Their conspiratorial behavior forced me to consider my own situation. Colonel Ivanov probably had good connections in the KGB and the GRU Chief Directorate for Military Intelligence. My desperate attempt to blackmail him to obtain a medical discharge could well indicate that I was capable of even more desperate action. An officer like me serving in a MiG-29 regiment might be considered a dangerous security risk. So there was a good chance the Osobii Otdel would be waiting at the Sochi airport to put me under surveillance.
Then, on the final approach to Sochi airport, I heard the pilot apply full throttle and begin climbing away in an aborted landing. The flaps came up and the landing gear thumped back into their wells. We crossed the coast and banked left onto a southwest heading over the Black Sea. I checked the angle of the sun and noted the time, 2:27 P.M. Ten minutes later we were still heading out to sea and had obviously cleared Soviet airspace. This had to be a hijacking attempt by those furtive young Armenians behind me.
I tried to relax in my seat. This was the height of irony. Every day for the last three months I had been trying to find a foolproof escape route from the Soviet Union, and now I had apparently been given a free ticket to Turkey.
Then the engine pitch changed again and we banked further left, back toward the Soviet mainland. Soon we were set up on final approach to another airport. When we touched down, I realized at once that we had landed at Sukhumi, 150 miles down the coast. As we taxied to the terminal, the attractive young flight attendant finally deigned to tell us what was happening. “Dear passengers,” she said, batting her dark eyes seductively. “We followed our assigned route all the way to Sochi… but then we landed here in Sukhumi.” She laughed sharply and turned her back on us.
Around me the disgruntled passengers were grumbling loudly. Some were on health-cure holidays to resorts near Sochi. The buses from those resorts were waiting over a hundred miles away. These passengers realized that, once more, Aeroflot had taken their money and not delivered proper service.
As I shuffled out past the cockpit, I asked the copilot why we had aborted at Sochi.
“Sudden fog,” he said. “Zero ceiling, zero visibility.”
Walking across the sunny tarmac to the terminal, I considered this piece of news. Obviously the aborted landing had indeed been sudden; we were locked up on short final when the pilot climbed away. If the KGB surveillance team was waiting for me up at Sochi, they probably hadn’t had time to reassign a new team down here. People thought the KGB was omnipotent, with thousands of agents evenly spread across the country. But I knew from my friends Zaour and Vladimir just how shorthanded they were here in Georgia.
I had not earned a free ride to Turkey. But at least I wasn’t being followed yet.
Twenty minutes later the porters shoved my bag off their rusty cart, and I cut through the crowd to the line of Volga and Zhiguli taxis half blocking the crescent drive outside the terminal building. The taxi ride to Tskhakaya normally cost twenty-five rubles per person, but I offered a driver — a mustached young Georgian with prominent gold teeth — seventy-five to take me straight to my base with no side trips to deliver other passengers.
“What kind of car?” I asked.
He grinned, a flash of gold. “A Volga, of course,” he replied with typical Georgian bravado.
“I’ll be right back.” It was a two-hour ride and I had to use the toilet.
In the stuffy terminal toilets, I decided to take off my raincoat and rolled it neatly into my carry-on sports bag.
A shiny Volga was standing with the motor running at the head of the taxi rank when I returned, but the young Georgian with the gold teeth was gone. Momentarily confused, I stood on the curb and looked around for the driver.
Then a stocky older man stepped from the other side of the car and reached for my suitcase. “You’re going to Tskhakaya, aren’t you?” His words were more of a statement than a question.
“I’ve already made my deal for seventy rubles,” I said, keeping a grip on my suitcase handle. I didn’t like the way this fellow had pushed in here. So I decided to see if he’d accept five rubles less.
“Sure, of course,” the man replied.
We were about six miles from the airport when the driver turned to face me. “Say,” he said without a trace of the typical singsong Georgian accent, “didn’t you forget something at the terminal?”
“What?” I was genuinely confused now.
“Your raincoat.”
