Twenty seven year old Helen Charman makes her way to her car. She's a chemist at the Mars Chocolate factory and she's on the way home. Her days are filled with questions about the right kind of toffee to use on chocolate ice cream, or how long a Mars bar will survive in the heat. She likes her job. Get up, go to work, come home a regular nine to five that day. Helen turns out of the factory car park and quickly hits the rush hour traffic. She sighs and turns the radio up loud. On it, a newscaster is going through the day's headlines. It's early summer nineteen eighty nine and in Hungary, the communist regime has just been overthrown, which could end forty years of one party rule. An Ira bar has gone off at a British military base. Please believe the tech, May Harold as summer of terror. Two hundred and sixty people arrested at Stonehenge for celebrating the Summer Solstice. Protesters moving towards Stonehenge. Helen starts flicking through the channels. I means number one, the new single yeahde and she just wants to listen to some music, and that's when she hears it. I was driving my car home from work and flicking through the stations, trying to find some music, and I heard an announcement, A suppose an advert really, and it said started off with astronaut wanted, no experience necessary. Suddenly Helen's staring at the radio an astronaut. Now, lots of kids me included dream of being an astronaut, but not Helen. She might work for a company called Mars, but she's never thought about going into space. Being British, who was no job for an astronaut. Growing up in the nineteen sixties nineteen seventies, Britain didn't even have a space program, so it wasn't possible. It wasn't part of my agenda. But now Helen's listening hard as the voice on the radio continues and then went on to describe they wanted people to go over to Star fifteen year Moscow, train with the cosmonauts and do experiments on the Mere Space station Cosmonauts Star City, Mere Space Station. These were words Helen hardly knew. They're looking for someone between twenty one and forty with scientific training and the ability to learn a foreign language, and Helen thinks, I'm twenty seven, and I have a degree in chemistry, and I know French and German. And then this idea begins to form in the back of her mind. What if the traffic light turns red before she can talk herself out of it. Helen reaches for a scrap of paper and scribbles down the number from the radio. She has no idea that this moment, stuck in traffic is about to change her life. That not only will she be soon going to space, but she's about to get a front row seat to one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by her side will be a Russian cosmonaut called Serge Kracole from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcasts and exile content. This is the last Soviet I'm Lance Bass. So actually, Helen Sharman and I have pretty similar stories. We grew up in very different worlds and had very different jobs, but we both somehow ended up in the same strange place, a secret town outside of Moscow, doing the same insane thing, training to go to space. We were both young, myself twenty three, Helen twenty seven, and we left everything we'd ever known behind us to see that electric blue light of our planet from orbit. We were actually at the frontier of something that today is a familiar idea, paying to go to space, except in our case it was TV companies who were paying for us. It was CBS and MTV fronting the money for my trip and for Helen a bunch of companies with backing from a British TV channel. We were fish out of water, and both of our journeys started completely by chance. For me with a call from my agent Lance. What would you say if I told you I've got you a ticket on a Russian space rocket for Helen? Sitting in her car one day in nineteen eighty nine, It all began with that radio ad astronaut wanted new experience necessary. Helen keeps the application for him in her bag for weeks before she sends it in a few weeks later, she gets a call. A woman's voice says, I'm telephoning on behalf of Air Vice Marshal Peter Howard and would like to ask if you would come for a medical for the Anglo Soviet Juno's space mission. Hotline has been buzzing continuously with hopeful astronauts. The mission was a joint project between the Brits and the Soviets. They called it Project Juno, and the idea was to hold a contest to try to find the best person in Britain to go to space, retracting applications from, among others, a city brokers, a tax inspective, a baker. There were commercials on posters, in newspapers, on TV and of course on the radio. With nearly twelve thousand enthusiastics making contact, the chance of success is six thousand to one. There was a selection process and medical psychological tests and then gradually whittled us down. This morning, it was only a small step onto the platform for the four who've beaten thirteen thousand candidates in the space race. A documentary film crew even followed their every move. It was kind of like an early version of a reality show which one would make it to space. Not quite The Bachelor, but you know what I mean. Helen Sharman's a research technologist for a confectionery firm and is already used to comments about her being the woman from Mars. I know we have to be fit, we have to be able to run the Russian language. So I have to be able to be perhapsing scientists fell in sextus annually. Yeah, I think I've got it now. Helen is pretty understaid. In fact, I would say she's quite tipathy British. She's not like US Americans, always saying we are the best at everything. But she had done pretty damn well to get to this stage. Thirteen thousand people had applied, and now she's just one of four. He only obstacle. Three other equally determined to spurring astronauts or four have the same ambition to join the Juno mission. They were tested and tested, intelligence, reasoning power, how they work under pressure. They asked Helen about her motivations. Why she was doing this money, fame, the good of science, the thawing of East West relations. This was, after all, a rare opportunity for people from the West to go behind the Iron Curtain to experience a slice of the Soviet way of life. Helen thought about these questions for a while, and in the end she answered, honestly, after doing all this work, all these tests, and getting excited, she just wanted to go to space, blast off in a rocket, see the Earth from above. Just like