0:11

It was early one morning. I was back in nineteen

0:13

ninety one. It was January, it was hot.

0:17

I left the radio on. This

0:20

is Maggie Iaquinto, a Ham radio

0:22

operator in the small town of Kolak, Australia.

0:25

And I was up very early in the morning and having

0:28

a cup of coffee and I heard this crackle. Oh

0:32

this is interesting. And

0:35

I heard this d heavy

0:38

rushing going cq

0:41

cq cq. This

0:44

is you two M I R

0:47

looking for contacts, you two

0:49

M I R the Soviet space

0:52

station. I

0:54

was so happy, I was

0:57

unbelievably happy. I said, well, this is it,

1:00

and with great nervousness I pressed

1:03

the transmit button and

1:05

I said, you two M I R. This

1:08

is VK three CFI.

1:11

The handle is Maggie over.

1:16

Maggie had been trying to make contact for years

1:19

and should anyone have seen me at six

1:21

in the morning out on my little street in

1:24

Kolak dancing, and

1:26

I wow, I've done it.

1:32

She was about to start a long and pretty special

1:34

relationship with the Soviet space station

1:41

and with a certain cosmonaut, Sira

1:47

gay K so

1:52

Sia gay Let's looted that. But

1:56

Maggie's connection to Saragay wouldn't just

1:58

be a cool story to whip out it dinner parties.

2:00

Within an hour, the crowd was heading to the

2:02

seat of Soviet power as the Soviet

2:05

Union unraveled in nineteen ninety one. At

2:07

allmy armored personnel carriers on the

2:09

streets, it was Maggie's who would tell sarage

2:11

the truth about what was happening in his country.

2:14

Armored personnel carriers rolled by carrying

2:16

scores of truths, some of them brandishing

2:19

machine guns, and Sarage

2:21

and the other cosmonauts were hungry for

2:23

the news, and they called it Rita

2:26

Rita, which is my name in Russian. This

2:29

is CNN breaking news. So

2:31

Rita's information. So I was their information

2:34

source. Good evening. I'm Jane Randall in

2:36

Washington. The information Maggie

2:38

gave Saragey proved crucial because

2:41

it would help him make the choice of a lifetime

2:45

to stay or

2:47

to go. Historians

2:49

may have trouble describing a day when Kael

2:51

Garbato resigned as the president of the Soviet

2:54

Union, which had already ceased to exist. I'm

2:56

Lance Bass and from Kaleidoscope,

2:58

iHeart podcast an exile content.

3:01

This is the last Soviet

3:15

Helen Charmon, becoming the first Britain

3:18

in space. She blasted off

3:20

with two Soviet cosmonaut repairment on

3:22

a missions Design chief need to repair the

3:24

eighteen Mirrors space station that has

3:26

been orbiting the globe for five years now. On

3:28

May eighteenth, nineteen ninety one, Helen

3:31

Sharman, the British woman who won the TV contest,

3:33

blasted off into space. Alongside

3:37

her were the Soviet cosmonauts Sergei

3:39

Krikalev and Anatoly Artabaski.

3:41

They were leaving behind a country in chaos,

3:44

a country literally breaking apart

3:46

at the seams, the republics

3:49

Estonia, a human chain of protests

3:51

Lithuania. Down in the Baltic Republic

3:54

of Lithuania, Latvia flag

3:56

was raised and they sang the national

3:58

lands. They were demanded independence.

4:00

The parliament in the capital city of Bakhu

4:03

voted unanimously to make ourser Bai John

4:05

an independent republic. But

4:12

at that particular moment, flying

4:15

through space in a tiny capsule, Helen

4:19

wasn't really thinking about what was happening on Earth.

4:22

She was just enjoying the ride. A

4:25

few hundred kilometers above the earth surface, you can

4:27

see that the Earth is curved, you

4:30

can see vasts sections of the

4:32

Pacific Ocean, the whole of Western Europe

4:34

in Mungo beautiful,

4:37

inspiring. After

4:39

forty eight hours, she finally arrived

4:42

at the Mere space Station. As Helen

4:44

Sharman Sawyer's spacecraft dot with the

4:46

Mere Station last Monday, it was the

4:48

realization of a dream that started

4:50

more than two years ago. I

4:54

remember opening the hatch I went through first.

