Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  He stopped speaking a moment and looked away. Sinews and ropy veins throbbed on his rigid neck. Valery was gripped by a turmoil I had never seen before. “Luckily the fellows from one of the rugby teams managed to break the paratroopers’ cordon,” he added. “And a hundred people escaped the trap. But the rest of them were chased down in the shrubbery to the right of the building. That’s where they were slaughtered with the trench shovels and gas.”

  “It was poison gas?” I asked, because Valery had experience with these chemical weapons.

  “A combination, Sasha,” he explained. “One gas we call cheryomukha because it smells like cherries. There’s about four variants of different strengths. The troops in the square used them all, both in gas grenades and with the MVD’s cloud sprayer. The other gas is called phenyl chloride,” Valery continued. “In open spaces, it’s not lethal. But everyone knows it’s deadly if used in a restricted area. The women and children on the ground didn’t have a chance. If the gas didn’t get them, those bastards with their trenching tools did.”

  “Who did this, Valery? What troops?” I was prepared to believe that OMON thugs from the Interior Ministry were capable of such slaughter. But it did not seem possible that regular Soviet soldiers had taken part in the massacre.

  “There were OMON troops from Perm, Voronezh, and Tbilisi,” Valery said, a veteran soldier reciting tactical details from memory. “But at least half the troops were from the Army, Sasha.” He looked at me sadly. “From our Army.”

  I shook my head, as much in sad recognition as disbelief.

  “This was not a riot, Sasha,” Valery said, staring into his cup of cold tea. “It was a coordinated combat operation involving both Defense and Interior Ministry forces. Moscow must have approved it.”

  At our regimental briefing the next morning, Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich announced that the base had been placed on a high security alert status. Each squadron would organize nine-man foot patrols to guard base buildings, the parking aprons, and the main gate. The regular guards on the aprons would be doubled. Because we were short of soldiers, they would be placed on indefinite four-hour-on, four-hour-off duty and sleep rosters.

  We all knew that Georgians in the city of Tskhakaya were simmering with anger and anti-Russian hatred, and that there had been mass protest strikes and spontaneous demonstrations all across Georgia. But now Antonovich explained how dangerous the situation had become. Soviet officers in the bazaar had been caught by mobs and severely beaten. Until further notice, he said, our enlisted soldiers would be restricted to the base.

  “And if any of you officers go into town,” he said, “I suggest you wear civilian clothes, not uniforms.”

  The next afternoon Antonovich and other senior officers returned from their regular monthly commanders’ conference at Vaziani. A lieutenant colonel zampolit from the 7th Air Army flew back with them to brief us on the situation. Like Antonovich, he stressed that the situation was extremely volatile. “The Army has to be prepared to maintain law and order,” he bellowed, his voice echoing in our briefing room. “We must stand ready to stop the extremists before they go any further.”

  After his stirring patriotic address, Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Dovbnya, our own zampolit, rose to assure us that the “legal actions” of the security forces in Tbilisi had been made necessary by the violent demonstrators. And these same adventurist elements, he added, could rise up here in Tskhakaya. We were to check our personal weapons and conduct careful inventories of the arms and munitions assigned to us, to be certain no guns or ammunition was stolen by extremists.

  The message of the two zampolits was just as clear as Gorbachev’s televised warning two nights before. If necessary, the Army would crush all those who threatened Moscow’s authority in any way.

  That evening I again sat alone in my kitchen, hunched over my transistor, listening to Radio Liberty. To emphasize Gorbachev’s message to the people, I heard, the Army and MVD had just staged military “maneuvers” in the capitals of the three Baltic Republics, terrifying citizens still in shock at the news of the Tbilisi massacre. Tanks and armored vehicles rumbled through the Baltic cities, a stark warning that, like the Georgians, anyone defying Moscow risked death.