me. She had been bitten by the space bug from starting out, not really believing that space was for someone like her. Now it was all she could think about and it was almost within reach. The final announcement was made in the Science Museum in London. There was a big sort of glitzy TV show and we were being encouraged to tryand and be terribly excited. Helen isn't really one for the cameras or glitz and glamour, so she isn't really feeling it. She's sitting there just trying to remember what to do if they call her name, and trying not to think about how many people are watching at home. Helen Charmotte. When day and asked my name, I just knew I had to stand up, go to the stage, shake hands, turned to face the cameras, smile a lot. And it was only really when the whole thing finished when I could relaxing people. I'm going to train with the cosmonauts and it could really start to sink in them. Helen was off to train for eighteen months with a team of cosmonauts for omission to the Mere Space Station, the Soviet's most advanced piece of space technology. It's a huge floating network of tubes and wires in orbit around the Earth where multiple cosmonauts can live, work and perform experiments. Helen had forty eight hours to pack up her life and move to the Soviet Union. I had to resign from my job. I closed for the Moscow winter. Eighteen months in Moscow. She was going to need a thick coat and sell my car. You know all that. She even got her affairs in order in case she died in training or on her emission, the arrange power of attorney. It was before internet banking, before the internet as we know it now, no emails, no mobile phones. It was all very very weird, a feeling of being cut off, I think, very much from everything that's had known in the UK. For Helen, the Soviet Union was very much an alien land. It fell very exotic and very very exciting. It was going to some other world. Really. Helen had grown up in the nineteen seventies where we were told that the Soviets were all nasty and they were going to come in Boma country with new clibombs. So she was already nervous. Then in November nineteen eighty nine, just as she's preparing to leave everything she knows. She hears this news from ABC This is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings reporting tonight from Berlin from the Berlin Wall specifically, take a look at them. They've been there since last night. They are here in the thousands, They are here in the tens of thousands. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. Earlier that summer, a peaceful revolution began in East Berlin calling for more freedom, and finally, on the night of November ninth, the checkpoints were overrun and the gates of the wall were swung wide. For the hapless East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie, they were swamped. They simply gave up, opened the gate and allowed thousands through the one crossing point that had remained firmly closed. The news was beamed across the globe in deep indimenticab Checkpoint Charlie day, the government of East Germany announced that its borders are open for Helen's family and friends. It was worrying, would it be dangerous going to Moscow at this totally uncertain time, and I expected a sort of harsh exterior, perhaps people who were a bit secretive, people who didn't want to share much. But Helen was determined. She realized not only did she have the chance to become a cosmonaut, but she could find out what was really happening behind the iron curtain that's coming up after the break. Star City, the secret cosmonaut training facility. I remember arriving there in two thousand and two for my very first days of training. They shipped me out there in the dead of night, to a place about twenty miles north of Moscow, in the middle of a forest. It was a place that until the nineties was completely off the map. It felt like I was arriving at the Russian version of Area fifty one. When you get there, there are these huge iron gates and guards standing there. Helen remembers the same thing soldiers with their guns at the gates and bobbed while around the edge of Star City. But once you got inside the walls of Star City, I remember it had the feel of kind of a movie set, cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. There was a bank, shops, a movie theater, a railway, station sports fields. But if that sounds quaint, it wasn't. All the buildings were gray Brutalis blocks, and let me tell you, on a cloudy day, the whole place felt pretty bleak. But there also was this big sense of community. Everybody knew everybody because the only people allowed to live there were cosmonauts and their families. The fact that there were customauts wool king around who I'd read about and who I could see in space magazines, and something that I was cute in the post office behind them. Helen was star struck. But before she could meet her heroes and her future crew, she had to train. Training to be a cosmonaut is one of the hardest things I have ever done, no doubt about it, more physically and mentally grueling than any INSYNCT world tour. And those were rough. Days of Star City started at about five am. First on the schedule was a Russian language class taught by a teacher that only spoke French and Russian. Yeah, and I gotta say Russian. It's not easy. In fact, Russian is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. I didn't even know that I had to learn a whole new alphabet. I mean it took me six months to learn Jagabaru, Pruskin and noshka, which means I speak Russian a little. And that's before we even started the physical training. There's not so much about running marathons, but it's building up good muscle strength in general fitness. All right, Helen's doing that thing we call British understatement again because the training it's brutal. We had this machine which is meant to recreate what it feels like when your rocket is returning to earth. They strapped me into a chair, spun me around. I got up to five g's which is basically like a grand piano being pressed into your chest. Then there was the weightlifting, working so hard I was puking like every five minutes. And I haven't even told you what happened in the woods. Sometimes they would just leave you there after a long run and say, okay, enjoy your night. And I had to build a shelter and start a fire and find food all on my own in the deep dark depths of a Russian forest. Then there was the technical stuff, which you had to totally learn from