4:56

It was just so nice to float into these long,

4:59

thin modules, feeling

5:02

weightless. I remember being

5:04

the most natural, relaxing

5:06

feeling I'd ever had as

5:11

she floated in zero gravity for the first

5:13

time. Helen discovered her

5:15

home for the next week. Tunnels

5:17

with tight walls and low ceilings,

5:20

wires, screens, keyboards, and transmitters

5:23

stuck to every available surface. The

5:25

space station Mirror was a technological

5:27

marvel, humanity's only outpost

5:30

in space, and the Soviets

5:33

had created it. But

5:38

in their rush to get it up there, comfort

5:40

had to take a back seat, so

5:43

the place was kind of a dump,

5:46

reeking a mold, mites and body

5:48

odor. And thanks to my INSYNCT tour

5:50

days, I can actually imagine what that smells

5:53

like like. Five sweaty teenage

5:55

boys in a bus for months. Not

5:57

pretty. Helen was going

5:59

up there for a week, but anatole

6:01

and sarage for five months. For

6:04

it all to work, everything had

6:06

to be super organized. Mission

6:11

control planned. Certainly,

6:14

my time to the nearest, five minutes, five

6:16

minutes, we were told when we needed to

6:18

awake around seven am Moscow

6:21

time, have a space shower, meaning

6:23

wipe your body down with a wet towel, and

6:25

typically we would have breakfast

6:27

together chicken with Brunes bread,

6:30

candy, coffee. Not my usual

6:32

breakfast, in fact, I'm not the biggest fan of

6:34

Russian food, but I guess it's certainly

6:36

feeling. And there was only one toilets

6:39

in use, so we have to work around

6:41

each other in that respect. Yeah,

6:43

in space, even something as simple

6:45

as ping becomes a whole operation.

6:48

Everyone gets their own custom shaped funnel

6:50

which is attached to a vacuum hose. When

6:53

you gotta go, you have to hold the funnel right up

6:55

against you unless you want to end up surrounded

6:57

by droplets of floating pea, and

6:59

that as gross. After

7:02

all that, the showering, the eating,

7:05

the peeing, the cosmonauts are

7:07

ready to get down to some actual work

7:10

because the station wasn't in great shape.

7:13

There were power outages, computer failures,

7:16

leaks. It needed constant

7:18

maintenance and that

7:20

is why our guy Sarage was there. He

7:22

was the engineer and his job was

7:24

to fix all these problems, to

7:26

keep the station running, to keep

7:28

the dream of Soviet space alive.

7:31

That's without Santatoli, Arts and Varsity

7:33

and their Cricolo will spend five

7:36

months and plan a record eight walks

7:38

in space as they go about repairing

7:40

the Mirror Station. Helen Charman had her own special

7:42

job on Mirror Space farmer. She

7:45

was growing wheat potatoes. She even

7:47

planted a lemon tree, growing

7:50

food in space. Been like mad

7:52

Damon in the Martian the Scientific Experiment

7:54

she took part and weren't going to win any Nobel

7:56

prizes, but it was nevertheless of British

7:59

first. And

8:03

in the evenings, after they'd finished all

8:06

their duties, it was finally

8:08

time to chill. Sometimes

8:10

we could just relax. Is usually a

8:12

good hour where there's nothing scheduled,

8:15

where you can just be together and

8:18

look out the window, talk about families

8:20

and friends that we left behind. The

8:22

last couple of years had been strange for Helen

8:25

she'd quit her job, broken up with

8:27

her boyfriend, and let's face it, I'm going

8:29

to Russia to train as a cosmonaut is a pretty

8:32

good excuse. She'd left her parents

8:34

behind in England and moved to the USSR.

8:37

But she was twenty seven single.

8:40

Her whole life was ahead of her. For

8:44

Saragey, it's different. He recently

8:46

got married to someone in mission control

8:49

actually, though she wasn't on this mission, and

8:51

now they had a baby.

8:55

Sigey's daughter was born just a few

8:57

months before we flew into space,

9:00

and he would have missed her terribly.

