Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [99]
At one point Gagarin said, ‘I must go to see the Main Man personally. Will he see me, d’you think?’
Russayev says, ‘I was amazed he could ask me this. I said, “But Yuri, you’re the one who’s always standing next to him on the Mausoleum. You’re always chatting together, and now you’re asking me if I can tell you whether or not he’ll see you? I haven’t even shaken the guy’s hand.”
‘“Yes, but I never talk seriously with him. All he ever wants to do is hear dirty stories and jokes from all my foreign trips.”’
Gagarin was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to talk properly to Brezhnev and persuade him to cancel Komarov’s launch. As Russayev explains today, ‘Relations between Khrushchev and Gagarin were absolutely excellent, but with Brezhnev it wasn’t so good. If people don’t want you, it can be hard to get through.’
Shortly before Gagarin left, the bitterness and intensity of his anger became obvious. ‘I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.’
Russayev goes on, ‘I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’
Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. ‘I told him, “Talk to me first before you do anything, and I’ll try to advise you. I warn you, be very careful.” But I wasn’t in the space department any more. I wasn’t even in Moscow, so there wasn’t much I could do. I don’t know if Yuri ever got to see Brezhnev, and I’ve felt guilty ever since that I couldn’t stay with Yuri to guide him.’
One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.
Although Gagarin grieved for Komarov, who had always been one of the ablest and most likeable cosmonauts, he remained as determined as ever to fly, and was extremely disappointed when his superiors decided to ground him from further rocket flights. Alexei Leonov explains, ‘After Komarov, the State Committee decided it wasn’t possible to fly Yura, because all the problems with the Soyuz had to be corrected, and it was going to take two years to redesign the vehicle.’
It was not just the slippage in the launch schedule, but renewed nervousness at the possibility of losing Gagarin to an accident, that contributed to his grounding – and there were certain military traditions to uphold. Sergei Belotserkovsky reluctantly agreed with the decision to ban the First Cosmonaut from further missions. Although he is well aware that Gagarin desperately wanted a moon flight, he says, ‘The main candidate [for a possible lunar attempt] was Andrian Nikolayev. Regarding Yura, Korolev told me shortly before his death that he probably shouldn’t fly any more. Yura was in a difficult situation, because he was Deputy Director of the Cosmonauts’ Training Centre, and the responsibilities of that job are clearly laid out – the control and training of other cosmonauts. It’s not usual for the chief of a training centre to make flights himself.’
Gagarin was very depressed by this decision, and wrote a letter to the State Committee in which he pleaded, ‘I can’t be prevented from flying. If I stop flying, I will have no moral rights to lead other people whose life and work are connected with flying.’
With the straight-talking wisdom of an honest working man, Gagarin’s favourite hairdresser Igor Khoklov says, ‘Yuri couldn’t live without flying. It was his whole life. A man can’t live without his trade. He can’t survive.’
When the redesigned Soyuz finally flew successfully for the first time, on October 26, 1968, Gagarin’s harshest critic, Georgi Beregovoi, was at the controls.
The truth behind Komarov’s