On 18 May 1991, Sergei Krikalev launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome as a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When his Soyuz capsule finally cracked open in a Kazakh field on 25 March 1992, the country that had strapped him to the rocket no longer existed. He had been in orbit for 311 days and 20 hours, more than twice his original assignment, because the Soviet space programme had run out of money to send up the replacement crew that was supposed to bring him home.
He was a flight engineer. And in the summer of 1991, before the hammer and sickle came down over the Kremlin, he agreed to stay.
The deal made in July
Krikalev’s original mission, Soyuz TM-12, was straightforward by Mir standards. Launch with commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British researcher Helen Sharman. Sharman would return after a week aboard the station. Krikalev and Artsebarsky would stay roughly five months, then hand the outpost over to the next crew and come home.
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The handover never happened the way it was written.
By the summer of 1991, the Soviet space programme was already running on fumes. Two planned expeditions had been consolidated into one to save money, and the Kazakhstan-based launch site at Baikonur was suddenly, awkwardly, in a republic that was about to become a foreign country. Somebody had to stay aboard Mir as flight engineer to keep the station operational. Somebody with the training already loaded into his hands.
Krikalev agreed. Mission control asked him if he would remain aboard for a second rotation. He said yes. There was no dramatic ultimatum. There was a budget shortfall and a station that needed a warm body who knew how the systems worked.
What Mir was, physically
The Mir core module was roughly the size of a school bus, launched in 1986. By 1991 it had grown into a complex with additional modules bolted on, giving Krikalev a living volume smaller than a modest studio flat, and cluttered with cables, ventilation ducts, food packets velcroed to the walls, and the constant white-noise hum of fans that had to run continuously because in microgravity, the carbon dioxide you exhale just sits in a cloud around your face until something blows it away.
He orbited Earth roughly every 90 minutes. Sixteen sunrises a day. Sixteen sunsets. The station passed over Leningrad, his home city, dozens of times a week.
Then, in 1991, Leningrad voted to become Saint Petersburg again. He watched the city change names from 400 kilometres up.
The country dissolved beneath him
On 26 December 1991, the Supreme Soviet formally dissolved the USSR. Krikalev was aboard Mir with commander Alexander Volkov, who had arrived in October on a rescue-of-sorts mission that also carried the Austrian researcher and, notably, the Kazakh cosmonaut Toktar Aubakirov — a diplomatic gesture toward the republic that owned the launch pad.
Ground controllers told him the news carefully. His country was gone. His spaceport was now in the Republic of Kazakhstan. His salary was being paid in a currency that was collapsing in real time. The Russian Federation, which would inherit the space programme, was still figuring out what it was.
He kept working. There was no other option. The station had to be maintained: air scrubbers, water recovery, thermal control, experiments. Mir was not a place where you could go on strike.
Why he could not just come home
A persistent version of this story frames Krikalev as “abandoned” or “forgotten” in orbit. The reality is more bureaucratic and more interesting. A Soyuz return capsule was docked to Mir the entire time. He could have undocked and come back within hours. Mission control was still functioning. Ground crews were still on shift.
What was missing was the next crew. Sending up a replacement Soyuz was expensive, and the newly independent Russian government was selling seats on that flight to whoever would pay — hard currency was the only kind that mattered. Austria paid for its researcher. Germany would later pay for Klaus-Dietrich Flade, who arrived in March 1992 and finally allowed Krikalev to come down.
If Krikalev had come home on schedule in October 1991, the station would have been left unmanned, and an unmanned Mir was a Mir that could tumble, lose orientation, drain its batteries, and become a piece of orbiting scrap. He stayed because the alternative was losing the station.
What ten months in microgravity does to a body
Human physiology was not built for this. On the ground, gravity does an enormous amount of work you never think about: it keeps blood pooled in your legs, it loads your bones every time you stand, it drains fluid from your face, it keeps the contents of your stomach where they belong.