9:04

He knew that was what his mission was assigned

9:06

to do, and he knew his wife would look after the door

9:08

so beautifully. But your

9:10

babies grow up very quickly, and

9:12

Segay was going to miss a lot of that development.

9:17

Over five months in space, sarage

9:20

was going to watch his daughter Orga grow up on

9:22

screen. He could only talk

9:24

to his family every two weeks. He'd

9:27

miss his daughter's first words, sitting

9:30

up, crawling, and then

9:33

her first steps. That's

9:36

a big deal, really, but he knew,

9:38

you know that that was his job, and he knew

9:41

he was going to do that, so he'd thought it all through accepted

9:43

it, that isolation

9:46

from the Earth and the fact that

9:48

you're not with all your friends and family

9:50

anymore. Over

9:53

that week, Helen listens to the usually quiet

9:55

sarage began to open up about

9:58

how he's missing summer and Moscow, the

10:01

long warm evenings with friends and family,

10:05

about how his daughter is growing up without

10:07

him. Every time, Saragey

10:10

tells Helen a little bit more, and

10:12

Helen found herself looking forward to their evening

10:14

chats. But

10:17

then all too soon it's

10:20

time for Helen to return to Earth.

10:27

It must have felt weird after so much build

10:29

up and training, knowing at twenty

10:31

seven the first lining for Obit has already

10:34

been written. But even stranger

10:36

was having to leave Space without Saragey

10:39

and Anatoly and that final

10:41

goodbye. It was heart wrenching because

10:44

I knew I was leaving them behind in space. Not only

10:46

I enjoyed it and I didn't want to leave to return

10:48

to Earth just then, but saying

10:51

goodbye to what felt like then the

10:53

two best friends I had ever had.

10:56

This morning, it was warm farewells from the two

10:58

cosmonauts staying behind, to the mere

11:00

crew being relieved, and to Helen.

11:03

They passed through the hatch into their Sawyer's craft,

11:06

which I'm doped from MEA and just before

11:08

half past ten this morning fired its retro

11:10

rockets. Less than half an hour later

11:12

they were parachuting to Earth. Watched firemission

11:15

control and when Helen landed back in the USSR

11:18

before going home to her parents, she

11:20

actually visited Saragey's family. I

11:22

went round to visit his wife

11:24

and his baby after I

11:26

returned from space while Segey was still in

11:29

space. That's how close they'd become.

11:31

And my hair was, you know, I'd

11:33

had it cut quite short, and the

11:37

baby Auga said dad. When

11:40

I arrived, Baby

11:43

Auga called Helen dad to

11:45

her. Saragey was just some stranger with short

11:48

hair, much like Helen. And

11:50

that's when Helen realized exactly how

11:52

much Sarahgey was missing. And

11:59

now Sarah finds himself missing

12:01

Helen loneliness

12:04

is starting to gnaw at him.

12:06

Downtime on the space station seems to drag

12:08

on forever, and

12:12

one evening, almost out of boredom,

12:14

sarage starts flicking through the handover notes

12:16

left by the previous crew, and

12:19

that's when he sees something strange

12:23

amongst the detailed log about technical issues

12:25

and repairs. There's a series of

12:27

scribbles, numbers, letters,

12:30

and symbols,

12:32

each with dates and times next to them.

12:35

It looks like some kind of call log, but

12:38

cosmonauts only get one personal call every week

12:40

or so these are way

12:43

more regular. It's

12:45

beginning to look like the last crew weren't just using

12:47

the radio to call home. They

12:50

were speaking to people all over

12:52

the world, to

12:55

people in Taiwan or

12:57

Ireland or Ohio, to

13:00

people in their living room, to amateur

13:03

radio operators.

13:14

And there's one call sign that comes

13:17

up again and again, and

13:20

next to it the word Australia

13:23

v K three CFI Nervous.

13:28

He tunes the radio to the right frequency

13:32

and waits nothing.

13:36

The next day he finds himself going through the

13:38

motions until he can try again. Nothing

13:44

days pass. Every night

13:46

he keeps coming back to the radio, listening

13:49

to the same old empty cracker. But

13:54

one evening, just as he's about to call it

13:56

quits, a

13:58

woman's voice Physics

14:01

into Life.

