Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  “What happened when you presented your findings at the institute?” I was beginning to understand the evolution of Mother’s “mental illness.”

  Her face clouded. “At first, they said there were errors in my calculations. Then I made a formal presentation, using the original surveyors’ figures and detailed plans of the land itself, with all the accurate coordinates clearly marked.” She smiled bitterly. “The chief engineer and the institute director thanked me and formed their own study committee to consider the matter.”

  “They told me I was working too hard and needed a rest.” She shrugged. “The next day they suggested a holiday at the children’s resort at Anapa on the Black Sea for me and Misha.” Mother’s face clouded. “Sasha, I’d had enough of those luxury seaside resorts. The Pearl Hotel in Sochi was filled with black marketeers, entire families of them, flashing rolls of dollars and deutsche marks, buying everything… even the poor girls who came to the terraces every night to sell their bodies.”

  “I’ve seen those girls,” I said. “They can’t make a living with their university degrees, so they drift down to the Black Sea. They like to be called courtesans.”

  Mother shook her head in distaste. All her life she had been taught that Socialism had abolished evils like prostitution. Now she looked up and spoke again, her voice stronger. “There was another reason not to go back down to the Crimea. Isolated at that resort, I could have easily had an ‘accident’.”

  My first impulse was to reassure her. Then I remembered the tight control the KGB maintained over those hotels.

  “I took two days away from the office,” Mother continued in the same dry tone. “When I returned, the chief engineer called me into his office to reexamine my findings. He said there were many errors. Sasha, someone had changed the figures. They had used correction fluid and simply altered the original calculations to make the land area conform almost exactly to the official records.

  “They told me I was suffering from stress and had made serious errors.”

  Mother continued her grim recitation. When she went to the Party secretary to protest, she brought her own copies of the original surveyors’ figures to show that documents had been illegally altered. Instead of helping with a formal investigation, the Party apparatchik scolded her for insubordination and meddling.

  She realized the entire institute was aligned against her. Obviously they were either all party to the massive fraud or had been intimidated into silence.

  “They kept saying I was emotionally unbalanced,” Mother said. “I was angry, certainly. But I was not deranged.”

  Then the resistance to her one-woman campaign took a cruel turn. “Misha was out on the neighborhood playground,” she said, her jaw trembling with outrage. “A man stopped his car and called him. ‘Hey, malchik, do you want a ride?’” Mother smiled. “But Misha remembered I had always told him never to take a ride from a stranger. He ran, and the man tried to catch him. Sasha, that man chased him almost to our podyesd. That incident was not an accident. I am sure of it.”

  “That is terrorism…” I sputtered, too outraged to speak clearly.

  “Under Stalin,” Mother whispered, “our parents warned us about ‘Dark Forces,’ the Black Raven van from the NKVD that came in the night. Sasha, I realized after they tried to kidnap Misha that these same forces still exist.”

  Two days later when Mother raised this issue with the chief engineer, demanding a criminal investigation, the institute director arrived with two big ambulance attendants. The director insisted she was suffering emotional stress and ordered her to receive a medical evaluation. Only when she had been examined and returned with the proper health certificate, he said, would she be readmitted to the office. Mother was taken directly from the institute to the clinic.

  She refused the capsules the first psychiatrist offered her. When he insisted, Mother demanded to leave. She had come for a health evaluation, not sedation.

  Then the drug treatment began. She was forcibly injected with antipsychotic drugs, mixed with more common sedatives. This “therapy” left her in a stupor for days.

  Mother had her hands around my fists. “Sasha,” she whispered, sobbing now, “all my life I believed that if I studied hard and became an engineer I would earn respect. I would help support my family and do honorable service to my country and to Socialism. Now…”

  None of us spoke. The spring sunshine fell through the window, warming the kitchen.

