The author of the chronology of the last six months of the people's idol's life is journalist Valery Perevozchikov. After the death of Vysotsky, he talked with everyone who knew him, and was ready to tell about it. Two books were written, interviews and publication in the Top Secret magazine. It's scary to read them.
Here we have before us not the idol of the masses, not Hamlet with a guitar and the husband of a sexy blonde, but only a human shred that drank without drying out, and during the last years, moreover, "sat on a needle." Some sympathetic doctor, injections of morphine, removed the signs of a "dry hangover" for him.
After the first ampoules, Vysotsky felt like a different person, he stopped drinking for a while, he wrote like a madman. Even when he did not sleep at night, he felt rested and in shape. However, the doses gradually increased, and a month before his death, Vysotsky injects and swallows everything that overshadows pain and fear: morphine, amphevitamins, heroin.
If medicines, panadol and pain relievers fall into his hands, they take several servings at once and wash them down with vodka, champagne and alcohol.
In mid-July, the 1980 Olympics begins in Moscow, the authorities are increasing their vigilance, which causes great problems with obtaining drugs. Vysotsky has hallucinations, he is terribly afraid of loneliness, constantly surrounds himself with people. Almost does not sleep - everyone who is next to him, like him, is on the verge of mental exhaustion.
Most often they are on duty with him: his theater administrator Yanklovich, doctor Fedotov, Oksana, the girl with whom Vysotsky has been dating since 1978, mother, actors Abdulov and Bortnik, photographer neighbor Nisanov.
Oksana - a witness to a sleepless drunken night with Bortnik's participation - is trying to leave. Vysotsky blackmails her with suicide. Running out of the gate, the girl sees him hanging in her arms from the balcony on the seventh floor. Returns immediately.
Vysotsky leaves the house for the last time, buys a ticket to Paris on July 29.
Marina Vlady remembered how on the day of their last conversation on the phone, he assured that he had finished with drinks and drugs and would fly in for a week. Meanwhile, he drinks two or three bottles a day. Alcohol does not dull drug withdrawal, Vysotsky alternately moans or howls. Fedotov calms him down with a huge dose of sedatives. In the evening, a team of doctors arrives from the hospital. Sklifosovsky: Vysotsky is in a coma after an overdose of drugs, he began to turn blue. The doctors want to take him to the hospital, but the offended Fedotov opposes. The doctors put the patient in an unconscious state on their side so that he does not suffocate, and leave.
Vysotsky wakes up every hour, rushes around the apartment, tries to get out for vodka. Yanklovich guards the door, Oksana follows Vysotsky on his heels, prepares warm baths. Tea is poured into his glass, the edges of which are smeared with cognac. At six in the evening Fedotov arrives from duty. He didn’t bring any drugs, they are injecting sedatives. Vysotsky rages, shouts, neighbors call several times and ask for silence. At 23 o'clock he is tied to the bed with sheets. Oksana sits on it and cries. Vysotsky calms down, they untie him, he asks for vodka, drinks.
at two o'clock in the morning orders to bring a bottle of champagne from a neighbor, drinks. Oksana goes to bed when Vysotsky stops moaning. Fedotov, who was on duty next to him, was tired and fell asleep. Wakes up at half past five - the room is deadly silence. Vysotsky lies on his back, completely white arms extended along the body. He's been dead for at least an hour.
Prior to the arrival of the police, Yanklovich throws out empty ampoules after morphine. Against the autopsy, Vysotsky's father is categorically against - the family is not interested in revealing the truth.
The ambulance doctor writes in the death certificate the diagnosis under Fedotov's dictation: "Death occurred in a dream as a result of withdrawal symptoms and acute heart failure."
On the morning of July 25, 1980, the director of the Taganka Theater, Yuri Lyubimov, called the Moscow City Council about Vysotsky's funeral. I asked for a place at the Novodevichy cemetery, where Gogol, Bulgakov and Mayakovsky lie. But in response I heard: "We are not allowed to bury every marshal there now."
Permission for the less elite Vagankovsky cemetery was received by the party's Central Committee, the beloved Politburo singer Iosif Kobzon. The cemetery director pointed out the grave at the very entrance, for which Kobzon handed him a wad of banknotes. Actor Vsevolod Abdulov, who was at the same time, recalls that the director, seemingly money, jumped back as if scalded. “I loved him,” he said.
About the funeral itself, the Western press wrote that Moscow had not seen such crowds since the death of Stalin. Even almost 40 years after his death, there are always fresh flowers, candles, cassettes and discs with his songs on the grave.
However, the massive obsession with Vysotsky has passed, and the Russian press recalls him twice a year - on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. Perestroika made the tone of the articles glorious: he was the voice of the people. He worked beyond his strength, and the persecutions of the authorities, silence or attacks by newspapermen did their job - the people's poet died at the age of only 43 years.
