As I watched his televised speeches and read his long policy statements in Pravda that spring, I felt a swelling optimism, a confidence that this strong young leader was really going to lead my country to its true destiny.
Certainly the process of glasnost seemed to be expanding rapidly. The scandalous corruption trials of the Central Asian leaders were reaching a sensational climax. The Uzbek Party secretary Sharaf Rashidov had led a truly corrupt mini-empire for decades. After his death in 1984, his successor — a seemingly bland Uzbek with the tongue — stopping name of Inamshon Usmankhodzhavev — and his republic’s Interior Minister were convicted of gross corruption and abuse of power. They had lived like oriental pashas; now they would learn the life of convicts in a corrective labor camp.
Over the months that followed, the scandal spread inexorably out of Central Asia to wash up on the red brick moats of the Kremlin itself. Yuri Churbanov, Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law, and the former first deputy minister of the interior (one of the top policemen in the Soviet Union) were implicated in the Uzbekistan morass and faced a stunning list of corruption charges, including accepting huge bribes from Rashidov and raking off millions of rubles from State enterprises. Every day, the Vremya newscast provided more sensational details of the Churbanov trial.
Sitting with my squadron mates in the duty-alert dayroom, watching our big color television, I was both fascinated and disgusted by the Churbanov trial.
My zveno leader, Yuri Petrukhin, now a major, aptly caught our mood. “That son of a bitch,” Petrukhin swore, pointing at the screen where Yuri Churbanov sat smirking at the courtroom camera. “He’s the type of leech that’s been bleeding this country white for years.”
The trial seemed to be glasnost at its best; Gorbachev appeared determined to rip apart the rotten old Brezhnev system of corrupt cronyism, to sack all the “bloated parasites” who were dragging our country into stagnation. But many of us began to wonder if such deep-seated corruption existed elsewhere in the Soviet Union; were former Brezhnev officials the only ones guilty of such gross abuse of power? Like the rest of the Soviet people, we had to wait for Moscow to shed more light by opening more doors to the unvarnished truth.
Then people began whispering rumors about shocking revelations by Western historians concerning the brutal execution of Czar Nicholas and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. According to accounts, the royal family had been butchered with bayonets, their bodies dissolved in acid and the bones thrown down an abandoned mine shaft. The zampolits dismissed these rumors as slanderous provocations. But confirmation came from a strange source. Major Yuri Petrukhin, our intelligence officer, a great pilot and a loyal Communist, told several of us in the ready room one afternoon that the reports were true.
“How do you know this, Comrade Major?” Nikolai Saratev asked. He was a Siberian country boy, a Party zealot with an “admirable” Komsomol record.
Petrukhin merely reached in his pocket and pulled out the beautiful little transistor radio receiver he had built himself from spare parts. “Radio Liberty” was all he said.
Nikolai gaped but did not challenge Petrukhin.
It was against State Security regulations to listen to Western radio broadcasts, which were known to contain coded messages for spies and saboteurs. But Petrukhin was never without his transistor radio these days. It was as if he had appointed himself an unofficial monitor of glasnost, whose duty it was to verify the accuracy of the State news media. Petrukhin had always been just as loyal a Party man as Nikolai. But something had changed in the major’s perspective. He now seemed obsessed with learning the real truth, not just the official glasnost version of events.
In many ways Petrukhin symbolized a barely perceptible schism between the hard-line Communist senior officers, who had staked their lives and careers in supporting the official status quo, and the restless junior officer corps, senior lieutenants, captains, and majors like Petrukhin who were beginning to have fundamental doubts about the Party’s leadership of our nation.
These were uncertain times, so I decided to keep my own counsel. One thing I knew for certain, however, was that glasnost certainly was not anywhere near as “open” as Moscow would have us believe. This was dramatized a few days later. I was talking to Peotr Tutakin, a visiting engineer from Akhtubinsk. We were alone in the squadron dayroom, so I decided to ask him about an accident report we had received the month before. Apparently a civilian aircraft had been destroyed in a “mishap” involving a combat plane on an Akhtubinsk poligon. The VVS report had been sketchy at best.
