From Russia With No Love Lost: Putin regime vows revenge on rogue trader touting historic cosmonaut suit for £250,000 on eBay
Russian security officials say they are tracking down an eBay seller known as "Maksuta" who is offering a rare Krechet-94 Soviet cosmonaut suit, designed for the USSR's cancelled Moon landing programme, for £258,000 with free shipping to American collectors. A Russian security source described the sale as "scandalous" and said the FSB is monitoring such trades, with the regime reportedly determined to see the suit returned to Russia rather than sold to Western buyers.
The suit is one of twenty-two Krechet units built at the Zvezda factory near Moscow in 1967 for use on the lunar surface, a programme abandoned in 1974 after rocket failures and the success of US Moon landings. Under Russian law dating to 1993, exporting cultural artefacts of this kind can carry fines of up to one million rubles or up to five years in prison or hard labour, and much of the surviving hardware left Russia informally after the 1991 Soviet collapse, when officials and scientists sold off state stockpiles. The seller's true identity remains unconfirmed, though he claims to be the son of a Soviet space scientist.
- Russia hunts eBay seller of rare £258,000 Soviet Moon-suit
- FSB monitoring sales of Krechet-94 cosmonaut suit abroad
- Exporting such artefacts can carry Russian prison sentences
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Russia's Soviet-era space programme once raced the United States to put a person on the Moon, spending years developing hardware before the effort was scrapped in the 1970s. Among the equipment built for that cancelled mission were bulky pressurised suits called Krechet-94, designed to let a cosmonaut walk on the lunar surface. Only a small number were ever made, and most have long since vanished from public view.
Many of these Soviet space artefacts left Russia informally in the chaotic years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, when state institutions were poorly funded and stockpiles of old equipment were sold off or otherwise dispersed. Since then, such items have occasionally surfaced at auction or through private collectors abroad, often fetching large sums given their rarity and historical significance. Russia has laws restricting the export of items considered cultural heritage, and treats their sale overseas as a sensitive issue tied to national pride and ownership of Soviet-era history.
That backdrop matters because it explains why a suit like this attracts such attention: it is a tangible, rare relic of a superpower space race that never reached its goal, and its sale abroad touches on questions of who has the right to control and profit from that history.