  Sitting there in the shadowy kitchen, I could picture other Soviet tanks crushing demonstrators, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, in the streets of Azerbaijan the year before when reportedly scores had died. But they were only Muslims like my friend Boris Bagomedov. Now Soviet European troops had been ordered to kill their own people. And they had obeyed those orders.

  The local Party hack in Tbilisi had been purged as a scapegoat, only to be replaced by the head of the KGB. How long would it be before the pilots of the 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment were ordered to bomb and strafe “adventurists” in the streets of nearby cities?

  In his national address Gorbachev had warned that nationalist demonstrators in Georgia had delivered a “stab in the back for perestroika.” What shit. They had been peacefully exercising their rights as Soviet citizens when their Army attacked them with poison gas and sharpened shovels. And now we had been ordered to prepare for similar action to “defend” Soviet law and order.

  I found myself standing, twanging with outrage. “I’ll show you bastards perestroika,” I shouted in the empty room.

  Suddenly everything was clear. All the ass-licking zampolits, the Osobists, the military bosses in Moscow, and the Mafia bosses in cities like Samara — who used illegal psychiatric “treatment” to destroy honest citizens — all this privileged, corrupt gang ultimately depended on the Soviet military for support. As long as the Army blindly obeyed the Party, my country would never be free of the criminal clique, the Mafia, that controlled our lives.

  Standing on the hot pavement of Lenin Square in Armavir so many years before, I had sworn an oath to defend the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, to do my duty with courage and discipline, even in the face of death. Now, in this tiny spartan kitchen, I saw where my true duty lay. My life was no longer balanced on a tochka opori, a fulcrum. The balance had tipped. I had made a decision.

  I would not leave the Soviet Union like a fleeing criminal on some smugglers’ trail through the mountains. I did not want my friends in the regiment scrambled from duty alert to chase me some night hanging from a balloon or slung beneath an ultra-light aircraft. But I would fly to freedom. As soon as I could prepare and execute a practical plan, I would seize one of my regiment’s MiG-29s, take off, and loop back on a cannon run to destroy as many of the parked aircraft as possible without killing any of my colleagues. This would be an act of vengeance and a warning; vengeance not just for the victims of the Tbilisi massacre, but for all the other faceless millions crushed in the name of Soviet Communism. And the warning would be read clearly by the criminals who ruled my country: If a skilled and dedicated young professional officer like me had been driven to such desperate action, whom could they trust in the future?

  Then, if neither PVO missiles nor fighters from other regiments shot me down, I planned to fly the aircraft to the nearest NATO base in Turkey.

  I sat down again and rubbed my hand repeatedly through my hair, an unconscious mannerism I’d had since childhood, whenever concentrating on a difficult problem. Despite the hazard and audacity of my planned escape, I felt calmer than I had in months.

  CHAPTER 13

  Counterattack

  April 14 — May 20, 1989

  In mid-April I flew to Samara for one last visit at home. Once I actually hijacked a MiG-29, the chances were slim that I’d ever see my family again. I contacted my mother and had her obtain a certificate for emergency treatment. When her telegram arrived in Tskhakaya, Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich immediately granted me five days’ compassionate leave.

  This was another indication that Colonel Ivanov in Moscow had not found an ally in the military district in Tbilisi or the 283rd Aviation Division in Tskhakaya to initiate Osobist surveillance on me. But I couldn’t count on my good lu
ck holding much longer.

  Those few days in Samara passed too quickly. Mother was still weak, but recovering steadily. Through discreet inquiries, she had discovered that the staff at the psychiatric clinic had spared her from the worst brutality that had been originally ordered for her. If the clinic doctors had actually carried out their instructions and injected her with the full treatment of multiple antipsychotic drugs, she would have suffered irreversible brain damage, the fate of so many countless thousands of the “mentally ill” who had run afoul of corrupt apparatchiks and been committed to Soviet psychiatric hospitals.

  Now she was in numb limbo, her mind still clouded by the drugs. I certainly did not intend to bring my family into my plan.