“What about all this?” I asked. “What actually happened?”
Peotr smiled grimly. “Last November Major Viktor Stepanenko was flying a MiG-23 on a live-fire test of our new anti-helicopter missile,” he explained, then gave the details.
The weapon’s radar sensor was tuned to detect the Doppler rotation motion of a helicopter’s rotor. There was an old Mi-6 drone flying twenty miles downrange when Stepanenko fired his missile.
“But no one had informed the regional Aeroflot office of the exercise,” Peotr added. “Instead of striking the helicopter drone, the missile locked onto the propellers of a civilian An-26 and destroyed the airliner.”
“Shit!” I said. “How many were killed?”
“Twenty-six. All civilians … women, kids.”
“There was nothing in Pravda, not a word on Vremya,” I blurted out, then suddenly realized I sounded naive. “There wasn’t even a vague token report of an Aeroflot accident.”
Peotr nodded again. “Glasnost is a very flexible policy, Sasha.” He shook his head. “Missiles are dangerous. Remember the American U-2 flown by Gary Powers?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” Peotr said, “we shot down one of our own MiG-19s before we got the Americans that glorious May Day.”
That night I thought more of the missile accident. It reminded me of Chernobyl, not in magnitude, certainly, but in the cover-up that followed. At least in the aircraft, the people died quickly.
In each case, gross bureaucratic bungling had resulted in the tragic death of innocent Soviet citizens. But, despite glasnost, neither tragedy was reported to the Soviet people. Obviously, old habits died hard. But Mikhail Gorbachev had solemnly pledged during his Ail-Union television speeches that glasnost was more than token propaganda, that the new policy of openness was not simply a sophisticated variation on the old deceit of pokazuka, the official sham that pervaded all Soviet life.
Now, like Yuri Petrukhin, I was beginning to harbor serious doubts, not just about cautious bureaucrats sabotaging Gorbachev’s bold policy, but about the popular Gorbachev himself.
Valery was off on his third combat tour to Afghanistan and had graciously given me the keys to his flat. I had planned to use this quiet sanctuary away from my fellow pilots to study for the Akhtubinsk center examination. Sitting alone at night in Valery’s small, comfortable apartment, I found myself pushing aside my aerodynamic and electronics manuals and turning my own transistor to Radio Liberty.
Valery, a bitter, traumatized Afghansti, had recommended I learn the truth from Radio Liberty, not Pravda or Red Star. Major Petrukhin, a New Communist Man if there ever was one, had implicitly given the same advice. I began to listen to the American radio station each night, alone in the center of Valery’s small kitchen, the radio before me on the table, sheltered by my spread arms and shoulders so that no one in the staircase behind me could hear.
I heard a steady litany of reports on train crashes, mine and factory accidents, and increasingly, civil strife among rival ethnic groups in the outer republics. None of this was reported by the official Soviet media. I could believe either the American radio station or my own government. Finally I came to believe the Americans. And learning this privileged information gave me satisfaction; I knew things my comrades did not.
One reason I had lost faith in my government’s honesty was the hollowness of perestroika that was becoming more obvious as each month passed. Appare
ntly the much touted “restructuring” of perestroika was just a shifting of the same old inefficient structures of the economy. Gorbachev was taking the same apparatchiks from ministries like Gosplan and Agriculture and shuffling them around into new “super ministries” that were supposedly much more efficient. All that looked wonderful in Moscow, but it had absolutely no impact out in the provinces or the distant republics. Yet month after month, Gorbachev appeared on All-Union television, gazing earnestly into the lens to assure us all that perestroika would soon dramatically improve our lives. He began to sound like a zampolit.
Under perestroika, apparatchiks who earned their living mouthing platitudes — Gorbachev and the Politburo included — still had their fine apartments, their Volga sedans, and access to Beryozka hard-currency stores. They lived in a separate world from the millions of normal “toilers” whom they supposedly cared for so deeply. I saw no future in these splendid reforms.