scratch as to navigation ballistics. Basically the theory of flying really freaking fast through space, and all of us in Russian. One thing I found out pretty quickly was that they weren't going to make any distinctions between the train cosmonauts and us newbies. Every member of the crew would have responsibilities. I was in charge of oxygen on the soils, and so I had to know exactly how much air was needed to keep my crew made safe. I had to calculate all of this in my head. And did I mention all of this was in Russian. Yeah, if you were even a point off, everyone was dead. Because so much can go wrong with space travel, we were always having to learn what you should do in the event of a disaster. So some simple things, for instance, say the radio might not work, what if you can't speak to ground control? But there could be something else more complex, like what if your spaceship fails to land on the station? What the hell do you do? Then? What if the electricity cuts out or one of your fellow crew goes on a spacewalk and never comes back. So together we would work through that. Now, that's the kind of thing that we did in the simulators, and you would practice and practice and practice, and it really was a case of practice makes perfect. Years and years of Soviet missions to space meant that if anything went wrong, there was always a go to answer. These scenarios are often written down as well. It's part of our manuals, so we don't have to remember everything. We just have to remember which page we've got to quickly moved to for Plan B or Plan and C instead of Plan A. After months in Star City, Helen started to believe in herself. She was strong, she knew a bit more Russian than I did, and she knew how to save the spaceship from disaster. And eventually, in the summer of nineteen ninety she was ready to meet her crew, the famous cosmonauts, the guys she had been standing behind in the post office. The commander of her mission would be Anatoly Artabaski, and she would also ride with an engineer, the hero of the Salud seven rescue, sarage Crecovat. Sagey starts off when you meet him. He is a very modest kind of character, and he's very strong internally, but he's not the kind of person who would be the loudest in the room by any stretch of the imagination. You could probably go into a room. Unless he's standing up, he's quite tall, but if he was sitting down, you probably could go pass without even noticing him because he's not shouting, he's not waving his arms around, so you know, his presence just sort of creptopotomy. Helen says, there's this thing you need to understand about cosmonauts. All the cosmonauts have chosen in many respects. We're all quite similar fairly, I would say, even tempered, so not too excitable, not too depressive. But Sarah Gay stood out. I think Sagey has got a particularly high propensity to deal with stress. He's just outwardly very calm. He probably deals with it all inside, but he does deal with it soon. She was being invited to his house to meet his family, and of course, the first time that any British person goes to a Soviet house for dinner, you think this enormous amount of food, Wow, it's this amazing, and then you're offered more and more and more. You think, thank you very much, that was it's just really feeling super full. That's great, and then they say, oh, now it's the main course. I can tell you what Helen says about the Russians. Is true, they love to feed you and they like to get a drunk on vaca. But the generosity Helen experienced in Saragey's house also made her think, I know they were very well off compared to the average Soviet citizen at that time. I certainly was aware of the difficulty of many of them. The queues I hate, standing in lines I hated, and some of the hunger that was going around, some of the homelessness as well. In Moscow. It caused the average Russian a full day's pay for a pound of meat at the private markets. And then compared to the relatively good standard of living in Star City, and the fact that I could go to a canteen rude. Star City has looked curious by Soviet standards. The diet calculated by scientists to give them and eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner there, and so could the other cosmonauts without having to worry about where is that food coming from? That was a real luxury because in the rest of the country people were starving, women and children were sleeping in Moscow's railway stations. So what do you do now, go into I don't even know what I can do, I'm going to have to go back to the train station and spend the night there. Thirty two million Russians now found themselves below the poverty line. So only one in six families has a telephone, only one in twenty four owns a car. The quality of most things people can buy here is third rate. Helen heard about all of this from the Western media and her friends from back home. She knew about the collapse of the Soviet economy, and she also knew about President Gorbachev and about how he was trying to change the Soviet Union. So in England, in the UK, we'd got these two Russian words, and Glasnost and pedestroca. We talked a little bit about this in episode to Glasnost generally just means openness and pedestroika means rebuilding, and they became synonymous with what Gorbutof was trying to do. He was being more open with the West. We liked Glasnost and we liked paristroika in the West, and here was a chance to ask actual Soviets what they thought. And so she started going up to the cosmonauts in Star City, What do you think about these reforms of glasnost of pedestroika, And the response I got was a bit of a blank. What's odd? I don't people don't normally kind of sort of stum upon me when I'm asking them questions and they say, what do you mean? She replied, well, you know, I mean like society opening up what President Gorbachev was trying to do. Aren't we open? We thought we were being quite open with you. And what about pedestroika rebuilding? Well, but rebuilding the school down the road. Isn't that's a good thing, isn't it? The political connotations to these two words just weren't used in the Soviet Union. This made Helen realize everything she thought about the Soviet Union was wrong. That people in Star City, people like Serage Kreklov cosmonauts, they actually liked their lives because their lives were relatively quite good and relatively quite stable. They liked the way that they worked and the way that they lived. They weren't aware of any