Bought a horse and abandoned everything: the true destiny of Yashka the Gypsy

"Bought a horse with the first royalty" - sounds like a line from a beautiful Gypsy ballad. In reality, it's the harsh, pulsating truth of the Soviet sixties. While most families breathlessly brought Czech crystal sets and scarce pot-bellied refrigerators into their homes, a fifteen-year-old Gypsy boy acted differently. He bought a horse. And two milk cows for his mother. Cars? Apartments? Fashionable suits with a spark? Leave that to the metropolitan dandies. Life threw Vasily Vasilyev such a dizzying career that the neighbors in Vyazniki could only fervently cross themselves after him.

"Under the third birch on the left"

"I was born in the forest, under the third birch on the left," Vasily liked to joke. And you know, there was only a grain of a joke in this joke. He was born on the first day of 1950. Moreover, literally in a camp, in a huge family, where fourteen children were running around. Vasily's father, by the way, went through the war as a squadron commander - hence, apparently, this innate stateliness, and absolute fearlessness in the saddle.

Until the age of six, the boy wandered with his relatives across the vast expanses of the Union. The smoke of bonfires, nights under the huge starry sky, endless songs and a road going beyond the horizon - this was his main, most honest school of life.

And then everything was cut short. In 1956, a strict decree was issued: Gypsies were ordered to abandon their wagons, settle on the land and work like everyone else. The Vasilyev family dropped anchor in the Vladimir region, in tiny Vyazniki. The free camp life was replaced by a desk, school bells and a harsh proletarian reality. The boy learned to survive anew - now among ordinary, settled guys.

Factory whistle and copper pipes

His biography could easily have been lost in millions of similar destinies. Well, a guy. Well, he has been working in a weaving factory since the age of twelve, bringing every earned penny to his exhausted mother. Nothing unusual for those years. At the same time, Vasya was not just surviving - he was greedily absorbing life. He played the trumpet in the school brass band, put together his own ensemble and even ran two music circles. In the same 12 years, he wrote his first song.

He studied well, desperately played sports and even passed the strict standards of a candidate for master of sports in several disciplines, including equestrian sports and swimming. But the camp genes, which had been dormant until then, did not allow him to sit still. The energy inside was boiling, melting and looking for a way out. The guy was not drawn to acting at all - he liked nature and buzzing tractors, which is why he even went to an agricultural college.

Bride, cinema and leap into immortality

By the age of fifteen, according to strict Gypsy traditions, Vasily already had a bride - a black-eyed Valya. Things were moving towards the wedding. And then an accident intervened, turning everything upside down. A relative of the guy, actor Yuri Tsurilo, whispered to the director's assistants about a talented young man from Vyazniki. Eight thousand people auditioned for the role of Yashka the Gypsy then! Eight thousand.

The mother and bride cried, screamed, stood like a wall. Cinema seemed like a demonic thing to them. But the father, as a former military man, cut it short: "The film is worthy. Let him go." So the Vyaznikov weaver found himself on the set of "The Elusive Avengers".

What happened next can only be called an explosion. The 1967 film was swept away by an avalanche of adoration - 54 million viewers watched the film. The name "Yashka" became a household name. Boys in the yards fought for the right to be him in games. Vasily himself did crazy stunts. That very legendary jump from a 25-meter cliff into the sea is his own, desperate work, without any understudies. On sheer courage.

Then came "The New Adventures of the Elusive" and "The Crown of the Russian Empire". The trilogy carved his name in stone, but it also became a golden cage. Directors saw only Yashka in him. Fame began to cool down. Vasily left for the Romen Theater, served there for seven years, and then went to travel around the country with Lenconcert. He sang romances, played the trumpet. But the audience stubbornly asked him to say at least a word "in Yashka's voice." He only smiled bitterly - you can't escape the past.

"Russian old woman" and broken illusions

The most painful breakdown occurred in his personal life. In the seventies, fate brought him together with Galina Khramova, a brilliant operetta actress. They were introduced by Vladimir Presnyakov Sr. Galina was 12 years older than Vasily and for a long time rejected the courtship of the young Gypsy. But the pressure took its toll.

They had a daughter, Kneya. Vasily acted chivalrously - he got married. And immediately went deaf from the whispers behind his back. Relatives were indignant: "Why did he marry a Russian old woman?" By the harsh standards of the camp, this was a challenge, a scandal, almost a disgrace. The marriage turned out to be fragile. Everything collapsed in an instant when Vasily met a young Gypsy woman, Marina. Blood took its toll - he lost his head and left.

Galina was left with a small daughter in her arms. She started drinking. Pain and loneliness pushed her to the bottom. Kneya had to be given to a boarding school for a while. Later, breaking out of the vicious circle, the mother took the girl and took her abroad. First she washed dishes in the USA, then moved to Portugal. The daughter grew up strong, opened her own restaurant. But the wound remained - Kneya's relationship with her father was forever covered in ice.

Bandits, Tver and a quiet harbor

The nineties ran over Vasilyev like a tank, as it did over the whole country. He had a beautiful, noble dream - to build a Gypsy cultural center on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. For this, the family sold the last value - a two-room apartment. The result is predictable for that era: the money dissolved in the pockets of "companions" with a bandit spirit. No housing, no center, no savings. The star of Soviet cinema found himself on the street.

But Gypsies don't give up. Marina, the second wife, saved him. With her, life found a new, calm rhythm. A common daughter, Kristina, appeared. Esenia, Marina's daughter from her first marriage, whom Vasily raised as his own, also grew up.

They moved to Tver. There, away from the metropolitan bustle and betrayals, Vasily finally did what he had dreamed of. He created a cultural center, began to organize concerts. For the local diaspora, he became an undisputed authority, a wise mentor. A man who knows the price of both frantic applause and deaf poverty.

Life has put everything in its place. The children went their own ways. Kneya is building a business in distant Portugal. Kristina stayed close to her father, becoming his main support. Esenia also found her way. Each of them carries a part of that desperate boy who once did not buy a fashionable tape recorder, but brought a horse into the yard. The life of Vasily Vasilyev is not just a biography of an actor of one role. This is an honest, torn, beautiful script, where there were both falls into the abyss, and flights to the sun. And a quiet, worthy finale under the plucking of guitar strings.