trust a zampolit with a combat airplane.” He laughed out loud now. “I got shot down by my deputy regimental commander for political administration.”
“You what?” This seemed to be the lead-in to a standard pilot’s joke, but Karpich was serious.
“We were out on the missile poligon, firing R-23s at LA-17 target drones,” he said quietly. “GCI was vectoring a pair of aircraft on the target because the drone was almost out of fuel.”
The LA-17 drone was a fast, very maneuverable target drone powered by a solid-fuel rocket engine. Firing R-23 radar-guided missiles at these drones was realistic combat training. You had to fly well and act with quick decisiveness. Unfortunately for Karpich, one of the other two-plane flights operating that day was led by his zampolit. These officers were always much better chatterboxes than pilots. I thought of the political officer in my own regiment who had almost blasted the Tu-16 with a burst of cannon fire. The VVS recognized the zampolits’ shortcomings. A directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force limited our zampolits to a maximum of four training sorties a day and prevented them from flying late in any given training day’s schedule because “fatigue” might jeopardize safety.
Karpich checked the corridor to make sure we weren’t within earshot of strangers, a reflexive gesture we all repeated many times a day. “The zampolit was so excited to actually get a solid lock on the LA-17 that he fired his missile without interrogating the target with the SRZO.”
“That really doesn’t surprise me, Karpich,” I said. The Soviet SRZO was similar to the coded Information Friend or Foe system employed in the West. Any pilot using live weapons with friendly aircraft nearby had to electronically interrogate the intended target to verify it was an enemy before firing.
“The next thing I heard,” Karpich continued, “was the colonel screaming on the radio, ‘Karpov, eject! Now!’ I ejected just before the missile hit.”
I couldn’t help grinning, despite Karpich’s pained expression. During our preliminary flight training with the L-29 trainer at the Pirsagat Air Base in Azerbaijan, he had revealed that he was terrified of ejecting from a crippled aircraft. Despite all our efforts to hammer into his thick head the simple truth that a pilot’s life was worth more than an airplane, Karpich had stubbornly refused to even consider using his ejection seat.
“How was it?” I asked. “Did you hurt your back?” The MiG-23 ejection seat was notorious for compressing your vertebrae.
Karpich scowled and nodded. “My back is fucked. I probably won’t be flying jets anymore.”
Thanks to the rotten zampolit system, here he was undergoing the rigorous standard postejection medical exam. That had been bad luck for him, but a pleasant surprise for me. I was happy to have found an old friend in the hospital.
“So, why are you here?” Karpich asked. “Are you about to become the first cosmonaut in our illustrious class?”
“No,” I said, “hardly that. It’s a long story, Karpuha.”
I began to tell Karpich a version of that story, being careful not to reveal any information that might implicate him in my deception.
But I was interrupted by the arrival of my nurse escort, a good-looking brunette named Nina. She wore her starched white uniform so tight that her nipples — “circuit breakers” to the young pilots — showed clearly through the fabric. Here patients had to be escorted to their appointments by nurses who carried the patients’ medical records. Most pilots objected to the degrading hospital regulation. But, unlike the others, I certainly did not mind walking a few paces behind Nina’s seductively swaying hips. Normally I would have made a pass at her. Nina, however, had made it clear that she was “engaged” to a snot-nosed kid just finishing secondary school. It turned out the boy had relatives in West Germany, and Nina was trading on her good looks for the chance to emigrate to the West. Her story was indicative of the desperation people felt.
I wanted freedom, too. But I had chosen another means to obtain it.
Walking down this corridor, we passed the outpatient reception area, where the hospital’s unofficial clientele arrived each morning. They stood out in dramatic contrast to the young pilots. The paunchy old men with faces as red and mottled as a plate of borscht were the elite of the military nomenklatura, active duty and retired. Their black GAZ-31 sedans crowded the parking lot. You knew they were the big shots by the number of zeros on their license plates. The sleek men in their thirties dressed in well-tailored American suits were the rising stars of the KGB. Their equally stylish wives and well-groomed children were always led to the head of the line at each diagnostic or treatment department. These people had never stood in line for cabbage or laundry detergent. Their chins were not nicked by dull, rusty razor blades that had to last through fifty shaves. They took what they wanted. They did not wait to be thrown scraps like those angry millions in the endless lines.