I stared back at the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror. A chill pang stabbed beneath my throat. This driver had not been out here when I’d reentered the terminal to use the toilet. How did he know I had been wearing a raincoat? Was it possible that the KGB had managed to shift surveillance so quickly? Then I noticed the man’s cheap leather jacket. Despite the heat of the afternoon, he had that jacket zipped to his throat.
“I’ve got it here,” I answered, patting my nylon sports bag. My voice sounded shrill. The paranoia had begun.
Carrying my suitcase up the steep stairwell of my apartment building podyesd, I met my friend Valery coming down. He had been back from his last tour in Afghanistan for almost two months, but I’d hardly had a chance to talk to him. He was dressed in civilian clothes, carrying an overnight bag slung on his shoulder.
After we had shaken hands heartily and embraced, he looked me over and a warm smile spread across his face. “I hear you’re making waves, Sasha.”
I smiled back and shrugged, a neutral gesture devoid of information. The last thing I wanted to do was to ensnarl Valery in my escape plans. But his pleasant greeting and unfeigned pleasure at seeing me again provided important evidence that — whatever the Osobists were doing — they had not yet tried to suborn my friends as knockers.
Valery explained he was off to Tbilisi for several days’ leave to see his father, a retired Russian factory worker who had lived in Georgia for years.
I had a shock when I unlocked the door of my little apartment. Papers and clothing were scattered on the floor, and the doors hung open on the hardwood armoire I had finally managed to buy the previous autumn. It looked like the Osobists had, after all, paid a visit. Then I realized what had actually happened. While I was in Moscow, Jana had returned from the university in Kiev to collect her possessions. A quick check of the apartment revealed that was not all she collected. The small strongbox where I kept our meager savings was open, empty. She had taken more than her share. But at least she was gone.
That night at the officers’ dining room I learned that our regimental Osobii Otdel officer, Major Soloyov, was occupied on other matters than my escapades in Moscow. Captain Rustam Salamov had apparently become a scandalous irritant to the zampolits and Osobists. The issue was still Salamov’s wife, Anna, the pretty Hungarian girl he had married while stationed at a MiG-23 regiment in western Hungary. Even though she was legally married to Salamov, she had only been granted a tourist visa. The fact that he had divorced a Russian girl to marry a “foreigner,” and had then audaciously brought this alien back to visit an officers’ housing compound of a Soviet air base, was viewed by the authorities as a blatant provocation.
They knew, of course, that Salamov intended to provoke them to the point of landing a discharge, at which point he would simply emigrate to Hungary and go into private business with his wife’s prosperous family. His tactic seemed to be working. Like me, he was grounded and pressing his superiors hard for a favorable resolution to the whole painful situation. Major Soloyov and his invisible crew of knockers were reportedly working around the clock, keeping Salamov and his suspicious alien wife under constant surveillance.
So much the better for me. I had delicate preparations to make in the coming weeks, and I certainly did not want to have to worry about every fellow I saw on the street wearing a leather jacket.
The next afternoon, Sunday, April 9, I was alone in my kitchen, listening as usual to the news summary on Radio Liberty. But this news bulletin was hardly normal. There were preliminary reports f
rom Tbilisi that “Soviet security forces” had violently dispersed pro-independence demonstrations before dawn that morning. At least six people had been killed and scores more injured. Early eyewitness accounts were confused, the calm Russian-speaking reporter in Munich conceded. But it was clear that “several hundred” Army and MVD Interior Ministry troops, supported by armored vehicles, had converged on Lenin Square and attacked peaceful demonstrators.
I carefully tuned the set when the signal began to fade. Then the familiar buzzing thump of shortwave jamming began. Quickly I snapped on the alligator clip of my wire antenna and managed to boost the signal from the Munich transmitters so that I could hear the announcer clearly, despite the attempts to jam the broadcast.
The commentator was now giving a background report on these latest independent demonstrations in Tbilisi. For the past week, several thousand demonstrators had gathered on the wide boulevards of central Tbilisi, some demanding greater autonomy, others actual independence from the Soviet Union. Senior Georgian Party officials, including First Secretary Dzhumber Patiashvili and the Georgian Minister of the Interior, Shota Gorgodze, had repeatedly declared the demonstrations illegal and ordered that the crowds disperse. The Communist officials’ refusal to even discuss the issue of Georgian autonomy from Moscow seemed to incense the demonstrators. That morning at least a thousand more joined the peaceful demonstration, waving pro-independence banners and singing the republican anthem.
