boys fresh out of school, we had understood that there were “safe,” officially acceptable answers to the long psychological profile tests we were obliged to take. And I had followed that policy through four years at the academy and seven years as a fighter pilot. During those eleven years, I must have taken different versions of this test at least ten times, always trying to shield my true feelings. I always got a headache trying to thread my way through the minefield of questions.
But I had answered with brutal honesty the six-hundred-question psychological test that Frolov’s staff had administered in the quiet room down the corridor on Monday. The test had been one of a battery of examinations designed to evaluate my manual dexterity and coordination, professional judgment, and personality in the wake of my aborted February flight. Only two hundred of the questions, the test staff had assured me, actually dealt with “personality traits.” And these questions were often linked to control questions salted throughout the exam to expose any attempt at deception.
I had no problem with that. Rather than attempt to deceive the authorities by espousing reverence for the ideals of Marxism-Leninism, I had proceeded to vent my disgust for the system. And I also honestly revealed the bitter depression I first felt when I’d learned about my country’s history of bloody repression.
Each question had three possible answers: Yes, No, or Uncertain.
To such questions as “Do you believe in God?” and “Are people conspiring against you?” I had answered Yes.
There had been the usual collection of questions to test my loyalty and faith in the wisdom of the Party’s leadership. “Do you read foreign magazines?” “Do you like foreign clothes?” to these I had answered Yes.
My answers to the questions that were obviously testing my attitude toward “collective decision-making” made clear my individualist nature.
One section of the test concerned personal and family relations. “Do you look forward to coming home after duty?” The questions were subtle, but clear in their intent. My answers made it obvious that I was not happy in my marriage.
To make certain my answers would be taken seriously, I searched for the control questions. “Do you like to watch fire?” Yes, I had answered. Any Russian who had camped and fished in the Volga heartland liked his campfire. “Have you ever been attracted to fire?” Yes again. And I had been careful to answer “Uncertain” several times.
In the two hours allotted, I had diligently answered all six hundred questions, then carefully reviewed my answers.
Now Lieutenant Colonel Frolov sat across his tasteful hardwood desk, his lips pursed as he tapped the graphed test results and precisely verified my answers to certain key questions. From his calm, exact manner, I assumed he was a man accustomed to reaching important decisions after some deliberation.
While Frolov reviewed my file, I gazed past the inevitable framed portraits of Gorbachev and Lenin and out the office window at the park. Warm, weak sunshine lit the trees. Pilots in red-trimmed, blue warm-up suits were out on the exercise paths, the younger men jogging, the older officers walking at a steady pace.
I focused on the short figure of a lieutenant colonel who had commanded a fighter regiment in Germany. His name was Peotr Petrov and I had been shocked to learn when I’d met him in my ward that he was only forty-two years old. He looked like a man in his sixties.
A doctor at the centrifuge G-stress unit in the Aerospace Medical Center near Dynamo Stadium had frankly revealed to me the disastrous cumulative effects of flying high-performance fighters. During Lieutenant Colonel Petrov’s twenty years of service, he had chalked up thousands of hours of high-G flight in MiG-21s and MiG-23s. The human body could only take so much of that punishment. When you combined almost daily high-G maneuvers with the adverse effects of breathing pure oxygen, and the hazard of ionizing radiation from supposedly well shielded aircraft radars, the result was a pilot like Petrov, a man we younger pilots called a “squeezed lemon.”
This brave and loyal officer had flown several combat tours in Afghanistan. For years, he and his family had endured the harsh existence of primitive, isolated bases in the Far East and Central Asia. All those years he had flown, in good weather and bad, in blizzards, dust storms, and frozen fog. And the cruel physics of high- performance flight had inevitably taken a toll. The connective tissue of his abdomen was so distended that he had to cinch up his G-suit as tightly as a weight-lifter’s belt during his entire last year on flight status.
