QuickCheck: Was a man stranded in space for 311 days when his nation collapsed?

AT first glance, the idea must sound like something from a horror movie or an absurd comedy; a man stuck in space because the nation that sent him into orbit had ceased to exist.

So when one reads that a Soviet cosmonaut was stuck in space for a total of 311 days because the Soviet Union collapsed and became the cash-strapped, smaller Russian Federation, could this be a case of a true story being as strange or perhaps even stranger than fiction?