  Mother wrung her hands in anguish and stared out the window. “It wasn’t just the institute or the Party, Sasha. This does sound crazy, but there’s an invisible apparat out there that we never knew about. The Party is in it, State Security…”

  Through other patients at the clinic, Mother had learned there were entire warehouses jammed with meat and produce from the kolkhoz and State farms. All this bounty was controlled by the local Party bosses and their accomplices. They not only took this booty free of charge, they shared in the profits from the sale of the goods on the black market. The authorities responsible for stopping this corruption were part of the banda who profited from it. It was a perfect criminal system, until Mother — a good Socialist — tried to derail their train. She had to be stopped.

  And they succeeded. “By the time they took me to the clinic,” she added, again shaking her head as if stunned by a blow, “even the original survey records had been altered. There is nothing more any of us can do.” Now Mother grimaced at some private memory. “All those terrible people in Sochi,” she said, “they are part of their own network elsewhere in the Union.”

  “Mama,” I said, taking her hand, “I’m afraid you are right. Those famous corruption trials in Moscow have just skimmed the surface. If you read Ogonyok, you will see the scale of this… octopus.” It was difficult trying to explain the sheer size and brazen nature of this enterprise. “In Georgia the State jewelry factories lose half their production. Half the gold from the mines in Kolyma is never counted. It’s the same for the caviar from the Caspian and the sable furs at the collectives in Siberia…”

  I raked my hand through my hair in frustration. “Mama,” I said, “they call them the Mafia.”

  Before I left Samara, I went back to the senior psychiatrist at the clinic. It was not necessary to detail the criminal abuses to which my mother had been subjected. Glasnost had already exposed the corruption of Soviet psychiatry. The previous autumn, Komsomolskaya Pravda had sparked an official investigation of these repressive “medical” practices. Without being specific, I alluded to friends in the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and the KGB who would be interested in how the mother of a Soviet Air Force pilot had been abused. The psychiatrist seemed terrified that the scandal of my mother’s treatment might become public. He assured me all drug therapy had been canceled. She would be granted an indefinite convalescent leave at full salary.

  It was a small victory. But I felt no elation.

  Jana reluctantly agreed to fly to Samara and help in my mother’s recovery. Mother was still too weak from the weeks of heavy sedation to cook and clean, and she certainly couldn’t face the long food lines. I had requested additional emergency leave, but Division refused. The MiG-29 combat evaluation was more important than minor personal matters.

  But after three weeks, Mother called and said Jana was returning the next day. Instead of helping, Jana had simply whined and complained, often sleeping until past noon. When she went out to buy food, she usually returned empty-handed. Jana did not have the patience to stand in line. They were better off without her.

  That summer the original trickle of information about officially sanctioned corruption became a steady flow in publications such as Argumenti i Facti. Now everyone knew the true meaning of the word “Mafia.” But aside from the politically motivated and well-publicized ongoing trial of Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, there was constant public outrage, but almost no official action. When the newly independent magazine Ogonyok suggested Gorbachev and the Politburo themselves
were beneficiaries of the Mafia, the magazine suddenly was found to have exceeded its authorized quota of ink and paper.

  I read all I could, keeping my own counsel. There was no sense even mentioning the subject to Jana. She was a true daughter of her family. To her, anyone who found the means to acquire wealth — no matter by what method — was to be admired.

  That summer I became more familiar with Argumenti i Facti and Ogonyok than with my aircraft manuals. I spent more time alone in the kitchen hunched over my small Riga transistor receiver listening to Radio Liberty than writing engineering reports.

  Stories of corruption and rumblings for real democracy were no longer sensational news. Another, much more historic issue gripped the Soviet Union. Under glasnost, Gorbachev had made repeated references to the cruelty and “excesses” of the Stalinist period. But he had carefully restrained from specific detail.

  Now that the floodgate was open, however, other, unofficial groups came forward to provide that terrible detail.