14:13

Two years earlier, nineteen eighty

14:15

nine, Australia. Kolak

14:18

a small town just outside of Melbourne,

14:21

twelve thousand people, best known

14:23

for its dairy farm somewhere

14:25

in that town. A woman is in a makeshift

14:28

radio shack in her house, trying

14:30

to get through to the Soviet space station.

14:33

It's VK three CFI Maggie

14:36

aya Quinto. I

14:39

can remember her dancing around

14:41

the kitchen, flinging a T twel

14:43

over ahead, dancing to some

14:45

type of Balkan music. That's

14:48

been Maggie's son. Maggie

14:50

died in twenty fourteen, but we spoke

14:53

to her sons and to an Australian radio

14:55

producer named Jesse Burrell, who sent

14:57

us an interview she did with Maggie in twenty eleven.

15:00

She had a quirky personality. She had

15:02

a fun sense of humor. She liked

15:04

puns. She liked bad action movies.

15:07

She liked playing softball, She

15:09

liked Macedonian dancing. She

15:12

spoke Russian. Maggie

15:14

was born in America and learned Russian at

15:16

college in the early sixties, during

15:18

the height of the Cold War. She was

15:20

just fascinated with the USSR. Maggie

15:24

followed the news of the Soviet Union anyway

15:26

she could, reading the papers, listening

15:28

to the radio, watching TV. She

15:31

was convinced that one day she would visit,

15:34

but then life guide in the way, she

15:37

met a guy and moved to Australia with him.

15:39

She had two sons and started working as

15:41

a computer teacher at the local high school in

15:43

Colac. The sides of Colac.

15:49

It was a good bakery there, not exactly

15:51

what Maggie's dreams were made of. Even

15:53

the bakery was closed on weekends. No

15:55

Balkan dancing club, definitely no Russians

15:57

to talk to. But

16:03

Maggie had a secret weapon cable

16:06

here, all right, and so that just

16:08

comes into the radio shock here

16:11

Ham radio. I always wanted

16:13

to be a Ham radio operator when

16:15

I was fifteen or sixteen, I just wanted

16:17

to do this. Ham Radio a

16:20

way for people to talk to each other from home using

16:22

radio waves, a more advanced version

16:25

of the ten can on a string. It

16:27

promised freedom, independence,

16:30

adventure. There's no way that I

16:32

can visit every country in the world, but I

16:34

can with Ham Radio. Maggie

16:36

talked to all sorts of people and even went to

16:38

Ham Radio conferences on weekends. They

16:40

would always be hosted at some sort of basketball

16:43

court, and they'd just be tables set

16:46

up along the walls stacked

16:48

with different types of gear, like different types of radios,

16:51

and everyone would call each other by their unique

16:53

call sign. It's like code names, a jumble

16:56

of letters and numbers that shows who's calling

16:58

and where from. In Australia,

17:00

all of the Ham radio call signs start with VK.

17:03

India's vu vs Canada.

17:05

You get the idea, and three represents

17:08

Victoria, so I'm VK three.

17:10

And then the suffix, which is two letters or

17:12

three represents your unique

17:15

identity, so I was VK

17:17

three CFI and

17:20

no one else in the world can have that call sign.

17:23

And not these Ham radio conferences, people

17:25

would actually address Maggie not by

17:27

her name, but by her call sign.

17:30

This is the level of geekiness we're talking

17:32

about. And then

17:34

at one of these conferences, she starts hearing

17:37

a rumor, a whisper going

17:39

around the community that a

17:41

handful of Hams have managed to get

17:43

through to space, not just

17:45

any space, but space behind

17:47

the Iron curtain, the space

17:50

station mirror. Maggie

17:54

can't get it out of her head, the idea

17:56

of speaking to a real Soviet and

17:59

she starts thinking, maybe this

18:01

is my chance to finally

18:03

visit the USSR, even

18:06

if her little patch of the Soviet Union would

18:08

be two hundred and fifty miles up in space,

18:12

and so Maggie gets to work. She

18:14

had already turned her spare bedroom into a sort

18:16

of radio shack, like something

18:19

out of a seventy science fiction film, cables

18:22

MIC's audio equipment and the

18:24

radio itself. But

18:26

even this gear isn't sophisticated enough

18:28

to pick up the signal she's after from

18:30

space. The

18:33

sheer distance makes it really, really

18:35

hard. So Maggie

18:37

buys a second radio for her kitchen and

18:40

fixes a giant antenna to the roof

18:42

of her house. Then she wires

18:45

it all up to an old Tashiba laptop,

18:47

a real doorstopper. Everything's

18:50

set up ready to go. Maggie

18:53

tunes the transceiver to the right frequency

18:55

for the Soviet space station you

18:58

Tube M I R and nothing.

