Poor Krikalev, the cosmonaut that a terminal USSR abandoned in space.

On October 4, 1991 nobody came to relieve Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev on the Mir space station. He had been more than 300 kilometers from the Earth's surface for almost five months and had been told a few days earlier from the Kaliningrad base that they had had to postpone the arrival of the man who was to replace him due to lack of funds and a series of bureaucratic chicanery. And even though he did not know it yet, also because the Soviet Union had two television news programs - it lapsed two months later - and the Government had more urgent agenda items than bringing a cosmonaut back to Earth. And so, Krikalev was stranded in space.

In the last half of 1991, the political events in the USSR had precipitated: if in June of that same year the Russians had gone to the polls to elect the president of the new Russian Parliament, on August 19 the media reported the advance of tanks towards the Red Square in an attempt of coup d'etat to depose to Mikhail Gorbachev of the presidency of the USSR and to avoid that the deterioration of the communist power continued. And despite the failure of the coup, the attempt encouraged the 'supreme soviets' of some republics to declare independence, nailing the giant Eurasian giant: on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president of the USSR, the The Kremlin dropped the banner of the hammer and sickle and replaced it with the tricolor flag with czarist reminiscences. And in full collapse, more than 300 kilometers from the Earth's surface, Krikalev became the "last Soviet citizen", "the abandoned man in the Cosmos", "the hostage of space".

This Kafkian astracanada is the inspiration of the film 'Sergio y Serguéi', by the Cuban Ernesto Daranas, who has the participation of Ron Perlman as an actor and executive producer and who has landed this end after passing through the XXI edition of the Malaga Festival of week in the Spanish billboard. But how much fiction and how much reality in this story of international intrigue, space races and astronauts adrift?

Sorry, there is no relief

Krikalev had taken off on May 19, 1991 from the Baikonur cosmodrome - in present-day Kazakhstan - with his compatriot - at that time - Anatoli Artsebarski and the British Helen Sharman, "the first non-Soviet or American woman to ascend into space ", according to the writer and Buenos Aires journalist Hugo Montero in 'Lost in space'. The three flew together to the Mir (whose name, in Russian, means 'peace'), a structure whose main module was 15 meters long and weighed 89 tons. "It had five other coupled modules, for a total of 400 cubic meters of surface area, it was in orbit since February 1986, exactly one month after the Challenger tragedy in the American sky." Years later, specialist Gregory Benett admitted: It's an impressive achievement, the Russians kept it going with a Third World economy. '"

But Sharman, who had only the mission to carry out some medical and agrarian experiments, returned to Earth on May 26, just a week later, aboard the Soyuz TM-11. For his part, Artsebarski left in October on a trip with an international expedition on the Soyuz TM-12 and was exchanged for Aleksandr Volkov, who from then on accompanied the hapless Krikalev whom they ordered to stay for an indefinite time. "No one ordered him to remain in space, but the truth is that no one can say that he accepted with pleasure," acknowledged the deputy director of Space Missions, Yuri Teplakov.

Against Krikalev had joined the hunger with the desire to eat on the one hand, the deterioration of the Soviet ruble was worth what wet paper, and secondly, at the height of the peripheral nationalisms and negotiations to cash dead future before the end of croak, the government of President Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan raised the price of renting the Baikonur base, which became unaffordable expenses for the moribund Soviet space agency. The situation was so limited that Moscow tried to sell the station to its archenemies of NASA to take charge of costs amounting to one million rubles a day. "Does the agreement with NASA include the cosmonauts in orbit?" Krikalev asked between ironic and resigned.

To try to raise funds, the Soviet space agency even signed an agreement with Coca-Cola to get money in exchange for the Mir astronauts appeared drinking their sodas. According to Montero, Nikolai Semyenov, a member of Glavkosmos, a subsidiary of the state-owned company, admitted at the time: "We have enough money to pay the salaries of the staff, but nothing else." The big question is what will happen at the end of the year, when all supplies have been exhausted. " Black panorama, of course. So while on solid ground they were trying to get money out from under the stones, Krikalev and Volkov spent their time training with ropes - as for every month in a situation of weightlessness, the human body loses 10 percent of muscle mass and 1 percent bone mass - and talking to radio amateurs from around the world to keep up with the news.

Added to that in a video conference, Krikalev's wife, Yelena, confessed to her husband that his family was going through financial hardship: "Sergei, the salary is not enough to live on". The cosmonaut's salary, which at the time had been quite respectable, "now equaled that of the cleaning staff, was a little less than that of a taxi driver in Moscow and exactly half of what they earned, for example, the miners of Kuzbass, "says Montero in his book. At that time, it meant a salary of around 2.50 dollars per month.

In a letter that former cosmonaut Vladimir Polyakov sent to Krikalev, he warned that things were even worse. "You do not know how hard it has been to find the lemons that we have sent you, not everyone in this country can now have a lemon." We understand your exhaustion, but President Yeltsin himself has promised your return for next March, although you know that we can not confirm anything ... Psychologists say that your depression is due to the fact that you are seeing the changes that are happening in the nation, that your salary was still respectable and yet today your wife sees how it is not enough to Nothing ... Some two months after the liberalization of prices have quadrupled, the government says it is corruption, the first privatizations are a scandal, the mafias take over all sectors, they have everything and they control everything from drugs and weapons to The trade in oranges or caviar will give you an idea of ​​how our economy is, sorry to tell you about the concerns of your compatriots, but there are many threats and fear of a blow or explosion Social".

When the USSR finally fell - remember, on December 25, 1991 - nobody was very clear who ran the old Soviet space program and who had to be held accountable. The ship was in difficult conditions, with little maintenance or supplies, with leaks, blackouts and dents. Krikalev had spent more than two hundred days watching the night and the day happen every 45 minutes, approximately, taking into account that the space station gave 17 laps a day to the planet.

On March 25 the relay expedition finally arrived, thanks to the 28 million dollars paid by Germany. Krikalev had been stranded in space for 313 days. "Shot in space: the Soviet dissolution causes the delay of the return to Earth of a cosmonaut in orbit," he called the newspaper 'Los Angeles Times' the next day. Nothing else to land, what the Russian authorities did was to remove a disoriented and puny Krikalev and cover the flags of the Soviet Union that adorned his suit.

After more than 10 months that he had stayed at Mir, Krikalev found everything very changed. "His homeland had ceased to exist as such, the legendary rocket launch center nestled in the steppe of Tyura Tam, better known as Baikonur, now belonged to the nascent independent republic of Kazakhstan, his salary of 600 rubles was not enough to buy a kilo of meat, his hometown was no longer called Leningrad but St. Petersburg and his membership card of the Communist Party lacked any validity because that group was outlawed. "

As Chris Jones tells in his book 'Out of Orbit', when that day a journalist asked him: "Last year you left the Soviet Union, now you go back to Russia, how do you feel about this drastic change?" there was an answer