  One of the most prominent was a private organization simply called Memorial. It began as a small gathering of middle-aged intelligentsia in Moscow, determined to rehabilitate the reputations of good Communists who had been unfairly persecuted under Stalin. But once intellectuals like Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Andrei Sakarov joined with the group, the new, freer news media ran story after story about the repressive decades of Stalinism. For the first time, the official acronym gulag, Central Administration for Corrective Labor Camps — which exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had apparently made infamous in the West — became fully understood among millions of Soviet citizens. In fact, “gulag” quickly became a common noun, not just another meaningless bureaucratic term.

  Week after week, the stories ran with numbing authenticity. I learned about the purge trials of the 1930s. Thousands of senior Red Army officers had been unjustly executed. Thousands more had been sent to the gulag. Millions of innocent citizens had joined them in those bleak camps, their only crime an accusation by some faceless informer that they were “enemies of the people.” An unofficial historical colloquium in Moscow estimated that somewhere between twenty and forty million Soviet citizens had died in the four decades that the gulag had existed.

  This holocaust now had a name: the Great Terror. This wholesale murder had been ordered and managed by Communists. Millions died in the name of Communism. The proof was undeniable. Memorial demanded that the KGB open the archives, and offered a victim-tracing service. The group’s small Moscow office was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds and hundreds of letters from relatives of innocent people who had disappeared, victims of the “Dark Forces” my mother had mentioned.

  One issue of Ogonyok offered a detailed analysis of the holocaust in the Ukraine in which at least seven million peasants died of starvation. Stalin had sealed the borders of that republic to keep food out while his NKVD troops confiscated every grain of wheat, every apple, every egg. It was no wonder the Ukrainians hated us. Chernobyl had only been the latest disaster of the Soviet system.

  I simply could not keep silent about this. But when I tried to discuss the Great Terror and its impact on the Soviet military during the regimental Party meeting, our chief zampolit, Lieutenant Colonel Dovbnya, muttered that this was inappropriate and “irrelevant.” Ogonyok, however, had already presented a quite relevant, two-part series proving that the disastrous initial military reverses during the first year of the Great Patriotic War had been a direct result of Stalin having decimated the professional officer corps in the late 1930s. When the zampolit refused to allow a legitimate discussion of this important issue, I simply posted the Ogonyok article on the “Local News” section of our regimental dayroom bulletin board.

  What made the clipping especially provocative was the reproduction of the painting Requiem, by Alexander Lozenko, which ran the full width of the page. The painting showed a long line of boxcars curving across the bleak steppes, shrouded beneath a plume of coal smoke from the distant locomotive. Superimposed on the battered slats of the windowless railcars were the ghostly faces of the victims: intellectuals, workers, women, boys and girls, soldiers just like us.

  In all our years of school and training, we had never been told. Now we had to face the truth. Our nation was built on a dictatorship much crueler than the Nazis we had defeated in that heroic war. We had been taught that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews, Gypsies, and other “subhumans" — including Soviet war prisoners — in extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. But now we learned that our own Organs of State Security had killed at least three times as many citizens of the Soviet Union, all of them just as innocent as the victims of the fascist terror.

  The Nazis had used their perverted scientific techniques for mass murder, herding the victims into gas chambers.

  The Soviet methods had been cruder, but equally effective: Beginning in the 1930s, NKVD execution squads had simply loaded suspected “enemies of the people” into their Black Raven vans, driven them to the forests outside the cities, and shot them through the head. Those who were not immediately murdered were automatically convicted in Peoples’ Courts, and sentenced to hard labor in the frozen Siberian taiga or the “death mines” like Kolyma.