19:04

She does this over and over again

19:12

every day. She wakes up before five, while

19:15

her sons are still sleeping. She pads into

19:17

the kitchen, tunes in and listens. In

19:20

the middle of the night, after she's finished work, planned

19:23

lessons, marked essays, made dinner, got her

19:25

sons ready for bed, she sits up

19:27

in the dark listening, and

19:32

usually she's got the TV news on in the

19:34

background, and every night the

19:37

news brings stories of chaos

19:39

from the Soviet Union check points

19:41

across Berlin had finally buckled.

19:43

The Berlin Wall falls November

19:46

nine, nineteen eighty nine. A few

19:48

weeks later in Czechoslovakia, the

19:50

people overthrow the Communist governed will

19:52

give offense monopoly on power. A month

19:54

later, in Romania, people shoot

19:56

their dictator. Chow Ku is dead, so

19:59

is his wife. Two

20:06

years pass. You heard that right,

20:08

Two years And

20:11

all this time Maggie keeps trying

20:13

to reach the Soviet space station, getting

20:15

up on the roof to tinker with her antenna,

20:17

buying and barring every piece of equipment

20:20

she can. But still her chances

20:22

are slim because Mirror is in constant

20:24

rotation around the Earth. It's

20:27

only above Australia for ten minutes a time,

20:29

a few times a day. To catch

20:31

it, Maggie has to be on the right frequency

20:33

at the exact right time, and

20:36

she starts to feel like she's running out of

20:38

options, like nothing she tries

20:40

is working. Until one warm

20:43

morning in January nineteen ninety one,

20:48

the sun is just beginning to spread across

20:50

the roofs of Colac and Maggie

20:53

sits in her radio shack, sipping a

20:55

warm cup of coffee, and

20:58

I heard this deep hey

21:01

Russian going c q

21:04

c q c q. This

21:06

is you too, am I r

21:09

looking for contacts? Oh, I

21:11

have been waiting two years to talk

21:13

to you. Yahoo

21:18

shoo to talk

21:20

to you. So I

21:22

am such a happy person. I

21:26

am very very happy. And

21:30

what can I tell you about us? To

21:32

it over?

21:50

Finally, Maggie had reached the Soviet

21:52

Union, and soon the person she was

21:55

speaking to almost every day was

21:57

Sergei Krakov. I

22:00

remember waking up one

22:02

morning, There'll be this loud static it'd

22:06

be five in the morning, five thirty in the morning. Are times

22:08

when they're having their free time they

22:13

go talk to us. See

22:16

this deep, powerful Russian

22:19

voice calling my mother. Rico,

22:27

you just get shocked into a wiking

22:29

and he hears the thick Russian accent, this

22:31

guy, and so you know, you put in your class and it kind

22:34

of stumble down the hall into the radio shack.

22:36

Oh yeah, good morning, good evening. They

22:39

would speak in a mixture of English and Russian.

22:42

Maggie called it runglish.

22:46

I

22:46

have too

22:48

little, sir over Do

22:50

you have a wife? Do you have any children?

22:54

He even talked to the students in her computer

22:57

class. The house would

22:59

be packed if with students

23:01

from school, and they would line

23:03

up to ask questions and

23:06

Maggie would translate. I can

23:13

remember they were speaking in these really

23:15

strong Australian accents, like Sarah

23:17

Gay, what do you eat in spice?

23:20

What do you do when? The

23:25

communication wasn't always the smoothest,

23:27

but that didn't matter. The desire

23:30

to communicate, that was the

23:32

truly wonderful part about being a him radio

23:34

operators.

