During the day we did the “Poza” experiment and took care of household chores. Today at 10 PM we passed the Romanenko and Grechko milestone — 96 days of flight. I remember, when they were preparing for that longest flight in history (before that, the record was the American astronauts’ flight on Skylab — 84 days), one evening in the Star City health center Zhora and I were drinking tea. I looked at him sympathetically and thought: “96 days he’ll have to be up there, in space” — and mentally tried to imagine what that’s like, drawing on the experience of my own eight-day flight with Pyotr Klimuk on “Soyuz-13.” I didn’t know then and couldn’t have imagined that I myself would end up exceeding that distance by more than double.

In manufacturing, in sports, a record is often largely predetermined by engineering calculations or training plans. In a spaceflight, behind the record there’s always a degree of the unknown. The main thing is in human capabilities — those that depend on the person and those that are unexpected, like a heart attack, kidney colic, toothache, and so on.

We can already be proud. Now only Lyakhov, Ryumin, Popov, Kovalyonok, and Ivanchenkov have worked longer in space than us. The next milestone is 140 days, the flight of Kovalyonok and Ivanchenkov. Yesterday I asked them to play us old music in the broadcast — tangos, foxtrots, Ruslanova, etc. And I didn’t expect how pleasant it would be to listen. After all, this is the music and songs of our parents and our childhood. So many memories came flooding in — how our loved ones celebrated holidays in the cramped rooms of barracks and communal apartments, all together to the sound of a phonograph, but it was so cheerful and close-knit that it’s hard now to feel or find, amid the increased prosperity, the atmosphere that existed before.