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seemed all too familiar – the bang on the door, the arguments, the wounds to her husband’s face (this time caused by her own nails, rather than by a jump from a balcony). Next morning Khoklov had to disguise the scratches on Gagarin’s cheeks prior to a meeting with Khrushchev. Khoklov recalls, ‘I did his make-up. I was licking his wounds, so to speak. He was the kind of a man who had a taste for women, but I wouldn’t say he was throwing himself around left and right. Valentina loved her husband very much, but because of all the things that had happened, she was very jealous. Plus the fact that she caught him.’

Gherman Titov says, ‘It was very difficult for Yura’s wife to get used to the fact that he didn’t really belong to her any more.’

One of the restraining influences on Gagarin’s behaviour after Foros was the bodyguard assigned to him, on Khrushchev’s orders – a tall, sour-faced man nicknamed the ‘polecat’, who immediately dampened the mood of any room he walked into, although he was apparently very nice, once one got to know him. By 1962 Gagarin had persuaded Khrushchev to withdraw the guard, but he had merely replaced him with three rather poorly disguised undercover followers. Khoklov says, ‘If Gagarin liked a woman he couldn’t go with her. You can’t put the bodyguards in the same bed. If you want a drink, it’s just the same. You have to buy a drink for the bodyguards.’

The other major factor was sheer pressure of work, not only at Zhukovsky but also at Star City, and during official ceremonial and propaganda functions. These were reduced in the Brezhnev era but by no means eliminated. Khoklov recalls Gagarin arriving for a haircut one day and commenting about a drunken tramp lying on the street outside, who had soiled his trousers. Exasperated by his relentless schedule, Gagarin joked bitterly, ‘That’s an intelligent fellow over there. He finds an opportunity to rest and do all the other stuff at the same time.’

Igor Khoklov was often despatched to the Kremlin to cut Khrushchev’s hair. The wily old barber retains an unflattering memory of the endless KGB staffers and secret policemen he encountered in those days. ‘I was in the room with Khrushchev and his special bodyguard, who kept his hand in his pocket where he hid his gun. I was thinking, “Who’s faster, you with your gun or me with my razor?” A senior manager then came in, a good bloke, Armenian I think. He saw the guard and said, “We trust the barber. With Igor here, a guard isn’t needed.” So the guard had to go and wait outside the door.’

And it wasn’t Igor the barber, but Khrushchev’s closest political colleagues who eventually cut his throat.

Khrushchev demonstrated that the Soviet Union was a modern technological nation, a powerful player on the world stage, with its missiles, space rockets, satellites, computers, jet planes, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. His weak spot – as for so many Russian leaders before or since – was providing the people back home with the most basic necessity of life: food. In the autumn of 1963 he was forced into an embarrassing series of emergency measures, buying wheat from America to make up for the poor harvests yielded by his over-ambitious and under-planned ‘Virgin Lands’ grain-planting programme.

In a similar manner to President Kennedy in the US, Khrushchev looked to the glamour of space to divert attention from his failures. On October 12, 1964, Korolev made good on his promise, successfully launching Voskhod I with three crewmen aboard. Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov were denied ejection seats in the cramped cabin, and there was not even room for them to wear spacesuits. Instead, they had to make do with simple cotton coveralls. However, the Voskhod incorporated some useful improvements on the old Vostok design. There was a back-up retro-rocket pod at the front of the craft, just in case the primary unit failed, and the re-entry capsule had a slightly flattened underside with a cluster of small rockets to soften its impact with the ground, thereby allowing the crew to stay aboard