

Site it was an earthquake, it was a daily earthquake.

For the first time, you could start your own business.

And so suddenly bakeries appeared in Moscow and you could go get fresh bread.

Things appeared that people could sell, little shops appeared, kiosks in the street.

Culture opened up.

Suddenly, every TV station is being more candid, is showing more.

The girl singing in Moscow and the boy singing in Minneapolis reached out, slipped just a little and seemed to hold hands while half a world apart.

And you're coming out of that system where everything was controlled to an incredible degree, and especially when it's out of that period of stagnation, when there was nothing fun on TV, nothing interesting, sort of variety shows where sixty year old veterans singing some old ballad, some old patriotic ballad, and suddenly these things are happening.

American movies made it to Moscow in the past.

Now you Rambo Star Wars.

You should not have come back, James Bond.

I've looked forward to this moment, mister Bond.

There was so much demand.

And then to enjoy it to the full, some savvy entrepreneurs powered and copies and set up makeshift movie theaters and their apartments.

You could speak, you could buy, you could think.

I mean, all these things that had been under a cloud were now out in the open.

There was a sense that, you know, the system was changing, and that change encompassed everything from how you did your shopping to the space program.

The space program that in nineteen eighty five did still have its space station, It's crown jewel, but had no more money.

The country was in such bad shape the government could no longer afford displourage on space.

This was not just a practical matter, It was a question of national identity.

The cosmonauts became real heroes.

Utika guide in the first men in space.

So there was great pride in this program.

It showed that Russia, the Soviet Union, that the Soviet people were ahead of the West in something that is so kind of advanced and dramatic and romantic.

But now there was no more money to fund this dramatic and romantic cornerstone of Soviet identity.

No breaking the next frontier, no inspiring the Soviet people, no future, and no future for the program meant no future for our man, Saragey.

But Gorbachev had an idea, an idea of how to save the mighty but crumbling space program to sell Soviet space services globally on the commercial market.

Yep.

Gorbachev's big idea was capitalism.

After decades of keeping everything under wraps, the Soviets were now going to say to the world, our space program is open for business.

We'll launch your satellites for you.

So you could pay X million dollars, deliver your satellite to the Soviets and they would launch it into space.

We can also sell you some of our world class equipment, things no other space programs have.

And this should have been an extremely attractive sales pitch for countries that don't have their own space programs.

But there's one big problem.

Of course, they don't understand a thing about capitalism, or markets or anything.

The Soviets weren't great at making high tech stuff, but after years of living under communism, they were not so good at selling things, marketing advertising.

But then they finally come up with a plan, a plan that would totally change the space program and give our man Sarage a chance to fulfill his dream.

Decades before Elon Musk, the Soviets started thinking, what if we sell seats to go to space, invite people into the heart of the Soviet program, train them, fly them up there, in other words, space tourism.

There was the idea that would eventually lead me Lance Bass to go to Russia and train to be a cosmo.

The first country wanting to buy the Soviet services Japan.

They sent a TV journalist to the Soviet Union to fly with the cosmonauts.

They were so desperate for money, the Soviets agreed that the rocket could be sponsored by Japanese brands, a pharmaceutical company, a manufactor of sanitary towels, and a maker of karaoke equipment.

The deal was worth twelve million dollars pretty good, but it wasn't enough, so the Soviets decided to go bigger.

They were going to create a contest to try to find the best person in an entire country to go to space.

I was driving my car home from work and flicking through the stations trying to find some music, and I heard an announcement as posed an advert really, and it started off with astronaut wanted, no experience necessary.

In the next episode, this unassuming British woman travels to Russia like me, trained to be a cosmonaut and flies with Serge on the mission he almost didn't come home from.

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 Hada Kadoor with Oz Wallisham and Kostas Linos from iHeart Executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Ettore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina.

Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzena, and Joe Sykes, writing by Lydia Marchant, research by Mika Golubovski and Molly Schwartz, music by Will Epstein, themed by Martin or String, sound designed by Richard Ward and special things to Nando via 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, so please spread the love wherever you listen and number