Take gravity away for ten months and the body starts unbuilding itself. Bone density drops in the weight-bearing skeleton. Muscle mass shrinks. Cardiovascular fitness plummets because the heart no longer has to pump against gravity. And the digestive tract, as research on astronauts has shown, slows dramatically — food takes longer to move through the intestines, and gut bacteria begin fermenting protein at unusual rates, a change that starts within weeks of arriving in orbit and continues until the return to Earth.
Krikalev was aboard Mir for nearly ten months. He was exercising two hours a day on a treadmill and stationary bike, strapped down with bungee cords so he would not float away. It was not enough.
The landing
On 25 March 1992, the Soyuz descent module fired its retrorockets and dropped through the atmosphere. Krikalev, Volkov and Flade landed on the Kazakh steppe near Arkalyk. Ground crews pulled Krikalev from the capsule and carried him. He could not stand.
Photographs from that afternoon show him pale, sweating in the cold air, wrapped in a fur-lined recovery blanket. He had lost a significant amount of weight. His face was puffy from the fluid shift that microgravity causes, and his legs, unused to bearing weight, felt as if they belonged to someone else.
The mission patch on his suit still read CCCP.
Where 311 days sits in the record books
Krikalev’s single-flight duration of 311 days was, at the time, the second longest ever, behind Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov’s year-long flight aboard Mir in the late 1980s. The single-flight record has since been broken repeatedly — Valeri Polyakov spent 437 continuous days aboard Mir in the mid-1990s, a figure that still stands.
The cumulative endurance record, across multiple flights, now belongs to Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, who has logged roughly 1,110 days in orbit over five missions and broke the previous cumulative record of 878 days set by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka in February 2024. Krikalev himself would go on to fly multiple more times, including as flight engineer on Expedition 1 in 2000, the International Space Station’s first resident crew, ending his career with more than 800 cumulative days in space, among the highest totals ever recorded.
None of his later flights involved his country ceasing to exist while he was away.
The strange legacy of “the last Soviet citizen”
The nickname stuck because it was almost literally true. When Krikalev launched in May 1991, he carried Soviet identity documents. When he landed in March 1992, those documents were no longer issued by any government on Earth. As UNILAD Tech has recounted, he had left as a citizen of one country and returned as a citizen of another, without ever changing his address.
The city he flew home to had a different name. The flag over mission control was different. His military rank was in a military that had been dissolved and reconstituted. The rouble he was paid in had lost most of its purchasing power.
He went back to work. In 1994 he became the first Russian to fly aboard an American Space Shuttle, on STS-60. In 1998, on STS-88, he helped attach the first two modules of the International Space Station. He was, by then, one of the most experienced spacefarers alive, and the Cold War logic that had kept Soviets and Americans on opposite sides of the launch pad was already giving way to the joint architecture that would become the ISS.
What the story is really about
The Krikalev episode gets retold as an accidental drama — cosmonaut stranded, country vanished, ground controllers forgetting to bring him home. The version in the primary record is stranger and quieter. He was not forgotten. He was asked. He said yes. And then the arithmetic of a collapsing state extended a five-month mission into a ten-month one, because sending up his ride cost money the state did not have and would not have until a foreign government wrote a cheque.
There is a strange durability to things sent into space — Mariner 1’s 293-second Atlantic flight in July 1962, the microbe-shedding suits that NASA now worries could seed lunar craters with Earth bacteria. Krikalev is the human version of that theme: a body launched into orbit by one civilisation and pulled back to Earth by its successor, ten months and 4,741 orbits later.
On Christmas Day 1991, while the Supreme Soviet worked through the paperwork of dissolving a superpower, Krikalev was still running through the same routine tasks that kept the station alive regardless of what flag was flying below: checking air pressure, monitoring the CO₂ scrubbers, logging experiments. Below him, invisible through the porthole, a country was signing itself out of existence. He kept the station running until somebody, from somewhere, could afford to come and get him.