other way to do that, and they were very happy with that. And I kind of, I suppose I'd always assumed that they would always be trying to live more like the life in the West was. And of course they weren't. They were very happy with their lives, happy with their lives and proud to be part of the Soviet space program, the most revered men and the Soviet Union revered and rewarded with comfortable houses, food and a good life. The only problem is that comfortable life, the one enjoyed by Soviet cosmonauts since the age of Uriga Gerin it was in serious jeopardy. So it's now April nineteen ninety one and the three cosmonauts Sarage, Helen, and Anatoli are finally ready ready to go to space. They leave Star City by military plane and three hours later they start their descent to Bikanir, the secret city in the desert where the Soviets launched their rockets. From Helen clings to her seat. Bikenore is everything she pictured, the closest thing on Earth to a Star Wars planet, with great hangars and domes jutting out of the reddish brown Earth, and the cosmonauts are going to have to spend two weeks there in quarantine. They need to make sure that they're not carrying any viruses into the space station. Then they have to go through a series of strange rituals, rituals that go back to the very early days of Soviet space travel. There's a huge number of very traditional things that we do before the space flights itself. On the day, you wake up whichever bedroom you'd be sleeping, and you sign the door. Your signature goes on the door of that room. Goodnessays what they've done with all these doors. They must be jampactful of signatures. But the signatures are only the first part of the ritual. Next, the cosmonauts watch a movie. Picture the scene Helen, Sergei and Anatolie all gathered around on this little sofa from movie night, maybe eating some popcorn or probably more like sunflower seeds. And what was the movie White Sun in the Desert. I think it's called to some sort of comedy, White Sun in the Desert, very Russian Harley sounds like me the parents, But you know anyway, Then the next day they get up early, get into their spacesuits, they get on a bus to the launch site, and then comes another ritual. Your Gagarin forgot to go to the loo before he went to the rocket, so he needed to get out of the bus and have a pee on the back wheels, so you will do that. That's right, because Juriga Garan forgot to take a leak before his flight into space in nineteen sixty one. Every cosmonaut who flies in the Soviet Union still has to do this, although Helen actually didn't. She's a woman, remember, and she'd have to take her space suit off. Finally, bathroom bregg Dunn. They head to the launch site. There's a television on the bus where they watch video messages from Saragei and Anatoli's kids. Anatole's little boy tells them, pity you won't be here this summer. Goodbye. And then there there in front of the rocket, a rocket plastered with two flags, one for Great Britain the Union Jack and the other for the Soviet Union the Hammer and Sickle. They climb the still stairs and get in the elevator. Up and up they travel to the top of the rocket to their capsule. I was sitting on the right hand side, and the commander toleh he had their middle seat, and Sigay had this seat on the left. And the hatch door closes and that's it, just the three of them, all totally focused on the job at hand. The launch, the docking, and what they need to do when they get to the station. After what seems like an age, they feel it, the rumble, the shaking, the rockets start to fire, the rookie t engines fire. It takes well for the thrust to build up one second, two seconds, three seconds, probably tens of seconds before the thrust bills up enough. Ten seconds of waiting, neither off the ground nor attached. If the thrust bills up enough to lift you off the ground. But as they wait in this in between state, about to sever gravity's hold on them, to break the tether with Earth, something at the back of their mind, something completely out of their control, keeps intruding on their thoughts. What are they leaving behind? Because away from the rocket, beyond the Kazakh Desert, outside the guarded walls of Star City, the Soviet Union is beginning to break down. It covered it all across East Europe. That searched Memen again. He was the New York Times Moscow correspondent who was hungry a few years ago. This march could not have taken place Czechoslovakia. People were standing on the roofs above. Whence the fast Square. An hour before today's demonstration in Romania used the army is now firmly on the side of the people. Poland. I spent a lot of time in Poland the euphoria over the collapse of communism, as it was a period when Gorbatov's reforms just swept through the former Soviet Empire. The latest surge in the tide sweeping eastern Europe, demanding communist heads and knocked down wall after wall. In the old days when people protested the vie sin in tanks, but Gorbchef was all about freedom, and so we said, go ahead, protest, take to the streets, and people did in the millions. That was at the Hungarian border when people started flooding across. I was in Prague when hundreds of thousands of people went out to wed Sislas Square and jangled their keys, a dissidence and becoming much more confident, which was assigned. You know, the keys are gone and the doors are open. R if the freedom had been getting loud a here all week, there was a feeling of change in the air and the Soviet system. The main glue had been fear, the thing that held people in check and enthralled. Then now the fear was gone. What I think nobody understood was that this was a system built on repression, that if you loosen one grew, they're all going to start loosening, and then you can't hold this thing together. The empire was rap would lead disintegrating. So as the cosmonauts took off, they knew what they were leaving. They knew that they were leaving a country that was in deep into Surrey, in deep in existential crisis. 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' Dat 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 Atore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe Sykes and Dasha Lissina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sykes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz. Music by Will Epstein. Themed by Martin or string sound designed by Richard Ward, and special things to Nando Villa, 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.