But glasnost itself was a fascinating concept. I came to realize that there were actually two forms of glasnost evolving simultaneously: the official warmed-over pokazuka glasnost, and a parallel, more authentic and deeper process of national awakening. Once Gorbachev had opened the door to the truth a narrow crack, the doorway itself could never be completely blocked again. For example, his most recent admission that at least thirty-five million Soviet citizens had been killed in the Great Patriotic War — almost twice the previous official number — raised immense questions about other “official” versions of major historical events. New magazines such as Ogonyok and Argumenti i Facti had seized the opportunity presented by glasnost to conduct valid historic investigations, actually based on eyewitness accounts, not the dictates of the Party.
Books by banned authors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Anatoli Rybakov were now available in photocopies of printed editions. Growing up, I had never actually seen a samizdat “self-published” carbon copy of an illicit book manuscript, although I’d heard they had been popular among Moscow intellectuals. But now with glasnost there seemed to be much greater access to copy machines, so that even if Moscow tried to suppress a newly legal magazine by limiting the publisher’s paper supply, the important articles quickly spread throughout the Soviet Union, and were even quoted on news broadcasts in the republics. Perestroika, I knew, was doomed from the beginning. But glasnost, I suspected, had the potential to transform my homeland.
That spring I received my orders to report to Akhtubinsk in June for the week-long official examination and interview process. A few days later the 1st Squadron was unexpectedly ordered to fly to Akhtubinsk for several months’ intensive combat evaluation of the MiG-29. I immediately grasped the potential benefits from this order. The new fighter would be the star performer at Akhtubinsk, and flying as a member of my elite squadron would put me in daily contact with the test pilots who would conduct my formal examination in June. As every Soviet pilot knew, when you sat in a sauna drinking beer and talking airplanes with another aviator, you had a friend for life.
But my sudden good fortune was just as suddenly stymied. Colonel Torbov, my regimental commander, personally assigned me to a four-plane zveno, standing indefinite duty alert at the Vaziani Air Base near Tbilisi. When I requested an appointment with Torbov to appeal his decision, he curtly dismissed me.
“You have your orders, Captain Zuyev,” he said coldly, hardly looking up from his embossed-leather desk set.
“But, Comrade Colonel…”
“Dismissed, Captain.”
Now he looked up, his sharply chiseled features set in a scowl. He was lean and tall, a true “Hussar” of a fighter pilot who could display a definite aristocratic hauteur when he chose to. The colonel was a graduate of the prestigious Gagarin Academy in Moscow and came from a well-connected military family. There was no arguing with his decision.
Walking back to the flight line, I had to face the bitter logic of his order. Colonel Torbov was exacting revenge, a prerogative of senior Soviet officers. A few months earlier Torbov had been unusually friendly and highly complimentary of my performance. I had quickly discovered the reason for the colonel’s pleasant attention. His wife had a relative named Tamara, an attractive woman of thirty, who had just been divorced and had sought refuge on their doorstep. Although Torbov was a regimental commander, with an ample supply of blat, he couldn’t find an apartment or job for this domestic refugee. So he had to marry her off to free the sofa in his small living room. Apparently he and his wife sorted through personnel files of all the bachelor pilots, and my name was on the top of the pile.
They invited me to dinner, then to tea, then encouraged me to escort Tamara to the November Revolution Day reception at the officers’ dining room. I declined. The blatant, passionless manipulation of the situation was distasteful. Tamara seemed an attractive and pleasant enough woman, but I found the crude matchmaking degrading for both of us. The whole situation was embarrassing. What the hell kind of country was this that could equip Colonel Torbov’s regiment with the world’s most versatile combat aircraft and forty skilled pilots to fly them, but could not provide decent housing for a young divorcee? Instead, an intelligent and energetic senior officer like Torbov was reduced to playing the role of a village babushka, trying to snare a valuable husband for his relative.