Despite the size of the crowds, there had been none of the mass anger and minor violence that had often marked the independence demonstrations in the Baltic Republics. Instead, the leaders of the Georgian movement had responded with a different tactic: The day before, several hundred had declared a hunger strike. Surrounded by supporters, they had gathered beneath the budding shade trees on Rustaveli Prospekt and Lenin Square, fronting the handsome neoclassic building of the Georgian Council of Ministers.
The Radio Liberty commentator noted that the Tbilisi demonstrators had combined the spontaneous passion of the Georgian people with unusual mass coordination. Their banners were printed in Russian, Georgian, and English. A typical placard read: “Down with the decaying Soviet Empire.” Many people waved the black, white, and claret flag of the once-independent Georgian Republic.
By Monday morning Radio Liberty’s reports were more detailed and alarming. Approximately six thousand demonstrators had been massed along Rustaveli Prospekt and on Lenin Square at four o’clock Sunday morning, still singing their republican anthem and waving banners. The crowd had been swelled by thousands of rugby fans, who had left a match at the big Tbilisi stadium to march to Lenin Square. There were hundreds of children among the demonstrators, some infants in their mothers’ arms. It was a warm spring weekend night, and the crowd was in an exuberant, almost joyful mood. Speakers with bullhorns mounted the steps of the government buildings on the square to address the crowds. One, the local patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, warned the demonstrators that the Communists were planning a violent military crackdown. But few people in the crowd seemed alarmed. They should have taken the warning seriously.
Ten minutes later MVD Interior Ministry troops and Army paratroopers launched an unprovoked attack on the peaceful demonstrators. In the ensuing massacre, Radio Liberty announced, sixteen people had been killed outright, almost three hundred were badly wounded, and thousands were overcome by thick clouds of an unnamed “toxic gas.”
The final Radio Liberty bulletin I heard before catching the bus to the base that morning confirmed that three wounded demonstrators had died in Tbilisi hospitals, bringing the total killed to nineteen. The gravely wounded were now estimated at 260, with 4,000 treated for serious gas inhalation. Eyewitness accounts stated that the Army and MVD troops had beaten many demonstrators with heavy clubs and slashed others with sharpened military trench shovels.
There was no mention of the massacre on that morning’s ail-Union news summary from Moscow.
At breakfast I asked the men in my squadron if they had heard reports of a massacre in Tbilisi. They all shook their heads and shrugged. All except Major Petrukhin. Obviously he was still a devoted listener to Radio Liberty. He looked grave and troubled when I mentioned Tbilisi. But he refused to acknowledge amid the bustle and clatter of the breakfast dishes that he had heard the same shocking reports.
By that night, however, no one could pretend that the massacre had not occurred. The official Moscow news media belatedly reported there had been “unfortunate loss of life” when “violent nationalist demonstrators’” assaulted security forces in central Tbilisi and those forces had responded with “legal actions” to disperse the crowds.
Georgian television, however, revealed a far different sequence of events. Although I couldn’t follow the Georgian language commentary, a Georgian pilot in our ready room translated, his face drawn into a tight mask of rage. Among the nineteen victims killed, he said, there were pregnant women and several young boys and girls, whose heads had been crushed or who had been dismembered by the troops wielding sharpened shovels. Others had died of gas poisoning. The hundreds still in the hospital had suffered irreversible lung damage from the dense clouds of the mysterious gas the troops had sprayed into the tightly packed ranks of demonstrators.
Despite the warnings for Soviet officers to avoid confrontations with Georgians in town, I went into Mikha Tskhakaya that night to meet Malhaz. I had my suitcase full of those sexy posters and I needed money, no matter what the mood among the civilians. As I expected, Malhaz was cold toward me, but relaxed a little when I offered my obviously sincere condolences for the shocking massacre.
