In a snowy Moscow, former NASA director Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) arrives at Star City for her new job. 'Exhale or your lungs will burst,' is not a phrase anyone wants to hear. It all erupts into the sort of minor scuffle that would usually lead to a minor HR disciplinary on Earth, but becomes a matter of life and death when Vasily's suit is punctured and he starts to asphyxiate. 'You don’t have Gorbachev and his cronies to protect you anymore,' he goads, before calling her a traitor and accusing her of 'spitting on your own culture, spreading your legs in front of the West.'
She's more interested in testing modified anchor clamps than discussing geopolitics, but Vasily just won't let it go, even when the pair are working together on the Martian surface. It turns out that bit-part player and Helios staffer Vasily Galkin (Eduard Osipov) is an ardent supporter of the revolution – he's even a bit of a Stalin fanboy – and he isn't afraid to tell Gorbachev-sympathizing cosmonaut Svetlana Zakharova (Masha Mashkova) what he thinks.
