that autumn I watched the weekly military television program, I Serve the Soviet Union. The entire hour was devoted to the Air Force (VVS) and the Air Defense Force (PVO). The program focused on young officer cadets undergoing pilot training at an air base in the Transcaucasus. Guys not much older than me were strapping themselves into the cockpits of jet trainers and taking off into the clear southern sky. That looked interesting. The next week’s program was devoted to Soviet Army engineers, and my mother encouraged me to think about applying to a military institute specializing in construction engineering. But I couldn’t forget the image of those young cadets flying jet aircraft.
I went down to the Army komandatura headquarters and inquired about the process of applying for an opening at a military aviation academy. Having done some preliminary research, as I usually did before approaching bureaucrats, I’d learned that this was the first day that application forms for aviation academies would be available. But the bored administrative officer I asked said there were “no more openings.” Apparently he thought I wanted to try for a place at the military helicopter academy in nearby Syzran. I then realized that you even needed blat in the military. Only boys with influential families went to that academy, because there was plenty of high-paying work for civilian helicopter pilots after they finished their military obligation. And I learned that the Air Force’s Kacha Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots near Volgagrad, which was nearest to home, was also inaccessible without blat. But the officer finally conceded that there were still openings at the PVO Higher Military Aviation Academy at Armavir down in the south of the republic. The PVO flew supersonic jet fighters, not lumbering transports or fighter-bombers. That prospect appealed to me.
In October 1977 I approached Lieutenant Colonel Gusev, my military training instructor at School Number Two.
“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” I said respectfully, “can you spare the time to help me with my application to the Armavir Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots?”
He was obviously shocked. “Zuyev,” he exclaimed, “you are interested in the military?”
But he quickly overcame his shock, realizing that, even if I wasn’t selected, my application was a sign of his good example and diligence.
Rema, the principal, was even more skeptical when I requested a formal transcript of my academic records. “Young man,” she said scornfully, “you will never make it.”
But Lieutenant Colonel Gusev was the secretary of the school faculty’s Party collective. He was determined to see me placed at Armavir. In quick order, I became a member in good standing of the school’s Komsomol aktiv, at least on paper. Then Rema got to work on the written evidence of my fine academic career. Her resume of my academic record was a monument to bureaucratic cunning. To read her words, I was a brilliant, dedicated young Communist scholar and athlete, whose only fault was accepting too many challenges (which explained my less than stellar exam grades).
I discovered that over 100,000 tenth-year boys from the entire Soviet Union were preparing applications for the twelve aviation academies, 20,000 for Armavir alone. It was estimated that only about 2,000 would pass the physical and aptitude examinations, and from that group, only 300 would eventually be selected for the class beginning in September 1978. All that winter I worked on the tedious application process. Finally, in February 1978, I was ordered back to the komandatura to take my initial physical examination. I had passed the first hurdle. But I still had to pass a battery of written tests and at least three more increasingly rigorous physical exams.
In mid-February my energy and determination were shattered with the news that my father had died of a sudden heart attack. I was staggered by grief, and by remorse that I had not been able to understand him better.
After my parents’ divorce, I had finally learned about my father’s childhood during the war. As a boy of eleven, he had been caught in a Nazi round-up of villagers near Smolensk and shipped to Poland to work as a farm laborer. Luckily the family he worked for were kind. He ate at their table and was able to read a few Russian books from their library. But when he finally was freed by the Red Army in 1944 and found his way back home, his village was devastated. He somehow traveled to Samara, where he had relatives. My father had never told me about all this because of the stigma the State placed on anyone who had been captured by the Germans and taken West. With typical paranoia, Stalin was convinced all former prisoners of the Germans returned as imperialist spies.
My mother had made sure I made no mention of his captivity on my academy application. And my father was gone before I could ever talk to him about his experience.
Only three weeks before, I had seen him standing outside a State liquor store one afternoon, like so many other Soviet men who had lost their way, waiting to find two others so that they could pool their money to “go three on a bottle” of cheap vodka. I had wanted to tell him of my plans to become a military pilot, but the shame of the circumstances kept me from approaching him. It was the last time I saw him alive.
I was still in emotional turmoil from my father’s funeral when I took the second physical examination, this one designed to eliminate all but the fittest applicants from the Kuybyshev Oblast. The cardiologist discovered an irregular systole beat on my EKG. I explained that my father had just died and asked to be retested. Once more, Coach Karanov came to my rescue by arranging the EKG at a friendly sports-medicine center, where I passed the exam ten days later.
But I was not so lucky with the vestibular balance test, designed to provoke vertigo. I had to sit on a revolving chair with my eyes closed and swing my head back and forth. I immediately broke into a clammy sweat and the woman doctor stopped the test. I told her I had been training too hard and requested another test.
When I came back at the end of February, I brought with me a foil-wrapped block of dark chocolate from the city’s best confection factory. This, I told her, was a small prezant, a gesture of thanks for her patience. It was the first bribe I ever gave. I passed the test. But the act left a bad taste in my mouth.
The written examinations were draining. And when I received the news I had passed them, I was almost too exhausted for elation. Which was just as well: These exams were simply a ticket to even more rigorous tests and interviews to be administered at Armavir itself in June.
I still was not certain of acceptance at the academy. But at least I had made it through the first two selections. And in the process, I had grown absolutely determined to become a fighter pilot.
CHAPTER 4
Armavir Higher Aviation Academy
1978-82
Over two thousand candidates for the academy arrived in Armavir by train in late June 1978. For me the three-day trip was pleasant and exciting. I had certainly been proud to visit Moscow the year before, but the idea of traveling to the South enticed me. Armavir was in the valley of the Kuban River, part of the Krasnodar Territory in the far southwest corner of the Russian Federation. And my Spartak teammates who had visited the city spoke highly of its grapes and cherries — and the pretty girls at the local nurse-midwife school.
Armavir’s buildings were handsome stone, with red tile roofs. The city’s name was Armenian for “valley of wind.” And the residents included many wealthy Armenian and Kazakh merchant families who had somehow retained their wealth after the Revolution.
On Spartak road trips I’d learned the trick of using local taxi drivers as unofficial guides to a new city; they were always in the know, and seemed proud to share their inside knowledge with young guys from out of town. Riding the taxi from the train station to the candidates’ reception camp with several other candidate cadets I’d met on the train, the taxi driver showed us the large nursing school and teachers’ academy.
But it would be a long time before any of us could visit these girls. My train had carried boys like myself, mostly seventeen, with a few as old as nineteen. I had ridden in the same compartment with six young guys from Samara. At home we probably would have been rivals, but as the train rumbled south, we quickly became “Samarskiye,” as the sons of Samara proudly called themselves.
I shared a huge tent with several of my new Samarskiye buddies and over a hundred boys from all over the Union. Anatoli Savelyev, one of my new friends, had a brother at the academy who was a cadet sergeant in his fourth year. His name was Valery, and he came to visit us with another, older Samarskiye cadet soon after we arrived. As new candidates, still dressed in civilian clothes, we were certainly impressed by these fellows. They wore their uniforms well and had an unmistakable disciplined confidence about them. Valery Savelyev was a husky,