Twenty seven year old Helen Charman makes her way to her car. She's a chemist at the Mars Chocolate factory and she's on the way home. Her days are filled with questions about the right kind of toffee to use on chocolate ice cream, or how long a Mars bar will survive in the heat. She likes her job. Get up, go to work, come home a regular nine to five that day. Helen turns out of the factory car park and quickly hits the rush hour traffic. She sighs and turns the radio up loud. On it, a newscaster is going through the day's headlines. It's early summer nineteen eighty nine and in Hungary, the communist regime has just been overthrown, which could end forty years of one party rule. An Ira bar has gone off at a British military base. Please believe the tech, May Harold as summer of terror. Two hundred and sixty people arrested at Stonehenge for celebrating the Summer Solstice. Protesters moving towards Stonehenge. Helen starts flicking through the channels. I means number one, the new single yeahde and she just wants to listen to some music, and that's when she hears it. I was driving my car home from work and flicking through the stations, trying to find some music, and I heard an announcement, A suppose an advert really, and it said started off with astronaut wanted, no experience necessary. Suddenly Helen's staring at the radio an astronaut. Now, lots of kids me included dream of being an astronaut, but not Helen. She might work for a company called Mars, but she's never thought about going into space. Being British, who was no job for an astronaut. Growing up in the nineteen sixties nineteen seventies, Britain didn't even have a space program, so it wasn't possible. It wasn't part of my agenda. But now Helen's listening hard as the voice on the radio continues and then went on to describe they wanted people to go over to Star fifteen year Moscow, train with the cosmonauts and do experiments on the Mere Space station Cosmonauts Star City, Mere Space Station. These were words Helen hardly knew. They're looking for someone between twenty one and forty with scientific training and the ability to learn a foreign language, and Helen thinks, I'm twenty seven, and I have a degree in chemistry, and I know French and German. And then this idea begins to form in the back of her mind. What if the traffic light turns red before she can talk herself out of it. Helen reaches for a scrap of paper and scribbles down the number from the radio. She has no idea that this moment, stuck in traffic is about to change her life. That not only will she be soon going to space, but she's about to get a front row seat to one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by her side will be a Russian cosmonaut called Serge Kracole from Kaleidoscope. iHeart podcasts and exile content. This is the last Soviet I'm Lance Bass. So actually, Helen Sharman and I have pretty similar stories. We grew up in very different worlds and had very different jobs, but we both somehow ended up in the same strange place, a secret town outside of Moscow, doing the same insane thing, training to go to space. We were both young, myself twenty three, Helen twenty seven, and we left everything we'd ever known behind us to see that electric blue light of our planet from orbit. We were actually at the frontier of something that today is a familiar idea, paying to go to space, except in our case it was TV companies who were paying for us. It was CBS and MTV fronting the money for my trip and for Helen a bunch of companies with backing from a British TV channel. We were fish out of water, and both of our journeys started completely by chance. For me with a call from my agent Lance. What would you say if I told you I've got you a ticket on a Russian space rocket for Helen? Sitting in her car one day in nineteen eighty nine, It all began with that radio ad astronaut wanted new experience necessary. Helen keeps the application for him in her bag for weeks before she sends it in a few weeks later, she gets a call. A woman's voice says, I'm telephoning on behalf of Air Vice Marshal Peter Howard and would like to ask if you would come for a medical for the Anglo Soviet Juno's space mission. Hotline has been buzzing continuously with hopeful astronauts. The mission was a joint project between the Brits and the Soviets. They called it Project Juno, and the idea was to hold a contest to try to find the best person in Britain to go to space, retracting applications from, among others, a city brokers, a tax inspective, a baker. There were commercials on posters, in newspapers, on TV and of course on the radio. With nearly twelve thousand enthusiastics making contact, the chance of success is six thousand to one. There was a selection process and medical psychological tests and then gradually whittled us down. This morning, it was only a small step onto the platform for the four who've beaten thirteen thousand candidates in the space race. A documentary film crew even followed their every move. It was kind of like an early version of a reality show which one would make it to space. Not quite The Bachelor, but you know what I mean. Helen Sharman's a research technologist for a confectionery firm and is already used to comments about her being the woman from Mars. I know we have to be fit, we have to be able to run the Russian language. So I have to be able to be perhapsing scientists fell in sextus annually. Yeah, I think I've got it now. Helen is pretty understaid. In fact, I would say she's quite tipathy British. She's not like US Americans, always saying we are the best at everything. But she had done pretty damn well to get to this stage. Thirteen thousand people had applied, and now she's just one of four. He only obstacle. Three other equally determined to spurring astronauts or four have the same ambition to join the Juno mission. They were tested and tested, intelligence, reasoning power, how they work under pressure. They asked Helen about her motivations. Why she was doing this money, fame, the good of science, the thawing of East West relations. This was, after all, a rare opportunity for people from the West to go behind the Iron Curtain to experience a slice of the Soviet way of life. Helen thought about these questions for a while, and in the end she answered, honestly, after doing all this work, all these tests, and getting excited, she just wanted to go to space, blast off in a rocket, see the Earth from above. Just like me. She had been