Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  In late September Jana suddenly returned from Kiev and announced she had managed to enroll in the university’s correspondence program. She had brought several boxes of books and laboratory manuals, so I took her at her word. But two weeks later, those boxes were still unopened.

  One night I got back late after an exhausting instrument flying sortie and blew up at Jana for yet again leaving the kitchen full of filthy dishes. She broke into tears and confessed that she was not, after all, enrolled in a correspondence course, but had simply left the university because she was “lonely.”

  This was a disaster. I knew her parents would blame me for her quitting the university. And I also realized that, if she did not return now, she never would. The next day I managed to secure a five-day leave and pulled some strings to buy Aeroflot tickets to Kiev with borrowed money.

  The next morning we were in the university rector’s office. I wore my best parade uniform with polished wings and the two decorations I’d earned. The old comrade was sympathetic when I explained that Jana had abruptly left the university after I had received a sudden overseas assignment. Now, I told him, that assignment had been just as suddenly canceled. It was imperative that she be allowed to enroll as a correspondence student.

  Although the official enrollment deadline was weeks past, I somehow managed to slash through the red tape. When we left Kiev, Jana was glum and pouting, but she was enrolled.

  Over the coming months, I learned another painful lesson about the reality of Soviet life. I had always eaten my meals in officers’ dining rooms, where the food was free and plentiful. But now I was a married man and was supposed to buy groceries in the bazaar, where the prices were at least three times those in the Voyentorg. But the Voyentorg was always empty these days. And, unlike Akhtubinsk, we had no transport available to whisk us off to Moscow for shopping trips. On a salary of 350 rubles a month, two healthy young people with normal appetites simply could not eat properly. I now understood why the staff of the Akhtubinsk center had staged their strike.

  Because Jana was only making a token effort in her correspondence study, I suggested she find a part-time job to help our finances. Before her father left for Syria, he managed to land her a well-paying position in the division meteorology office. But two weeks passed and she still had not reported for work. When I confronted her, Jana complained that she hadn’t “felt well.” In fact, she had merely slept all day.

  Only three months into our marriage, and I was beginning to face the bitter truth that I had probably married Jana for the wrong reasons.

  That December my squadron had duty alert when the huge, devastating earthquake struck Armenia. The Ruslan base became a staging and refueling point for Soviet transport aircraft hauling international relief supplies to the victims. Big An-12 and An-22 turboprops were landing and taking off every few minutes, and the convoys of fuel tanker trucks stretched along the apron halfway back to the main gate. The Air Force was doing its best to support the international relief effort.

  The television coverage of the disaster had been heartrending. Not only had thousands of people died in the collapsed buildings, but thousands more were at risk from the blizzards that swept down after the earthquake. I was proud to do my part, helping to turn the transports around quickly. And it was encouraging to see the massive outpouring of international aid for the victims.

  Then one rainy afternoon, I was talking to a tired crew of the An-22, who had just flown in short of fuel from Yerevan. The pilots were unshaven and their eyes were hollow; they had been flying practically around the clock. When I asked how the victims were holding up, the copilot, a lanky senior lieutenant, suddenly laughed bitterly.

  “They are dying, of course, Comrade.”

  His aircraft commander, a shorter captain my age, shot the man an angry glance.

  But the copilot ignored him. “All that food and medicine,” he said flatly, “the tents, the blankets… the sleeping bags for the children…”

  Now the captain spoke. “The whole republic of Armenia is controlled by maroder, pillagers.”

  “Pillagers?”

  The two officers explained. As soon as the relief effort began, armed gangs of survivors-usually aided by the local militia-set up bogus landing zones for the relief helicopters that ferried the supplies from the main airports. When the Mi-8 cargo helicopters set down, the looters rolled up their trucks and loaded the supplies on board. They even had colored landing panels, strobe lights, and radio beacons.

  “Obviously the local Party is in it too,” the captain said bitterly.

  The copilot added that women and children were literally starving in the ruins while the bands of looters were getting fat on canned Polish ham and French biscuits. They only took the most valuable goods; Army patrols had found boxes of medical equipment dumped in the frozen mud near the landing zones. The looters had thrown away the portable X-ray equipment and kept material that was easier to sell. Already, he said, the thick winter parkas flown in from Finland were for sale in the street bazaars of Baku to the north.

  I tried to grasp what all this meant. “What about the Army? Isn’t anyone trying to control this?”

  The copilot scowled. “The soldiers are, of course. They have their own methods. They caught a man cutting rings off the fingers of the dead. They led him into the ruins, then knocked down a wall on top of him. But he was just a free agent. They can’t do anything against the organized groups.”

  “But who’s protecting those gangs?” I demanded.

  The tired young captain slurped his sweet tea and shook his head. “The KGB… the Party… who knows? They call them the Mafia.”

  The term “Mafia” had first appeared during the Uzbekistan corruption trials to describe the crooked network established by the local Party officials. Since then, there had been other reports of secret criminal alliances among Party officials, State Security, and profiteers. This Soviet Mafia was not an American-style secret underworld group of pimps, drug dealers, or hijackers, as we had seen in so many gangster films, but rather an unofficial network of corrupt Socialist “entrepreneurs” who abused their positions of authority. And now these officers had affirmed that another absolutely corrupt banda existed in Armenia, a gang so cruel that they would strip relief supplies from the hands of starving women and children.