He was now receiving his final medical examinations before retirement. The standard pension for this officer’s long service to the Socialist Motherland would be 250 rubles a month. Today, in Moscow, a dinner in a cooperative restaurant costs 100, a decent overcoat, over 1,000. If he was very lucky, he would be retired with a “generous” disability bonus: an additional 50 rubles per month. In either case, the reward for his long and courageous service was poverty. Depending on his connections, he might also be fortunate enough to be granted a lease on a one-room apartment in a shoddy high-rise block of a microrayon near some reasonably prosperous city. But a lieutenant colonel Sniper pilot with a good combat record was probably not so politically astute as to have secured such luxurious retirement housing.
One of Lieutenant Colonel Frolov’s telephones rang, the muted double ring of the hospital’s internal switchboard. “Yes, good morning,” he said cheerfully, reaching for a small notepad. The person at the other end spoke for almost a minute, and I watch Frolov writing a neat, two-column list on the pad. The caller was from the Voyentorg, the military supply exchange that served all branches of the Soviet armed services.
But the Voyentorg in Moscow’s Central Aviation Hospital was clearly different from that in a motor rifle regiment in some forlorn garrison on the Mongolian border. Out there the troops might be lucky to find rusty razor blades one month and tins of bitter peach jam another. Supplies at the military exchange at my own base in Georgia had become increasingly scarce in recent months. Now officers’ wives had to wait in line for hours each week to buy their subsidized sugar and obtain the milk ration for their children. And when they did receive their supplies, their cabbage was often rotten and the milk sour.
But Frolov was not writing a list of sour milk. The column on the right side of his pad was headed, “Package with Salmon,” the other, “Package with Caviar,” the Voyentorg’s weekly offering to the hospital’s nomenklatura. From what I could read on his lists, both packages included East German salami, Hungarian frozen chicken and fruit compote, coffee from Africa, Darjeeling tea, chocolate candy, and sweet biscuits. The main difference was in the “luxury” item, smoked salmon from the Siberian Pacific or two hundred grams of Caspian sevruga caviar. In reality, of course, every item on both lists was a luxury far beyond attainment by all but a few of the privileged.
Frolov’s careful deliberation showed me he was human, after all. Maybe I had a potential ally in him. And I certainly was going to need all the influential allies I could find to win my discharge.
Only the day before here at the hospital, I had seen how an officer who did not have connections was treated. Major Beryozovoy was a middle-aged MiG-23 pilot, whom I had first met at Gudauta on the Black Sea. This poor old fellow was a “squeezed lemon” if ever there was one. He had given his all to the State. Now he had only two years remaining before retirement and wanted desperately to stay on the Black Sea. His fourteen-year-old son, Misha, was asthmatic and could not tolerate the long northern winters. The boy had almost died the year before on a visit to the Ukraine. Now the Air Force intended to transfer the major to the Transbaikal Military District deep in Siberia. So far he had been able to obtain a medical waiver. The major was a brave and honest Soviet soldier. Not a politician.
I had recently learned just how powerful the politically well connected rear-echelon bureaucrats were. My friend Valery, a decorated veteran of almost four years in Afghanistan, where he had served as a forward air-ground controller in the combat zone, confronted a typical staff-rat personnel officer. This arrogant idiot told Valery, “You may well be a hero of Afghanistan, but I have more power.” He held up a pencil in one hand, an eraser in the other. “Today,” he continued, pointing to a pilots’ personnel roster, “Ivanov is in Moscow and Siderov is in Siberia.” He erased the two names and reversed their assignments. “Tomorrow, things are different. That is my power.”
“Then it will be the Package with Caviar,” Lieutenant Colonel Frolov finally said. “Of course, I would like to exchange the salami for a double portion of coffee.”
I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but I saw Frolov neatly cross out the salami and write “2” beside coffee on the caviar list. Frolov was proving himself astute. Caviar was doubly valuable, not only as a luxury item for barter here in Moscow but also as one of the few available Soviet commodities that could be sold for hard currency, valuta. Most caviar was exported, of course, but enough was doled out to the nomenklatura to help meet their hard-currency needs. Such transactions kept their children in Western clothes and their wives in French silk scarves and designer sunglasses.
At a higher level, the unofficial benefits of office increased with rank, as did ostentation. Raisa Gorbachev’s