bitten by the space bug from starting out, not really believing that space was for someone like her. Now it was all she could think about and it was almost within reach. The final announcement was made in the Science Museum in London. There was a big sort of glitzy TV show and we were being encouraged to tryand and be terribly excited. Helen isn't really one for the cameras or glitz and glamour, so she isn't really feeling it. She's sitting there just trying to remember what to do if they call her name, and trying not to think about how many people are watching at home. Helen Charmotte. When day and asked my name, I just knew I had to stand up, go to the stage, shake hands, turned to face the cameras, smile a lot. And it was only really when the whole thing finished when I could relaxing people. I'm going to train with the cosmonauts and it could really start to sink in them. Helen was off to train for eighteen months with a team of cosmonauts for omission to the Mere Space Station, the Soviet's most advanced piece of space technology. It's a huge floating network of tubes and wires in orbit around the Earth where multiple cosmonauts can live, work and perform experiments. Helen had forty eight hours to pack up her life and move to the Soviet Union. I had to resign from my job. I closed for the Moscow winter. Eighteen months in Moscow. She was going to need a thick coat and sell my car. You know all that. She even got her affairs in order in case she died in training or on her emission, the arrange power of attorney. It was before internet banking, before the internet as we know it now, no emails, no mobile phones. It was all very very weird, a feeling of being cut off, I think, very much from everything that's had known in the UK. For Helen, the Soviet Union was very much an alien land. It fell very exotic and very very exciting. It was going to some other world. Really. Helen had grown up in the nineteen seventies where we were told that the Soviets were all nasty and they were going to come in Boma country with new clibombs. So she was already nervous. Then in November nineteen eighty nine, just as she's preparing to leave everything she knows. She hears this news from ABC This is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings reporting tonight from Berlin from the Berlin Wall specifically, take a look at them. They've been there since last night. They are here in the thousands, They are here in the tens of thousands. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. Earlier that summer, a peaceful revolution began in East Berlin calling for more freedom, and finally, on the night of November ninth, the checkpoints were overrun and the gates of the wall were swung wide. For the hapless East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie, they were swamped. They simply gave up, opened the gate and allowed thousands through the one crossing point that had remained firmly closed. The news was beamed across the globe in deep indimenticab Checkpoint Charlie day, the government of East Germany announced that its borders are open for Helen's family and friends. It was worrying, would it be dangerous going to Moscow at this totally uncertain time, and I expected a sort of harsh exterior, perhaps people who were a bit secretive, people who didn't want to share much. But Helen was determined. She realized not only did she have the chance to become a cosmonaut, but she could find out what was really happening behind the iron curtain that's coming up after the break. Star City, the secret cosmonaut training facility. I remember arriving there in two thousand and two for my very first days of training. They shipped me out there in the dead of night, to a place about twenty miles north of Moscow, in the middle of a forest. It was a place that until the nineties was completely off the map. It felt like I was arriving at the Russian version of Area fifty one. When you get there, there are these huge iron gates and guards standing there. Helen remembers the same thing soldiers with their guns at the gates and bobbed while around the edge of Star City. But once you got inside the walls of Star City, I remember it had the feel of kind of a movie set, cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. There was a bank, shops, a movie theater, a railway, station sports fields. But if that sounds quaint, it wasn't. All the buildings were gray Brutalis blocks, and let me tell you, on a cloudy day, the whole place felt pretty bleak. But there also was this big sense of community. Everybody knew everybody because the only people allowed to live there were cosmonauts and their families. The fact that there were customauts wool king around who I'd read about and who I could see in space magazines, and something that I was cute in the post office behind them. Helen was star struck. But before she could meet her heroes and her future crew, she had to train. Training to be a cosmonaut is one of the hardest things I have ever done, no doubt about it, more physically and mentally grueling than any INSYNCT world tour. And those were rough. Days of Star City started at about five am. First on the schedule was a Russian language class taught by a teacher that only spoke French and Russian. Yeah, and I gotta say Russian. It's not easy. In fact, Russian is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. I didn't even know that I had to learn a whole new alphabet. I mean it took me six months to learn Jagabaru, Pruskin and noshka, which means I speak Russian a little. And that's before we even started the physical training. There's not so much about running marathons, but it's building up good muscle strength in general fitness. All right, Helen's doing that thing we call British understatement again because the training it's brutal. We had this machine which is meant to recreate what it feels like when your rocket is returning to earth. They strapped me into a chair, spun me around. I got up to five g's which is basically like a grand piano being pressed into your chest. Then there was the weightlifting, working so hard I was puking like every five minutes. And I haven't even told you what happened in the woods. Sometimes they would just leave you there after a long run and say, okay, enjoy your night. And I had to build a shelter and start a fire and find food all on my own in the deep dark depths of a Russian forest. Then there was the technical stuff, which you had to totally learn from scratch as to