  They would be subjected to a KGB investigation, whatever the outcome of my escape attempt. So the less they knew, the better. But I did give them sixteen hundred rubles, as much as I could spare from the war chest I had built from the sale of the posters to Malhaz.

  Whatever happened, my family were in for a rough time in the months ahead. But one advantage of glasnost was that the KGB would not be able to simply swoop down and haul them off to some camp in the gulag. With a few exceptions, those camps were now empty, ghost settlements inhabited only by the spirits of the millions of innocent victims who had starved and frozen in the shoddy barracks and concrete punishment cells. The State no longer took vengeance on the families of traitors. And I was confident that the American government would help protect my family. With the failure of perestroika, Gorbachev found himself increasingly dependent on the West, especially the Americans. That dependence would be the insurance policy for my family.

  But that was all in the future. Now I just wanted to say goodbye. Mother and I walked one afternoon in a neighborhood park. The spring foliage was already well advanced, and the streets and sidewalks had been swept clean of winter sand and cinders.

  “I will be leaving the military soon,” I told her.

  She nodded. I didn’t have to explain my reasons. Mother now believed that the system I had so proudly served had been taken over by “Dark Forces” that she had never suspected existed in our Socialist Motherland.

  “I’ll build a new life… somewhere,” I added.

  Her shoulders were stooped and her head still moved slowly. But I saw recognition in her eyes. “That’s for the best, Sasha,” was all she said.

  We passed the large bronze statue of Lenin, the Young Revolutionary, his quaint tailcoat eternally flapping in the riverside breeze of Samara. The handsome government buildings and solid apartments of the affluent microrayon seemed monuments to Socialist wisdom and energy. But I knew they were hollow shells.

  Mother, however, smiled at the statue in the well-groomed park. “Samara,” she said, “is so lovely in the spring.”

  We sat on a bench in the sunshine. Across the street, a gray line of women, many still wearing drab quilted winter coats, appeared around the corner of the red brick building. There was a State dairy store on the side street, and this long line had spilled over to the park square. We watched them a moment, noting their empty plastic mesh and net avos’ka shopping bags.

  “Sasha, why do we live so badly?” Mother asked. “What has happened to our country? Why this disaster?”

  “It’s taken a long time for us to reach this point, Mother,” I told her. “Decades, really. And for all those decades our people have been forced to live in fear, enslaved, not just their bodies, as when you were young, but their minds as well. And for all those years the Communists have used us in their bloody experiment. But that experiment has failed. And now people are no longer afraid. Now we are brave enough to look around with our eyes open and talk about what we really see.”

  A gaudy scarlet propaganda poster, showing a giant Lenin beaming at the production line of the Buran space shuttle, occupied half the building facade above the drab line of women. They did not seem impressed. To me, that pitiful scene was the essence of the Soviet Union in its eighth decade. The Communists had squandered so many countless billions on the pokazuka of our glorious space program and our massive military establishment. But old babushkas still had to stand on their swollen feet, shuffling for hours to buy a bottle of milk. I glanced around the handsome square, wondering where the bosses’ secret storerooms were located. Lenin’s paternal gaze seemed to follow mine.

  Later that afternoon when Misha returned from school, I sat in the kitchen with him as he laid out his schoolwork, just as I had done so many years before. Although only eight, he was proud of his calligraphy and arithmetic papers. Then he presented his most challenging assignment.

  “These are poems to memorize, Sasha,” he said, staring seriously at the pages of his textbook. “They’re twenty-four lines long and we have to have them perfect.”

  I hadn’t been paying close attention, but now I focused on the poems and felt a sudden flush of anger.

  “It’s all about Dedushka,” Misha continued, “about Vladimir Ulyich Lenin when he was a young man in prison.”

