Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [81]
By December 9, Gagarin, Valya and the accompanying entourage were in Colombo, Ceylon. Gagarin told Kamanin that he was ‘close to wearing out’. The Soviet ambassador in Colombo insisted on his making as many appearances as possible. Kamanin could not help but note:
They are doing their best to squeeze the maximum possible use out of Gagarin to make the government look good. They have no interest in how all this affects him.
By now Kamanin was growing concerned about Gagarin’s alcohol abuse and Valya’s increasing inability to deal with the stress of public appearances. Kamanin, Golovanov and other close colleagues have a similar view about this. It seems that Gagarin was a sensible drinker, a fun-loving man who could get drunk with the best of them but seldom drank too much when working. Unfortunately the publicity tours placed him in social situations where he was expected to drink each and every time, so as not to snub the endless toasts made in his honour. This, coupled with the emotional strain of his remorseless public schedule, inadvertently led him towards excessive drinking. Gagarin’s personal KGB escorts and speech advisors, Venyamin Russayev and Alexei Belikov, were criticized for allowing this state of affairs to occur, although there was little they could do to prevent it.
Gagarin developed a very good relationship with Russayev, and each man worked behind the scenes to protect the other. Today Russayev says, ‘Yuri was a very pure-hearted man, often taking responsibility for problems caused by others. As for Gherman Titov, problems seemed to slide past him like water off a duck’s back. After his flight he had 20 or more serious disciplinary incidents, car crashes or whatever. People always wanted to connect these problems to Yuri, and at that point I would intervene.’
Russayev (and his colleague Belikov, an excellent linguist) sat close to Gagarin while he made presentations or spoke to journalists. ‘I wasn’t like the bodyguards; I was more an advisor and assistant. You have to imagine all the difficulties Yuri came across in his public life, and on the foreign trips. It was my job to look after him.’ Not that Gagarin was socially inept – far from it. ‘He had an excellent memory for the names of all the politicians and officials he met, quite unlike Kamanin, who came on many of the trips and was hopeless at that kind of thing . . . Often Yuri could play it by ear, and didn’t need guidance. I was amazed at how he could cope with so many difficult questions.’
Russayev tells a touching story. ‘Nikita Sergeyevich Khrush chev could get pretty tipsy on just a couple of glasses of booze, and Yura always protected him from going over the top.’ Although Gagarin quite obviously adored Khrushchev, he kept as far apart from other politicians as he could safely manage without giving offence. Sergei Belotserkovsky came to know Gagarin very well, tutoring him in aerospace studies from 1964 onwards, when Gagarin was trying to get back to serious work. ‘I think his personality began to split. On one side he was the welcome guest of kings, presidents and even the Queen of England, but on the other side he never lost his ties with the ordinary people. I think he began to sense the lower classes’ lack of rights, their hardship, and he saw the corruption of the top layers of society. He saw our drunken leaders dancing on the table and behaving badly, and that can’t have left his honest soul unwounded. I’m talking not just about the external symptoms, but also the internal corruption which was dominant among our top leadership clan.’
Quite unfairly, there was a certain degree of resentment directed at Gagarin because of all the privileges he was assumed to have accumulated under Khrushchev. True, he and the other cosmonauts were given better-than-average living accommodation, but their level of comfort was not significantly better than that of most middle-ranking officers. Titov says, ‘Honestly, we never received special benefits. People were always saying to me, “Show us, point to the place where you’d like your