EVENING BELL:
Splashdown of the Ending Day

On October 16, 1976, Soyuz-23, with commander Vyacheslav Zudov and flight engineer Valery Rozhdestvensky, landed in Kazakhstan's Lake Tengiz – the only splashdown in the history of our cosmonautics. Just two hours later, Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent Valery Volodchenko rushed to the shore.

He preserved the details for us...

"Having jumped the estimated landing point by 121 kilometers, the spacecraft plopped heavily into the middle of a vast, night-time lake. The salt water shorted the contact relay, inflating the enormous reserve parachute canopy (over 500 square meters), flipping the descent module over. The cosmonauts inside the "saucepan" found themselves upside down. The exit was underwater...

The emergency situation became critical in seconds.

That night, workers from the Abay State Farm, celebrating the birth of a tractor driver's daughter, were milling about along the shore. They immediately joined the rescue operation. Then, as now, I believe it was these experienced men, hunters and fishermen, who assessed the situation more soberly than anyone else. They dragged a large boat over and began launching it. But soldiers stood in their way.

"We need to save these guys, they'll freeze!" the men insisted. "But you're not supposed to rescue them in a boat!"

"An hour passed, then two, then three," recalled Valery Rozhdestvensky. "It was freezing cold inside. We felt like sprats in a tin that had been mistakenly shoved into the freezer. As morning approached, these feelings began to become clear...

At dawn, scuba divers were brought to the lake, shrouded in thick fog. They waited a long time for a clear window. The helicopter, with its precious cargo dangling from its tether, took almost an hour to cover the few kilometers to the shore...

During this time, we suffered through the wait on the shore. The villagers brought another flask of moonshine from the village. They were in no hurry to drink it: "This is for the boys, they're frozen, the poor things..."

What a thunderous "hurrah" we greeted the exhausted boys with! They had spent more than ten hours in the icy waters of the Tengiz..."