  In a speech that winter Gorbachev had accused the Mafia of brazenly sabotaging the Armenian relief efforts. But the last thing successful criminals wanted was such notoriety. Then I realized that Party officials themselves had to be involved with this criminal enterprise. The only reason they singled out the Mafia was to divert attention from their own crimes. Indeed, corrupt officials seemed to use the Party’s own Union-wide organization to extend their tentacles.

  And the corruption seemed to be spreading like a cancer. I wondered where it would end.

  CHAPTER 10

  Repression

  1988–89

  One of the few pieces of good news in the spring of 1988 was the announcement of our new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli Ignatich Antonovich. He was a great leader and a very popular officer. Short and wiry, like many fighter pilots, he had a sharp nose and bushy brows above lively, deep-set eyes. He smiled easily and showed none of the cold brooding of Torbov. Antonovich was not carefree, however. He worked us hard, but always explained the purpose of orders in his precise, almost comically basso voice, as if the words were echoing from a railway station loudspeaker. Above all, he was an excellent pilot, and being in his mid-thirties, was much closer in age to his officers than Torbov or other regimental commanders had been.

  I got along with him well. Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich made it clear from the beginning that he expected us to hold up our high flying standards, and complete the combat evaluation of the MiG-29 in record time. But he also worked hard to improve the officers’ housing conditions and was continually fighting the bureaucracy-often unsuccessfully-to increase the food supplies in the Voyentorg.

&nbs
p; Early that April, when I was due for my annual leave, Antonovich telephoned me at the duty-alert room.

  “Shurka,” he said, “people tell me you’re the world’s expert on ski resorts. Can you arrange a vacation package for me?”

  I hadn’t known he was a skier, and as it turned out, he was a novice eager to learn. “I’ll try, Anatoli Ignatich.”

  “You’ll do more than try, Shurka, because you’re coming along to teach me how to ski.”

  That was, indeed, an incentive. I’d been flying hard and my troubling marriage was in one of its sporadic truce periods. Although Jana had not seriously tried to hold a job at the base, she had turned back to her studies with something like enthusiasm. Now she was in Kiev completing her second-year spring examinations, and I hoped to reward her effort by taking her along to the Terskol resort with me and the colonel.

  That afternoon I called the military travel office; they called Moscow, and we had three packages in hand before the office closed. Next I called my friend Hamid, who lined up the best skis and rooms for us.

  “Ignatich” was a skilled pilot, but did not make much progress in his large class of beginner ski students. So I promised to teach him parallel skiing quickly. The next morning we rode the lift to a remote shoulder of the mountain and I made real progress, using aviation terminology like “thrust,” “bank,” and “pitch” to explain the proper angles for his skis. By afternoon he was progressing well. And the next day he was actually skiing the steep slopes of Cheget, the hardest mountain.

  But Jana was a problem. She resented being left behind in her beginners’ class, and clearly she was jealous of the attention I devoted to the colonel. Jana insisted on joining the colonel and me, but complained about the cold and whined that she didn’t have a pretty ski suit like the other girls. Imported ski suits cost three months’ salary, and I told her crossly that she could have paid for one herself if she had kept her job.

  When she lashed back at me, I responded in turn. “If you wanted a nice ski suit, you should have brought one from Hungary.”

  For months she had been harping on the wonderful trove of luxury goods her family had amassed during their long years in Hungary, and implicitly criticized me for not providing the same.

  For the first time she swore at me and stomped away, her shoddy ski boots clomping on the ice. That night we slept in separate beds and were hardly speaking in the morning.

  We didn’t have a chance to reconcile. I received an emergency telegram to call my stepfather, Valentin, in Samara. When I finally got through to him on the poor interurban phone lines, he explained that my mother was in a psychiatric hospital, having become unstable and actually attempting suicide. I was shocked. She had never before shown any symptoms of emotional instability, although she had seemed nervous and subdued when she returned from her Black Sea holiday the previous August.

  Colonel Antonovich immediately gave me a week’s leave, and the resort commander helped with plane reservations to Samara. I arrived home at nine that night and wanted to go immediately to the psychiatric clinic. But Valentin explained that visiting hours were severely restricted. If I was lucky, I could see her for half an hour the next morning.

  We sat in the kitchen, drinking tea late into the night, as he explained the situation. Mother had been taken directly from the Hydroelectric Institute to the psychiatric clinic, after her superiors and coworkers had signed commitment papers stating she had become “irrationally paranoid and dangerously depressed.” This was her third week in the clinic, and Valentin said she was making no progress.

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” I had been skiing and drinking hot mulled wine while my mother was locked in some psychiatric ward.

  “We didn’t want to worry you, Sasha.”

