there’s something poetic about the idea of surviving the most inhospitable environment in the universe and the several-mile fall from it through the power of technology and then being lain low by a fucking bear
I really feel this sums up Russia
This may be the cover story
they do not fool me
they brought that machete with them to fight Space Monsters O.O
Oh, it was much funkier (and so much more idiosyncratically Russian industrial) than that.
It wasn’t multiple weapons; it was one weapon, the TP-82:
The top two barrels are 40-gauge shotgun barrels, while beneath it is a 5.45x39mm rifle barrel (that’s the AK-74 round, basically the Russian answer to the M4 and other Western rifles designed for 5.56mm NATO).
Take a look at the buttstock; see how it’s got a sort of cloth wrapper unfolded, and there’s clips and other stuff? That’s because the buttstock was the machete. The whole thing was part of the standard issue survival kit for cosmonauts, and it was in service from 1986 to 2006.
But, why, you ask, did they design such a thing?
The Восход-2 (Voskhod-2) mission, in which Alexey Leonov became the first human being to execute a spacewalk, was beset with technical problems (as happened with hair-raising regularity in the Space Race era of the Soviet/Russian space program), most of them hit during reentry. Leonov wrote about it, so I’ll forgo the details; suffice it to say they came down hundreds of miles away from the planned landing zone, in heavily forested Siberian wilderness (taiga), and mission control had lost radio contact.
This happened during the mating season for both bears and wolves. And the survival kit had just one small-caliber handgun (given the year, 1965, I’m assuming a Makarov), which would do only marginally more damage to an enraged, seasonally-horny bear or wolf than the cosmonauts’ most caustic mat (barring a stupendously lucky shot).
Fortunately, Soviet aircraft found the landing module in fairly short order; unfortunately, there was no way for helicopters to put down anywhere even close. So warm clothing and blankets were air-dropped so that Leonov and the other Voskhod-2 cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, wouldn’t freeze to death overnight. (And a good thing, too, because the landing module developed an electrical fault such that the heater wasn’t working but the fans were going full-blast.)
A rescue party on skis arrived the next day, and built a fucking log cabin within the day so that Leonov and Belyayev had a much warmer and more comfortable place to recover for a night before setting out on skis to the nearest place a helicopter could pick them up.
Yes, a fucking log cabin. Because Russians.
Anyway, Leonov — at that point a national hero — told his superiors that the piddly little Makarov¹ was, as far as Siberian wildlife was concerned, roughly equivalent to yelling at them very loudly while poking them with sticks, and told them that if there was any chance future cosmonauts might have to contend with such circumstances, they needed to be issued something rather more authoritative an argument winner.
1. Don’t get me wrong! I adore the Makarov as a design; in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with inexplicably abundant ammunition, it’d be on my short list of weapons I’d like to have, along with an AK-47 and a pump-action 12-gauge, because I know it will basically never stop working. Russians have a long history of building absurdly reliable firearms. But 9x18mm Makarov, as a round, is right at the bottom end of useful for general self-defense.