23:37

Gay was really into him radio Oh

23:39

my goodness. In fact, he called her

23:42

more than she called him. Sire Gay

23:44

and I had this relationship and he

23:46

wanted to communicate with

23:49

me. Sarah

23:59

Gay needed Maggie because deep

24:01

down he was struggling. When

24:04

Sarage left the Soviet Union, the country

24:06

was in turmoil, food was

24:08

in short supply, millions

24:11

were taking to the streets and protest. There

24:14

was this tinderbox feeling like

24:16

anything could happen. And

24:19

now whenever he asks Mission control what's going

24:21

on back home, he gets a breezy it's

24:23

fine, a brush off, a

24:26

change of subject. So he

24:28

gets uneasy, frustrated.

24:31

But then Sarage realizes there

24:33

is a way he can get information, information

24:37

that isn't filtered through mission control,

24:39

and he can get that from his friend

24:41

in Australia, from Maggie,

24:45

and so he asks her, what's

24:47

going on in my country? What are

24:49

you hearing now? We just scour

24:51

the newspapers and I'd rewrite articles

24:54

in very simple English, and I would

24:56

leave it in my system. She figured

24:58

out a way to send the computer on her written

25:00

messages, which meant she could

25:02

type up news. It was easier than

25:04

reading out whole articles over a bad connection.

25:07

My own system was a tiny bulletin board.

25:09

They would read those articles. They

25:12

loved reading all that stuff. They

25:14

didn't get that information from

25:16

their own central so

25:19

I was their information source. Moscow

25:22

was losing its grip on the Soviet Union.

25:25

The rebels are using every kind of weapon

25:27

they can lay hands for seventy two years

25:29

of foreign domination. Armenia has

25:31

declared itself independent from the Soviet

25:33

Union. Sarage

25:36

starts to feel like he's losing it, far

25:39

away from home, floating

25:41

in a black void, left

25:44

in the dark,

25:50

until finally, in July nineteen ninety

25:52

one, mission control calls him.

25:55

They say, look, there's a problem.

25:59

States are breaking away

26:01

and we're worried Kazakhstan will be

26:03

next. If we lose Kazakhstan,

26:06

we lose our launch pad bikan Nor. If

26:11

we lose Biknor, we lose our

26:13

access to space. But

26:16

they say, we've got an idea. We

26:19

want to send a Kazak cosmonaut to Mirror

26:22

as an olive branch, a way

26:24

to keep the Kazakhs on our side. The

26:27

thing is, and here's the hitch. He's

26:30

not experienced, and he's not an engineer.

26:33

He definitely won't be able to take care of

26:35

the station. So, Sarah

26:37

game, we're giving you a choice. You

26:39

can come back to Earth, back

26:41

to your family as planned, and abandon

26:44

the station to an unknown fate. Or

26:48

you can stay as long

26:50

as it takes and protect the station,

26:53

our last hope. You

26:56

have three hours to decide to

26:59

stay or to go. That's

27:10

next time on The Last Soviet.

27:27

The Last Soviet is a Kaleidoscope production

27:29

in partnership with iHeart Podcast and

27:31

Exile Media, produced

27:33

by Sama's Dat Audio and

27:35

hosted by me Lance Bass

27:39

Executive produced by Kate Osbourne

27:41

and Mangesh Hadakador, with

27:43

Oz Wallisham and Kostas Linos

27:46

from iHeart Executive Produced by Katrina

27:49

Norvelle and Nikki E Torre from

27:52

Sama's Dad Audio. Our executive producers

27:54

are Joe Sykes and Dasha Listsina.

27:57

Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha

27:59

litz Sa and Joe Sykes.

28:02

Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research

28:04

by Mika Golubovski and Molly

28:06

Schwartz, Music by Will

28:08

Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstring,

28:11

mixing and sound designed by Richard Ward

28:14

and special thanks to Nando villa We,

28:16

Lissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel

28:19

BYRNE, Bob Pittman and Isaac Lee.

28:22

Many thanks to Ben and josh Iya Quinto

28:24

for letting us use some of their mom Maggie's incredible

28:27

recordings, and to Australian

28:29

radio producer Jesse Barrell for the interview

28:32

she did with Maggie in twenty eleven. If

28:34

you want to hear more shows like this, nothing

28:36

is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope

28:39

than subscribers, ratings and reviews,

28:42

so please spread the love wherever you listen,