navigation ballistics. Basically the theory of flying really freaking fast through space, and all of us in Russian. One thing I found out pretty quickly was that they weren't going to make any distinctions between the train cosmonauts and us newbies. Every member of the crew would have responsibilities. I was in charge of oxygen on the soils, and so I had to know exactly how much air was needed to keep my crew made safe. I had to calculate all of this in my head. And did I mention all of this was in Russian. Yeah, if you were even a point off, everyone was dead. Because so much can go wrong with space travel, we were always having to learn what you should do in the event of a disaster. So some simple things, for instance, say the radio might not work, what if you can't speak to ground control? But there could be something else more complex, like what if your spaceship fails to land on the station? What the hell do you do? Then? What if the electricity cuts out or one of your fellow crew goes on a spacewalk and never comes back. So together we would work through that. Now, that's the kind of thing that we did in the simulators, and you would practice and practice and practice, and it really was a case of practice makes perfect. Years and years of Soviet missions to space meant that if anything went wrong, there was always a go to answer. These scenarios are often written down as well. It's part of our manuals, so we don't have to remember everything. We just have to remember which page we've got to quickly moved to for Plan B or Plan and C instead of Plan A. After months in Star City, Helen started to believe in herself. She was strong, she knew a bit more Russian than I did, and she knew how to save the spaceship from disaster. And eventually, in the summer of nineteen ninety she was ready to meet her crew, the famous cosmonauts, the guys she had been standing behind in the post office. The commander of her mission would be Anatoly Artabaski, and she would also ride with an engineer, the hero of the Salud seven rescue, sarage Crecovat. Sagey starts off when you meet him. He is a very modest kind of character, and he's very strong internally, but he's not the kind of person who would be the loudest in the room by any stretch of the imagination. You could probably go into a room. Unless he's standing up, he's quite tall, but if he was sitting down, you probably could go pass without even noticing him because he's not shouting, he's not waving his arms around, so you know, his presence just sort of creptopotomy. Helen says, there's this thing you need to understand about cosmonauts. All the cosmonauts have chosen in many respects. We're all quite similar fairly, I would say, even tempered, so not too excitable, not too depressive. But Sarah Gay stood out. I think Sagey has got a particularly high propensity to deal with stress. He's just outwardly very calm. He probably deals with it all inside, but he does deal with it soon. She was being invited to his house to meet his family, and of course, the first time that any British person goes to a Soviet house for dinner, you think this enormous amount of food, Wow, it's this amazing, and then you're offered more and more and more. You think, thank you very much, that was it's just really feeling super full. That's great, and then they say, oh, now it's the main course. I can tell you what Helen says about the Russians. Is true, they love to feed you and they like to get a drunk on vaca. But the generosity Helen experienced in Saragey's house also made her think, I know they were very well off compared to the average Soviet citizen at that time. I certainly was aware of the difficulty of many of them. The queues I hate, standing in lines I hated, and some of the hunger that was going around, some of the homelessness as well. In Moscow. It caused the average Russian a full day's pay for a pound of meat at the private markets. And then compared to the relatively good standard of living in Star City, and the fact that I could go to a canteen rude. Star City has looked curious by Soviet standards. The diet calculated by scientists to give them and eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner there, and so could the other cosmonauts without having to worry about where is that food coming from? That was a real luxury because in the rest of the country people were starving, women and children were sleeping in Moscow's railway stations. So what do you do now, go into I don't even know what I can do, I'm going to have to go back to the train station and spend the night there. Thirty two million Russians now found themselves below the poverty line. So only one in six families has a telephone, only one in twenty four owns a car. The quality of most things people can buy here is third rate. Helen heard about all of this from the Western media and her friends from back home. She knew about the collapse of the Soviet economy, and she also knew about President Gorbachev and about how he was trying to change the Soviet Union. So in England, in the UK, we'd got these two Russian words, and Glasnost and pedestroca. We talked a little bit about this in episode to Glasnost generally just means openness and pedestroika means rebuilding, and they became synonymous with what Gorbutof was trying to do. He was being more open with the West. We liked Glasnost and we liked paristroika in the West, and here was a chance to ask actual Soviets what they thought. And so she started going up to the cosmonauts in Star City, What do you think about these reforms of glasnost of pedestroika, And the response I got was a bit of a blank. What's odd? I don't people don't normally kind of sort of stum upon me when I'm asking them questions and they say, what do you mean? She replied, well, you know, I mean like society opening up what President Gorbachev was trying to do. Aren't we open? We thought we were being quite open with you. And what about pedestroika rebuilding? Well, but rebuilding the school down the road. Isn't that's a good thing, isn't it? The political connotations to these two words just weren't used in the Soviet Union. This made Helen realize everything she thought about the Soviet Union was wrong. That people in Star City, people like Serage Kreklov cosmonauts, they actually liked their lives because their lives were relatively quite good and relatively quite stable. They liked the way that they worked and the way that they lived. They weren't aware of any other way to