  Only the strongest of these prisoners survived. If you worked people twelve hours a day cutting timber in forty degrees of frost and only fed them a “harsh regime” food ration calculated to result in starvation, the outcome was inevitable: death. Reading the carefully documented reports from the Memorial organization, I finally understood the plight of the helpless zeks, the political prisoners of whom Alexander Solzhenitsyn had written so eloquently in his searing novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In his monumental Gulag Archipelago, which was now being privately circulated in photocopy, Solzhenitsyn dramatized the institutional barbarity of this system. One third of the population had been sent to the camps to work as slaves. Another third of the Soviet people closed their eyes to this cruel reality and lived reasonably well on the production of the gulag economy. The top stratum lived in luxury. Solzhenitsyn had dared to expose all this. He had been the conscience of our entire nation. And when the Party finally deported him, men like Andrei Sakarov stepped forward to fill the void. Now we all knew the dirty secrets of the past. And the Dark Forces who had tormented my mother with their illegal treatment could not deport an entire nation. But they were not yet ready to relinquish power.

  The foreign fascists had been vanquished. Unfortunately the ones who had survived were not alien to our Motherland.

  One hot bright morning in late July, I was in the squadron locker room pulling on my G-suit. We had a long day of flying scheduled. But I could hardly remember the details of the first training sortie, which Colonel Antonovich had just briefed us on. My mind was focused instead on the dark image of those thousands of unmarked mass graves, stretching like an invisible crescent scar all the way from the pine forests of the Polish frontier to the ancient larch groves on the granite bluffs above the Pacific. That terrible image was not just remote history. Now I saw the steel door of the psychiatric clinic in Samara, I felt the rusty grate in my hands, and I smelled the dank despair of the prisoners who had been held there for “treatment.” Then I saw the sunlit pool terrace of the Pearl Hotel in Sochi. The profiteers sat around the outdoor bar, smearing oil on their hairy chests, leering at the pretty young girls who came forward to sell themselves. Those criminals always reminded me of half-boiled crayfish, cold, predatory.

  Suddenly it came to me, as I bent to zip up the legs of my flight suit. I could no longer defend the fascist system that ruled my country. Somehow I would leave the Air Force. I no longer wanted the exciting career of a test pilot. I no longer wanted any of this. I no longer wanted to be married to Jana, a true daughter of the system.

  I slammed my locker shut. For the first time in months, the way ahead looked clear.

  When Jana returned from Kiev after her summer examinations, I decided to confront her.

  “I
want a divorce,” I told her, pulling back the shade to flood the room with morning sunshine.

  I had to catch the bus to the base in five minutes, and, as always, it had taken a long time to wake her up. As she sat on the edge of our makeshift bed, wincing at the early morning sun, I wasn’t sure she had understood my words.

  “Be ready this afternoon at three,” I told her. “We are going to the ZAGS to file the papers.”

  Now Jana had definitely understood. She gripped the sleeve of my flight suit. “No, Sasha… no. We can find a way…”

  Angrily I pulled back. Jana was completely unrealistic. The night before, I had tried to discuss our country’s bloody history and the criminal class that now controlled every aspect of our lives. But she had moped and pouted, finally haranguing me for not having enough money to buy a proper television set or a car. We would find no “way” to reconcile our differences. “Be ready at three” was all I said in reply.

  It took two more days to convince her. But on a rainy Thursday afternoon we went to an office in the large ZAGS building in central Tskhakaya to file our first divorce petition. By Soviet law, we had to attend regular counseling sessions for a month, attempting a reconciliation. Only then would our formal divorce petition be forwarded to the courts.

  I tried to spend as much time as possible at the base during this period, and actually volunteered as a replacement duty-alert officer so that I wouldn’t have to sleep at my apartment. All I wanted was for this marriage to end.

  But, despite her childlike demeanor, Jana had inherited much of her mother’s native cleverness. Although she signed the preliminary divorce papers, Jana was bound to resist the process in any way she could. Luckily her parents were already in Syria, which deprived her of powerful allies. I hoped there would be enough time to complete the divorce before her family tried to intervene. But this was a gamble.

  When we completed our first divorce papers, I knew the news would reach Colonel Baglai in a matter of days. And he would be sure to retaliate. It really did not matter, however. I no longer planned ahead for an Air Force career.