  The next day I walked through the center of the city and onto a street of old brick offices dating from before the Revolution. The psychiatric clinic was one of the oldest of these narrow, two-story buildings. The heavy steel front door was flecked with rust, and there were thick, rusty grates on the windows. The wooden stairs were worn and creaked badly as I climbed to the second floor. The place smelled of damp and there were stains on the walls and ceilings from leaking steam pipes. When I got to the reception, I had to pound on another steel door to get someone’s attention. Finally the door slammed open to reveal an inner steel grate. I was staring into the eyes of a fat nurse whose gray-blond hair was pulled tight against her skull. She scowled severely.

  “Name?” was all she hissed as a greeting.

  After a while they brought Mother to the stuffy narrow visiting lobby. Dressed in a robe and slippers, she looked stooped and old. The skin of her face was both pale and strangely flushed. Her eyes moved slowly as if searching for focus.

  “Only fifteen minutes,” the nurse snapped.

  After embracing my mother, I held her at arm’s length, searching her face. Obviously she was under sedation. Her eyes were languid, her voice flat and slow. And she constantly licked her dry lips and slurped the water I brought her in an enamel cup.

  But she was just as obviously glad to see me. Her main concern on that first morning was that Misha was all right. She was deeply concerned that my little brother be dressed properly for school and get a good meal in the evening. When I tried to question her about her emotional problems, she fell silent and stared down at the worn linoleum floor.

  The next day I brought her a basket of fresh fruit from the bazaar and a casserole of fish soup that I had simmered long in the kitchen. But again, she made no direct reference to the condition that had brought her here. When I probed her, Mother became visibly confused, as if she had no clear memory of those events. She absently rubbed the flesh of her forearms, sliding back the sleeves of her robe. I saw the small scarlet welts of hypodermic marks. But when I demanded to speak to her doctor about the sedation, the nurse scornfully told me to write for an appointment.

  It was Mother herself who managed to secure her temporary freedom. When she told her doctor — a shadowy woman psychiatrist — that her son, “a senior Air Force pilot,” was here to help her, the clinic allowed her to return home, on the proviso she visited the clinic as an outpatient, “for regular therapy.”

  The first thing I did when she came back to the apartment was to confiscate the brown glass medicine bottles and check their contents. Unfortunately the prescriptions for the capsules were partially written in a special Health ministry code. So I spent a morning seeking independent medical advice. Through friends, I contacted a senior psychiatrist at another clinic. I made a point of wearing my best uniform to the doctor’s office. He took one look at the brown bottles and picked up his phone to call Mother’s clinic.

  When she returned for her treatment the next day, the staff was less brutal. For the first time in weeks, Mother was not given an injection.

  That night her eyes and mind seemed to clear, as if a curtain was lifting. Again, we sat at the kitchen table, the steaming teapot between us. She began to talk, first in disorganized spurts, then more slowly, with the logical reasoning of a trained engineer. Over that long night and during the next day and evening, the strange story of her “illness” slowly emerged.

  What she told me began as a description of an innocuous bureaucratic process. Her story ended as a nightmare.

  Under perestroika, Gorbachev’s Politburo had decreed that the resources of the entire Soviet Union be accurately surveyed. In the military this had meant exhaustive inventories of equipment and detailed tabulations of troop strength. Factories had to list every machine and vehicle, registering their serial numbers. Tens of thousands of State enterprises were engaged in the process. In the spring of 1987 the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute had been ordered to produce a complete survey of all the farmland in the oblast that was part of the region’s large, complex irrigation scheme.

  Mother had been honored when she was given the task of supervising the survey brigades and tabulating their findings. At first the job seemed relatively st
raightforward, she explained. There were some minor discrepancies between the new survey sheets and the existing boundary lines of the kolkhoz collective farms and the sovkhoz State agricultural units. But this was to be expected; the new survey instruments were much more accurate than the old equipment that had been used just after the war.

  “Then, Sasha,” Mother explained gravely, “a strange pattern began to emerge.”

  The new surveys revealed that every collective farm and almost all the State farms were much larger than the official land records indicated. In many cases, a collective farm that was listed as having five hundred hectares of irrigated pasture actually had a thousand. The same pattern held for the sovkhoz vegetable enterprises and orchards. Mother was annoyed.

  “So I went out with them, Sasha,” she said, sweeping her hand across the tablecloth. “You’ve worked with survey crews. It’s a straightforward process. Either you use the instruments correctly and tabulate, or you shirk your task.”

  “Then I saw the true situation,” Mother said, her voice clipped and somber. “Over a third of the State land in the institute’s irrigation scheme was not officially listed on the records.”

  I frowned, not sure where all this was leading.

  Mother quickly explained. “It was theft on a scale I never imagined, Sasha.” She shook her head, as if she still could not believe her own words. Somewhere between a third and a half of the agricultural production of the oblast did not officially exist. This meant that the managers, and the government and Party officials responsible for agricultural production, easily and consistently met their monthly and annual quotas, and were generously rewarded with medals, promotions, bonuses, luxury apartments, and holiday packages. But that was only a minor benefit. The actual milk, fruit, meat, and vegetables produced, Mother added, “disappeared” into an intricate illegal distribution network.