The author of the chronology of the last six months of the life of the national idol is journalist Valery Perevozchikov. After the death of Vysotsky, he talked with everyone who knew him, and was ready to talk about it. Two books were written, an interview and a publication in the Top Secret magazine. They are scared to read.
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, which he drank without drying out, and in recent years, moreover, he "sat on the needle." A sympathetic doctor, injected with morphine, removed the signs of a "dry hangover."
After the first ampoules, Vysotsky felt like a different person, for some time he stopped drinking, he wrote like crazy. Even when he did not sleep at night, he felt rested and fit. However, the doses gradually increased, and a month before his death, Vysotsky introduces himself and swallows everything that overshadows the pain and fear: morphine, ampevitamins, heroin.
If medicines, panadol and pain medication fall into his hands, they take several servings at once and wash them with vodka, champagne and alcohol.
In mid-July in Moscow, the Olympics-80 begins, the authorities increase vigilance, which causes big problems with getting drugs. At Vysotsky's hallucination, he is panicky 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 whom Vysotsky has been dating since 1978, his mother, actors Abdulov and Bortnik, neighbor photographer Nisanov.
July 21 Oksana - a witness to a sleepless drunken night with Bortnik's participation - is trying to leave. Vysotsky is blackmailing her with suicide. Running out of the gate, the girl sees him hanging in his arms from the balcony on the seventh floor. Comes back immediately.
July 22, Vysotsky leaves his house for the last time, buys a ticket to Paris on July 29.
On July 23, Marina Vlady remembered how, on the day of their last telephone conversation, he assured that he had finished drinking and drugs and would fly in for a week. Meanwhile, he drinks two or three bottles a day. Alcohol does not dull narcotic withdrawal, Vysotsky groans or howls alternately. Fedotov reassures him with a huge dose of sedatives. In the evening, a team of doctors from the hospital. Sklifosovsky: Vysotsky in a coma after an overdose of drugs, he began to turn blue. Doctors want to take him to the hospital, but the insulted Fedotov opposes it. Doctors are laid in the patient's unconscious state on his side so that he does not suffocate, and leave.
July 24, Vysotsky wakes up every hour, rushing around the apartment, trying to go out for vodka. Yanklovich guards the door, Oksana walks on the heels of Vysotsky, prepares warm baths. Pour tea into his glass, the edges of which are smeared with cognac. At six in the evening Fedotov arrives from duty. He didn’t bring drugs, sedatives are introduced. Vysotsky rages, screams, the neighbors call several times and ask for silence. At 23 hours, he is tied with sheets to the bed. Oksana sits on it and cries. Vysotsky calms down, he is untied, he asks for vodka, drinks.
July 25 at two in the morning orders to bring a bottle of champagne from a neighbor, he drinks. Oksana goes to bed when Vysotsky stops moaning. Fedotov, who was on duty next to him, was tired and fell asleep. He wakes up at half-past four - dead silence reigns in the room. Vysotsky lies on his back, completely white arms extended along the torso. He’s been dead for at least an hour.
Before the arrival of the police, Yanklovich throws out empty ampoules after morphine. Against the autopsy, categorically against the father of Vysotsky, the family is not interested in revealing the truth.
An ambulance doctor writes in a death certificate a diagnosis dictated by Fedotov: "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 Soviet about the funeral of Vysotsky. He asked for a place in the Novodevichy cemetery, where Gogol, Bulgakov and Mayakovsky lay. But in response, he heard: "Now we are not allowing every marshal to bury."
Permission to the less elite Vagankovskoye cemetery was received in the Central Committee of the party by the favorite singer of the Politburo Joseph Kobzon. The grave at the entrance was indicated by the director of the cemetery, for which Kobzon handed him a bundle of banknote money. Actor Vsevolod Abdulov, who was at the same time, recalls that the director bounced back by sight of money, as if scalded. “I loved him, ” he said.
The Western press wrote about the funeral itself that Moscow had not seen such crowds since the death of Stalin. Almost 40 years after death, there are always fresh flowers, candles, cassettes and CDs with his songs on the grave.
However, the mass obsession with Vysotsky passed, and the Russian press reminds him twice a year - on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. From perestroika, the tone of the articles becomes glorious: he was the voice of the people. He worked beyond his strength, and the persecution of power, silence or attacks by newspaper men did their job - the national poet died at the age of only 43 years.
