Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [113]
The last time Valentin saw his brother was on February 25, 1968, a few days after Yuri had received his diploma. Some journalists spoiled the mood that evening when they arrived, uninvited, at Gagarin’s Moscow apartment. ‘They rang the bell, I opened the door a little bit, and they pushed their way in,’ says Valentin. ‘What the hell could I do? Yura said they were parasites, and he couldn’t even relax at home. They started to take pictures, and one correspondent noticed Yura’s new Japanese camera, and said, “I will give you my camera, you give me yours, and I’ll pay the difference.” Yura turned to Valya and said, ‘Let’s give him the money instead, so he won’t ask that question again.” The journalist was very ashamed after that.’
Gagarin’s sister Zoya also tells a bitter story. ‘The last time we saw Yura was at his graduation on February 18, where he received his diploma papers from the Zhukovsky Academy, along with Gherman Stepanovich Titov. Yura was very happy to receive the diploma after so much hard work. After that, we only heard about his death five weeks later on the radio. We weren’t given any advice, we weren’t warned in advance. We weren’t told anything at all. I felt very sick, and so did Mamma. The doctors had to give us endless injections to calm us down . . . There was never any precise official information about the cause of Yura’s death, just guesses and rumours, all the worst things you could posibly think of. Someone helped him to die, that’s my feeling.’
Zoya recalls the funeral arrangements with a grimace of discomfort. ‘We sat for two days in the House of the Soviet Army, and the endless funeral music banged away in our heads. We thought we’d go insane. People were walking, walking, walking through to say goodbye. They came from everywhere, an endless procession of them. There were such long queues, the guards had to block the entrance for a while. It was terrible.’
As was the custom, Gagarin’s mother wanted to see her son for one last time before committing his body to the crematorium’s flames. Valentin describes the worst moment. ‘We wanted to open the coffin, but the head of the funeral team wouldn’t allow it. Mamma and Zoya started to argue with him, and everybody was shouting. Finally he let them do whatever they wanted. They pulled off the red velvet drape and opened the coffin, and inside there were human remains in a plastic bag. It was just about possible to recognize some of them. Yura’s nose was in place, but his cheek was torn off. Somebody told me later that Serugin in his coffin looked just as bad. Well, we looked, and then we closed the coffin. The music started to play, and the coffin moved slowly into the furnace. The next day, at the official funeral, Yura’s ashes were put into the Kremlin wall. And that was it.’
Zoya says that her mother Anna took her son’s death very hard, and a peculiar cruelty of history prevented her from finding any peace. ‘Usually people have a chance to bury their loved ones, and then they calm down as time passes, but every day Mamma was reminded of it, because Yura was so famous. People were always turning up from all over the Soviet Union to pay their respects and see our family home. Mamma lived until she was eighty, and I often wonder how she got through it. She suffered more than the rest of us, I’m sure.’
Many of Gagarin’s friends and colleagues visited his parents in Gzhatsk to express their sympathy.