When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched to Mir in May 1991, the country that sent him was still the USSR; by the time he returned in March 1992 it no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had become Saint Petersburg, and even the spaceport that launched him — Baikonur — was now inside newly independent Kazakhstan, forcing Russia to renegotiate access to the machinery of its own space program

Sergei Krikalev launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in May 1991 as a Soviet citizen. He returned to Earth on 25 March 1992, after 311 days in orbit, as a Russian one. The country that had sent him no longer existed.

The mission was originally meant to last about five months. Krikalev was the flight engineer on Soyuz TM-12, alongside commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British cosmonaut Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, who returned with the previous crew after about a week on the station. In July 1991, with funding cuts compressing the Soviet space program, Krikalev was asked to stay on Mir for the next long-duration expedition because two planned flights had been reduced to one. According to ESA’s biographical note on Krikalev, he agreed.

What followed, on the ground beneath him, was the dissolution of his country.

The political timeline during the mission

The failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place in August 1991, while Krikalev and Artsebarsky were conducting EVAs and station maintenance on Mir. The Soviet Union began to unravel through the months that followed. On 6 September 1991, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR signed the decree returning Leningrad’s historical name. Krikalev’s home city was Saint Petersburg again. He learned of it on the station.

Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, the last of the Soviet republics to do so. Ten days later, on 26 December, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. The cosmonaut still in orbit was now flying for a state that did not.

When Soyuz TM-13 launched on 2 October 1991 with Alexander Volkov, Toktar Aubakirov of the Kazakh SSR, and Austrian researcher Franz Viehbock, it was the last crewed flight planned under the Soviet program. By the time Krikalev returned in March 1992, alongside Volkov and German cosmonaut Klaus-Dietrich Flade, the organisation operating Mir was Russian.

What he came back to

Krikalev landed near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on 25 March 1992. He had been in orbit for 311 days, almost double his original assignment. His home city had changed names. His country had dissolved. His employer was now a different organisation operating under a different state.

Andrei Ujica’s documentary Out of the Present, released in 1995, draws on footage shot inside Mir during the mission and on the ground at the landing site, and remains the closest available record of how the period looked from the inside.

In our reading, Krikalev’s mission has become a kind of natural symbol of the transition because the symbolism is unforced. It is simply what happened. He has often been described as the last citizen of the USSR.

The Baikonur problem

The longer industrial consequence of the dissolution was the spaceport itself. Baikonur, the cosmodrome from which Krikalev launched, sat in the same newly independent country where he would later land, near Dzhezkazgan. From 16 December 1991, that country was Kazakhstan.

Russia inherited the rocket industry, the spacecraft, the cosmonaut corps, and most of the institutional knowledge of the Soviet space program. It did not inherit the ground from which any of that hardware launched. From early 1992, the two governments negotiated arrangements for continued use. A preliminary agreement on basic procedures was signed on 25 May 1992. The substantive lease, the Agreement on the Basic Principles and Conditions of Use of the Baikonur Spaceport, was signed on 28 March 1994.

The 1994 agreement leased the entire Baikonur complex, including the supporting town then called Leninsk, to Russia for an initial period of 20 years, with rent set at approximately US$115 million per year. The town was renamed Baikonur in 1995. The lease was extended in 2004 and now runs until 2050.

What the arrangement still means

Every crewed Soyuz mission to the International Space Station since the program began has launched from Baikonur. The complex remains Kazakh territory, but Baikonur operates under a special Russian-administered legal regime for the duration of the lease. Rent disputes have been recurrent through the life of the arrangement. Kazakhstan reclaimed parts of the complex, including the former Zenit launch facilities, in 2018, and has periodically signalled an interest in revisiting the wider terms.

Russia has been building the Vostochny Cosmodrome in its Far East as a partial alternative since the 2010s. The first Soyuz-2 launch from Vostochny took place in April 2016. The first Angara A5 from Vostochny launched on 11 April 2024. Both were uncrewed. The first crewed launch from Vostochny remains a planned but unrealised step.

What we keep returning to, in pieces like this, is how the geopolitical accidents of one mission can become permanent infrastructure. A cosmonaut launches under one flag and lands under another. The country that sends him absorbs the loss of its primary spaceport, and works around the loss for the next three decades. The 1994 arrangement was a fix for a problem that emerged while a single man was in orbit. The first crewed launch from Vostochny, whenever it happens, would mark something Russia has not had since the Soviet collapse: an orbital crew launch from Russian soil, rather than from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.