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Sergei Krikalev — The Last Soviet Citizen
The cosmonaut trapped in space for 311 days as his world fell apart
On March 25th, 1992, Sergei Krikalev returned to earth a broken man. He was pale, thin and weak, described by reporters of the time as “pale as flour and sweaty, like a lump of wet dough.” He bore the insignia of the country he’d proudly called his home for his entire life, a state that no longer existed — the USSR. He was no longer a son of the city of Leningrad, but of St Petersburg, the re-introduced historic name for his hometown.
He had been trapped in space for an incredible 311 days, a world record at the time, but unlike those who would later surpass his stay in the vast emptiness of space, Sergei Krikalev never intended to break any records. He was simply a victim of far larger forces on the earth below.
The Cosmonauts and Mir
Krikalev, for all his achievements, seemed unlikely to loom large in the world’s spacefaring consciousness. Yuri Gagarin, a fellow cosmonaut, had gone into space in 1961, the first human to do so. The USSR had also been the first to place a satellite into orbit in 1957.
By the time Krikalev’s cosmonaut days began, however, the United States and NASA dominated the space age and the USSR and US had even begun working together decades earlier. The space station that Krikalev would find himself aboard for his long stay was named Mir, the Russian word for ‘peace’ and even today it remains an example of phenomenal engineering.
Consisting of several modules, the space station took a decade to assemble from 1986–1996 and was the first continuously inhabited, long-term space station in history, until it was surpassed by the ISS in 2010.
311 days
Krikalev was a flight engineer. Essentially a co-pilot, he had a critical role on the ground, during take-off and once aboard the Mir. His first…