As soon as Torbov realized I was not interested in Tamara, he turned cold toward me. Within days his lavish attention was focused on my friend Yuri, one of the twin Siberian maintenance officers. Three weeks after that, Yuri and Tamara were married, and Yuri received an unexpected plum assignment to a regiment in Germany. This was his reward for marrying Tamara. But it was also a breach of the unofficial policy not to split up twin officers who had joined the service together. In fact, Yuri’s assignment drove a wedge between the two brothers and eventually destroyed their close relationship. Once again, the sordid reality of everyday Soviet life had a destructive effect on normal human relationships. But at least Tamara had found a husband. We all knew terrible stories of divorced couples who were forced to continue sharing the same small living space because there were no other apartments available. In some cases, a divorced man or woman brought the new spouse or paramour back to the one-room apartment where they “lived” on a cot or sofa separated by a curtain from the former spouse — and usually a child or two. And yet the editorialists in Pravda lectured us about the weak moral fiber of those who turned to alcohol to escape the brutal reality of their lives. I couldn’t blame Yuri for snatching up Tamara; her unofficial dowry — orders to a VVS regiment in Germany — made her a very attractive bride.
These foreign assignments paid at least double salaries in convertible currency. After five years in Germany, a young captain could return home with a houseful of furniture and enough money saved to buy a Zhiguli. Real “overseas” assignments to third world Socialist countries like Syria, Angola, or even Cuba were still more prized. There a man got five or six times his normal salary, paid in hard currency. “Frying your ass” three years in Africa or the Middle East set you up for the rest of your life. Colonel Torbov had dangled such a prospect in front of me, before I made it clear I didn’t want to marry Tamara.
The lesson of this sequence was clear: If you cooperate with the system, you will be rewarded. Conversely, I had to be punished for resisting Torbov’s pressure.
In May the 1st Squadron flew off to Akhtubinsk, and I went to Vaziani.
Both glasnost and perestroika were subjected to bizarre scrutiny on a bright afternoon in early May, when a teenage West German pilot named Mathias Rust flew a rented, single-engine Cessna 172 across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, on across the coastal plain, all the way through Moscow’s ultra-modern air-defense zone — which even included antimissile weapons — and landed on a bridge near the Kremlin. He then proceeded to taxi the light aircraft directly into Red Square, where he hopped out and began signing autographs. Before glasnost, this would have been a nonincident; official Moscow would have staunchly denied it had ever happened. Reports of
the intruder aircraft would have been dismissed as imperialist provocation, just as Moscow had refused to admit that the Korean Airlines Flight 007 had successfully penetrated our most concentrated air-defense sector in the Far East. But under glasnost, Western journalists and tourists were allowed to videotape the landing and even chat with the young pilot, who stated he was on a peace mission and wished to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Unfortunately Gorbachev and his new reformist Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, were at the Warsaw Pact conference in East Berlin when Rust landed. With much fanfare, Gorbachev had just announced that the forces of the Warsaw Pact were undergoing their own perestroika, based on a new military doctrine that was purely “defensive” in character. Efficiency based on high technology, not the brute force of numbers, was to be the hallmark of the Socialist nations’ military, a restructuring to be led by the Soviet Armed Forces. Unfortunately for Marshal Sokolov, the penetration of Moscow’s vital airspace by a light plane flown by a young civilian was hardly a tribute to this newly efficient defense. Gorbachev summarily dismissed Sokolov, replacing him with a mere general of the Army, Dmitri Yazov. The head of the PVO Air Defense Force, Marshal Alexander Koldunov, was also fired. In the official announcement he was referred to simply as “Comrade Koldunov,” without his name or patronymic, a cutting insult to a Marshal of the Soviet Union.
My zveno was on duty alert at Vaziani when Mathias Rust landed. At first we thought the news was just another of the rumors or weird jokes that had mushroomed since glasnost, but we quickly learned that the Defense Ministry was boiling with angry embarrassment over the incident. That night the deputy military district commander, Major General Shubin, drove his own car out to the base from Tbilisi after midnight in a personal attempt to assess our readiness to intercept similar provocation flights down here in Georgia. The scared conscript guard at the gate waved the general through without even checking his identity papers. Shubin drove right to the control tower and the parking apron of the duty-alert section. He called the hapless duty-alert officer on the carpet, bellowing that — like Mathias Rust — he could have a “powerful bomb” in the trunk of his Zhiguli.
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