Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [87]
Voskhod I flew too late to benefit Khrushchev. The capsule came home on October 13, and on the very next day the First Secretary was deposed. In fact, he was called away from his retreat at Foros even as the flight was in progress. In Moscow a special meeting of the Politburo informed him, much to his surprise, that he had just resigned due to age and increasing ill-health. Khrushchev’s deputy Leonid Brezhnev took advantage of the unresolved grain crisis to take over as First Secretary. Khrushchev’s faithful aide Fyodor Burlatsky says today, ‘Never mind the coup which happened recently during Gorbachev’s time. This was a real coup, prepared by the KGB and Brezhnev against Khrushchev and against anti-Stalinism.’
Almost immediately Gagarin’s status was affected. His foreign trips were curtailed and his lines of communication with the Kremlin severed. Brezhnev did not care to be reminded of his predecessor’s space triumphs. Burlatsky, who knew Gagarin very well, noticed an immediate change in the young cosmonaut’s mood. ‘I’m sure that he became unhappy. It wasn’t because he disliked Brezhnev. No, quite the opposite, it was because Brezhnev regarded him as a representative around the world for Khrushchev. Immediately Gagarin lost his status, his position. I had the feeling he didn’t know what to do with himself. Politically he represented the hand of peace extended from the Soviet Union to the West, but Brezhnev started up the arms race again, and he didn’t need people like Gagarin.’ Burlatsky stresses the perpetual truism of political life in Russia. ‘It’s not so important who’s who, but who belongs to whom. Gagarin belonged to Khrushchev, and that was enough to finish his career in Brezhnev’s time.’
Burlatsky is not alone in his opinion that the new hard-line regime ‘affected Gagarin’s life in such a way that he lost everything, and he had to try and find himself again in some kind of new experience. Drink, perhaps. He was devastated. One day he was a representative of his country, and the next, a simple pilot without any position. Somebody once wrote, “The greatest unhappiness is to have known happiness before.” Brezhnev and his Politburo friends took that happiness away, and they were guilty of everything that happened to Gagarin afterwards.’
Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk sums up the political fall-out for the First Cosmonaut in the most straightforward way. He remembers that in the Khrushchev days Gagarin’s frequent trips to the Kremlin were happy affairs, often accompanied by laughter and drink. In Brezhnev’s time the trips became far less frequent, ‘and Gagarin would come out looking sad and sit quietly in the car. I wouldn’t ask him what was wrong. I didn’t need to. I could see he was busy with his thoughts.’
Gagarin’s greatest initial shock was that he was no longer able to work behind the scenes on behalf of the many people who came to him with pleas for help. He was hardly a saint, but he was without doubt an essentially good-natured man, a product of his decent upbringing in Gzhatsk and Klushino. The virtues of social and personal responsibility that he had learned during the war years stayed with him throughout his life. Among those former colleagues who hint today at Gagarin’s moments of caprice, his occasional misbehaviour and thoughtlessness, none of them denies his warm and generous behaviour towards friends and strangers alike when they were in trouble. In fact, by 1964 all the cosmonauts who had completed missions were well known, and their influence stretched a long way in higher quarters.
At Star City a special Correspondence Department was established ten days after Gagarin’s flight to deal with the immense quantities of mail coming in from all over the Union, and many foreign countries besides. Over time the department was expanded to deal with other cosmonauts’ correspondence, with