This was still the way the world worked, despite the “reforms” of glasnost and perestroika. My fellow pilots and I were the official reason the State had invested so generously in this hospital and its expert staff. But the nomenklatura were here, as always, to skim the cream off the State’s generosity.
Passing the library, I glanced at the inevitable bust of Lenin. Here he was portrayed in a meditative pose. My entire life I had been watched by Lenin: “Dedushka,” “Grandfather” Lenin smiling down on my kindergarten class, Lenin the Military Expert gracing the walls of the Armavir Academy, Lenin the Friend of Humanity, Lenin the Universal Genius. I was sick of looking at him.
When I was sixteen, my mother and I visited Moscow. She assumed that, like every other normal young Soviet citizen, I wanted to visit Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square. But when she explained we would have to get up at five-thirty to begin standing in line at six, a full three hours before the Tomb opened, I told her I could wait until I visited the capital in the summer. It was February and I certainly had no intention of risking frostbite simply to pass before the glass coffin of a waxy corpse. Maybe that was the unrecognized first tentative step down the path that led me to this hospital. Maybe not. More probably I was just a typical lazy adolescent who preferred a warm hotel bed to the icy cobblestones of that windswept square. Twelve years had passed and I had not yet made the pilgrimage.
In any event, Lenin’s body, as rosy and firm as New Year’s marzipan, still lay in that mausoleum. And people from all over the Soviet Union still lined up in the winter frost and summer sun to pay their homage. To me, their devotion to Lenin was a touchstone of our nation’s progress toward freedom. As long as simple people on the street believed in the Great Leader’s Universal Wisdom, the Party would retain control of their minds.
We turned left from the medical diagnosis wing and climbed the stairs to a quieter, more softly lit department on the second floor. This was the realm of the psychologists. Here the decor was less clinical. Rich wood trim and bookcases replaced the spotless tile and electronic apparatus, giving the department an academic atmosphere. Nina led me to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Frolov, the clinical psychologist assigned to my case.
Lieutenant Colonel Frolov rose from his desk, took my records from the nurse, then greeted me. He was a lean, vigorous man in his late thirties, with dark hair and intelligent hazel eyes. His white medical coat was starched and spotless.
“Alexander Mikhailovich,” he said, addressing me formally, a gesture of respect from a senior officer to a pilot captain. His handshake was firm. “Please sit down.”
His office was large and handsomely furnished. The hardwood parquet floor glowed from recent polishing, matching the shoulder-high maple wall paneling. The desk was wide and well varnished. There were two telephones on the right corner.
Frolov’s office reflected his status as the hospital’s chief clinical psychologist. His diagnoses and recommendations were taken seriously by Air Force personnel. I had to accept that the specialists in the internal medicine, neurology, and orthopedic departments had found nothing physically wrong with me during their exhaustive examinations. So Frolov represented my last real hope of obtaining a medical discharge.
He offered me a comfortable armchair, then sat at the desk and opened the thick pasteboard dossier containing my medical records. He withdrew a neatly penned chart covered with a sharply spiked graph. I saw my name and service number on the corner of the chart. Apparently this was the plotted result of the intensive psychological tests I had taken three days before.
Frolov frowned as he reviewed the graph. There were preplotted parallel lines running horizontally across the graph, which no doubt measured the “norms” so valued in all official Soviet life. The peaks and valleys circled in red of my plotted test results fell far above and far below these accepted norms.
Ever since I’d been a kursant at the Armavir Higher Aviation Academy, I had shared a basic tenet of survival with my fellow cadets and later with the pilots in my regiment: “Never tell the truth to a psychologist.” Even as