do that, and they were very happy with that. And I kind of, I suppose I'd always assumed that they would always be trying to live more like the life in the West was. And of course they weren't. They were very happy with their lives, happy with their lives and proud to be part of the Soviet space program, the most revered men and the Soviet Union revered and rewarded with comfortable houses, food and a good life. The only problem is that comfortable life, the one enjoyed by Soviet cosmonauts since the age of Uriga Gerin it was in serious jeopardy. So it's now April nineteen ninety one and the three cosmonauts Sarage, Helen, and Anatoli are finally ready ready to go to space. They leave Star City by military plane and three hours later they start their descent to Bikanir, the secret city in the desert where the Soviets launched their rockets. From Helen clings to her seat. Bikenore is everything she pictured, the closest thing on Earth to a Star Wars planet, with great hangars and domes jutting out of the reddish brown Earth, and the cosmonauts are going to have to spend two weeks there in quarantine. They need to make sure that they're not carrying any viruses into the space station. Then they have to go through a series of strange rituals, rituals that go back to the very early days of Soviet space travel. There's a huge number of very traditional things that we do before the space flights itself. On the day, you wake up whichever bedroom you'd be sleeping, and you sign the door. Your signature goes on the door of that room. Goodnessays what they've done with all these doors. They must be jampactful of signatures. But the signatures are only the first part of the ritual. Next, the cosmonauts watch a movie. Picture the scene Helen, Sergei and Anatolie all gathered around on this little sofa from movie night, maybe eating some popcorn or probably more like sunflower seeds. And what was the movie White Sun in the Desert. I think it's called to some sort of comedy, White Sun in the Desert, very Russian Harley sounds like me the parents, But you know anyway, Then the next day they get up early, get into their spacesuits, they get on a bus to the launch site, and then comes another ritual. Your Gagarin forgot to go to the loo before he went to the rocket, so he needed to get out of the bus and have a pee on the back wheels, so you will do that. That's right, because Juriga Garan forgot to take a leak before his flight into space in nineteen sixty one. Every cosmonaut who flies in the Soviet Union still has to do this, although Helen actually didn't. She's a woman, remember, and she'd have to take her space suit off. Finally, bathroom bregg Dunn. They head to the launch site. There's a television on the bus where they watch video messages from Saragei and Anatoli's kids. Anatole's little boy tells them, pity you won't be here this summer. Goodbye. And then there there in front of the rocket, a rocket plastered with two flags, one for Great Britain the Union Jack and the other for the Soviet Union the Hammer and Sickle. They climb the still stairs and get in the elevator. Up and up they travel to the top of the rocket to their capsule. I was sitting on the right hand side, and the commander toleh he had their middle seat, and Sigay had this seat on the left. And the hatch door closes and that's it, just the three of them, all totally focused on the job at hand. The launch, the docking, and what they need to do when they get to the station. After what seems like an age, they feel it, the rumble, the shaking, the rockets start to fire, the rookie t engines fire. It takes well for the thrust to build up one second, two seconds, three seconds, probably tens of seconds before the thrust bills up enough. Ten seconds of waiting, neither off the ground nor attached. If the thrust bills up enough to lift you off the ground. But as they wait in this in between state, about to sever gravity's hold on them, to break the tether with Earth, something at the back of their mind, something completely out of their control, keeps intruding on their thoughts. What are they leaving behind? Because away from the rocket, beyond the Kazakh Desert, outside the guarded walls of Star City, the Soviet Union is beginning to break down. It covered it all across East Europe. That searched Memen again. He was the New York Times Moscow correspondent who was hungry a few years ago. This march could not have taken place Czechoslovakia. People were standing on the roofs above. Whence the fast Square. An hour before today's demonstration in Romania used the army is now firmly on the side of the people. Poland. I spent a lot of time in Poland the euphoria over the collapse of communism, as it was a period when Gorbatov's reforms just swept through the former Soviet Empire. The latest surge in the tide sweeping eastern Europe, demanding communist heads and knocked down wall after wall. In the old days when people protested the vie sin in tanks, but Gorbchef was all about freedom, and so we said, go ahead, protest, take to the streets, and people did in the millions. That was at the Hungarian border when people started flooding across. I was in Prague when hundreds of thousands of people went out to wed Sislas Square and jangled their keys, a dissidence and becoming much more confident, which was assigned. You know, the keys are gone and the doors are open. R if the freedom had been getting loud a here all week, there was a feeling of change in the air and the Soviet system. The main glue had been fear, the thing that held people in check and enthralled. Then now the fear was gone. What I think nobody understood was that this was a system built on repression, that if you loosen one grew, they're all going to start loosening, and then you can't hold this thing together. The empire was rap would lead disintegrating. So as the cosmonauts took off, they knew what they were leaving. They knew that they were leaving a country that was in deep into Surrey, in deep in existential crisis. 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' Dat 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 Atore from Sama's Dad Audio Our executive producers or Joe Sykes and Dasha Lissina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sykes. Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz. Music by Will Epstein. Themed by Martin or string sound designed by Richard Ward, and special things to Nando Villa, 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.