In Soviet times cosmonauts Vasily Tsibiliyev and Alexander Lazutkin would have faced a stark choice on their return to Earth from the Mir space station. They might have faced ignominy, and all that went with that status, for their actions which compounded the early problems in space, or they might have been made heroes of the Soviet Union for managing, finally, to save the space station from disaster.
But the USSR has ceased to exist. The station's commander, Cosmonaut Tsibiliyev, resides in an independent Ukraine; the Soyuz capsule, named for the Sovyetsky Soyuz (Soviet Union), landed in independent Kazakhstan; and Michael Foale, a Britishborn Russian-speaking American astronaut, remained to help the new crew in their task of repairing the 11year-old space station.
Despite all these changes, however, many echoes of Soviet attitudes remain. Cosmonauts Tzibileyev and Lazutkin's return from space has been marked by harsh criticism in Russia. There are elements in the Russian media that strongly resent the country's decline from world super-power to that of a state which is heeded more on a regional rather than global basis. The cosmonauts' actions which compounded earlier problems and caused Mir to apparently run out of control has been the focus of a criticism redolent of the Soviet era. Never mind that the two men were exhausted after six months in space or that one of them was suffering from heart problems - the prestige of the motherland had been damaged and for this they would have to pay.
Significantly, however, more generous voices have sounded, praising the men for their work in stabilising the 11-year-old Station and keeping Russia's space programme alive. A hero's welcome, similar to that staged on the return from space by the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, has been called for. The reality of the situation lies somewhere between the two poles of Russian opinion. Russians do feel sharply that their status in the world has been diminished and that the saga of errors on board Mir has further lessened their country's image. Moves by conservatives in the US to discredit the entire Russian space programme have helped tinge these feelings with a xenophobia which has always been easy to arouse in Russia. Withdrawal of American co-operation from the Russian space programme would serve further to fuel anti-western feelings already engendered by the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders.
The men who landed safely in Kazakhstan yesterday, by undoing their early mistakes and managing, under severe pressure, to stabilise Mir, have given the creaking Russian programme what may be its final chance. There will be more problems in the near future but, as Cosmonauts Tsibiliyev and Lazutkin have shown, none of these are insoluble. Mir's water supply may run out in six weeks if its humidityrecycling programme is not fixed and the job of reattaching power cables to the damaged Spektr module is a complicated one.
In both these cases NASA will play a positive role. Astronaut Foale will work with the new Russian crew on the re-cabling and next month when the space shuttle Atlantis arrives to take Mr Foale home it will bring a supply of fresh water. NASA's attitude in this respect will serve the cause of international relations very well in comparison to the conservative stance which manages to combine schadenfreude and the defunct mind-set of the Cold War.