When Soviet cosmonaut Anatoly Pavlovich Artsebarski climbed into his rocket on its launchpad in Kazakhstan on May 18, 1991, he had little idea that his country was about to go through a major political upheaval. As commander of the Soyuz TM-12 spacecraft, he blasted off with two crewmates–Sergei Krikalev and Helen Sharman–to rendezvous and dock with the space station Mir. After Sharman returned to earth a few days later with the station’s previous two-man crew, Artsebarski and Krikalev settled in for a long stay in orbit.
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The cosmonauts had brought along a 35-millimeter movie camera to shoot footage for the Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujica. His documentary, Out of the Present, contrasts their residency in space with the historic events taking place on the ground: the ouster of Mikhail Gorbachev, mass demonstrations in the streets of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin’s speech from atop a tank, and finally the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Strangely removed from it all, Artsebarski and Krikalev looked down from their perch in the sky and saw only the same brown mountains, white clouds, green forests, and blue oceans.
During his sixth and last space walk, while he and Krikalev were assembling a new girder structure on the outside of the station, Artsebarski got into trouble. “I found out that the cooling system of my survival suit did not work. The glass of my suit became covered by fine drops of water,” he says. The condensation fogged his faceplate, effectively rendering him blind. He climbed slowly back down the girder and into the air lock with Krikalev coaching his every move. A misstep could have sent him tumbling into the void.