  I found myself scowling. Not that old lie. The myth we taught our children was that the brave young Lenin, imprisoned by the Czar’s secret police, had taken his milk ration but refused to drink it, using the precious fluid instead as invisible ink to write revolutionary tracts that galvanized the masses. What shit. Didn’t the idiots who still pushed such propaganda realize that people would look fondly to those evil days when there was still milk available, even for prisoners?

  I picked up Misha’s book. The chapter of poems began with the bold red title “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live.”

  I slammed the textbook shut. “Misha,” I said loudly to the startled boy, “do not learn this crap. Remember this always. Lenin was a liar.”

  He blinked with confusion. My mother looked up from the sink where she was peeling vegetables. “Sasha,” she admonished me, “what are you telling the boy? That is his class assignment. Do you want him to fail in school?”

  I clenched my teeth. The afternoon in the park she had asked me to explain the disaster that had overcome our country. Yet here, in her kitchen, her younger son was staring at the ultimate source of that disaster. How could I explain to her that our nation, the Rodina, had not simply been stolen by renegades who had abandoned Lenin’s golden dream of a Socialist Utopia. Leninism had not been abandoned by those corrupt shadowy men. Lenin was the source of all their evil.

  When I returned to the Ruslan Air Base, I was ordered to see Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich. The “report” on my conduct that Colonel Ivanov had threatened to send had passed through the district and division, and now lay on the desk of my regimental commander.

  Antonovich stared glumly up from the folder on his blotter. When he spoke, his voice was cold, devoid of any friendship. “I should have grounded you last autumn.” He tossed the report across the desk, and I had to reach quickly to keep it from falling on the floor. “Is this true, Zuyev?”

  I studied Colonel Ivanov’s message, which bore a boldly inscribed subsection: “List of Charges.” He had requested formal court-martial proceedings against me, and both higher headquarters here in Georgia had endorsed this request. Antonovich’s hands were tied. Reprimands would no longer suffice. He had no choice but to convene an officers’ court to try me.

  The first charge was preposterous. According to Ivanov, I had “expressed contempt for the democratic election process,” by refusing to vote, which was proof of my “political unreliability.” At the very least, such an accusation would cause my dismissal from the Party. At this point, I could not have cared less.

  The second charge stated that I had “feigned an illness” to obtain a military discharge and pension under fraudulent terms. This was a criminal offense. Ivanov, of course, ignored the fact that I had specifically not requested a pension.

  The third charge stipulated that I had violated direct orders by repeatedly going into the city of Moscow without permission. This was chronic insubordination, grounds for my demotion to the lowe
st commissioned rank, lieutenant.

  Finally Ivanov officially requested a formal military investigation in this district’s jurisdiction, “leading to appropriate punishment.”

  “Well?” Antonovich said impatiently. “What about it?”

  “It’s all shit, and nothing more.”

  Antonovich shook his head. “That may be so, Sasha. But this regiment has to shovel your shit. And there will be an officers’ court.”

  I returned his angry glare. “Like there was for Major Matushkin?”

  Antonovich winced but remained silent. We both knew that the persecution of a loyal officer like Matushkin was a scandal, a desperate sacrifice to preserve the shaky authority of a parasite like Colonel Prozukhin.

  “Don’t you think it was a mistake to have grounded First Class pilots like me and Matushkin with the regiment preparing to go back to Mary?”

  I was speaking freely because I certainly had nothing to lose. Besides, I liked and respected Antonovich and wanted him to understand this corrupt system as I did. What kind of military “justice” was it that drove the best pilots from the Air Force?

  “I’ll worry about this regiment’s combat proficiency, Zuyev. You worry about writing a proper explanation to these charges.”

  Antonovich glanced at a note in my file. “I have assigned Captain Igor Novogilov to prosecute in the officers’ court. You will follow his instructions.”

  Igor was my Armavir classmate and a good friend. Obviously Antonovich knew this and was hoping the matter would not end with criminal punishment.

  “Thank you,” I said, my tone softer.

  “That’s all,” Antonovich said, taking back the report.