Then he reached under his counter and handed me a sheaf of photocopies. These were unofficial press photos of the massacre scene. They needed no translation. The wide sidewalks fronting Rustaveli Prospekt were littered with shoes, discarded placards, women’s purses, and overturned strollers and baby carriages. I saw none of the bricks or cobblestones that the Tass bulletin read over Vremya had proclaimed the “rioters” had used to attack the security forces.
By the next day the authorities’ attempts to suppress news of the massacre had failed completely. Despite a curfew throughout the republic, throngs of angry Georgians had demonstrated in almost every town and city. The commander of the Transcaucasus Military District, Colonel General Igor Rodionov, appeared on television appealing for calm. The Army, he said, is “in complete control of the situation.” Instigators of the unrest had been detained. “The extremists wanted blood and attacked the security forces,” the general read awkwardly from a prepared text. All further demonstrations were banned. “Patriotic comrades,” Rodionov concluded, “we must put this event behind us and refrain from anti-Socialist nationalism.”
He made no mention of the men, women, and children who had been slaughtered. He did not speak of the gas that had been used under the shade trees of Rustaveli Prospekt.
The next morning the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Dzhumber Patiashvili, and his chief subordinates resigned in disgrace. Patiashvili stated the massacre could not be denied. It was, he said, “our mutual grief.” Before resigning, he declared ten days of public mourning for the victims.
The Politburo then announced that Patiashvili had been replaced as the republic’s Party leader by another Georgian, Givi Gumbaridze. He was the head of the KGB in Georgia.
As after the Chernobyl disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev had initially remained silent. He had been on a State visit to England in the days before the massacre. Either Gorbachev had been unaware that his Defense Minister, Marshal Yazov, had been preparing a major military operation against the peaceful demonstrators of Georgia, or he had used his absence as a plausible means to deny his involvement in the massacre. Whatever the truth, I sat before the television in the pilots’ ready room on the night of April 12, watching Mikhail Gorbachev address the nation from Moscow. He offered no sympathy to the families of the dead and wounded. Instead, he spoke harshly, shaking his finger as he warn
ed against “extremism by adventurist elements.” Gorbachev’s statement had been followed by the first official videotapes from Tbilisi, which showed the streets patrolled by BMP armored troop carriers. The intersections of Tbilisi’s stately boulevards were barricaded with more armor, and troops in steel helmets and bulletproof vests searched civilian cars and pedestrians.
Gorbachev’s message was clear. Despite glasnost, despite perestroika, anyone questioning the authority of Moscow would be crushed. And the Soviet military was the chosen instrument of repression.
Around me in the dim room, my fellow pilots were glum and silent. I knew better than to speak to them here.
Back at my apartment building, I again encountered Valery, who had just returned from Tbilisi. We went to my kitchen to talk. He immediately described the massacre that his father and others had witnessed that terrible night in central Tbilisi.
After the patriarch’s warning, other speakers had taken their bullhorns and urged the crowd to remain calm. “It was late,” Valery said, his voice thick with anger. “Many of the women were already walking home, carrying their small children. Then it began.”
The streetlights suddenly were cut and the city center went completely dark, Valery related. People heard the throaty rumble of BRT armored cars and the snarl of tracked BMP armored personnel carriers. These armored vehicles converged on the demonstrators from several directions. Rank after rank of paratroopers and MVD troops charged the crowds, which had already been dangerously compressed by the advancing armor.
“They had no place to run,” Valery added. “The troops pushed them up against the stairs of the Council of Ministers. It was like driving livestock to a slaughter.” The flesh on his left chin was pulsing uncontrollably, a tic I had first noticed two years before when Valery had described some of his worst experiences in Afghanistan.
“The troops separated about three hundred people, Sasha,” Valery continued, his voice flat and slow, as if he were tiredly recounting yet another combat operation. “They pushed them directly toward the armed squads at the top of the stairs. Don’t you see? They were trying to simulate an attack on those guards. It was a provocation planned to trigger the massacre.”
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