The fifty best-qualified cadets of the 250 who remained in my class were selected for MiG-23 training. Based on my performance at Pirsagat, I was in this group. So were my friends Sergei Mashenko, “Deep Freeze” Morozov, Dmitri from Leningrad, and “Boris” Bagomedov from Dagestan, one of the few successful Asian cadets.
The MiG-23 cadets were assembled on a ramp near the Burav runway where a variety of fighter aircraft were kept for familiarization purposes. The big gray MiG-23 parked there was almost twice as long and four times as heavy as the L-29 trainer. The MiG-23 evoked brute power and speed. Its tapered nose ended in the bullet tip of a gray radar dome, from which a titanium Pitot instrument probe extended like a lance. Just aft of the canopy, the two tall, rectangular engine air intakes gaped open, which explained why pilots of the smaller MiG-21 called the MiG-23 the Crocodile. This image was intensified by the widespread main landing gear, protected by the angled plate of mud deflectors, which gave the undercarriage the appearance of a crouching reptile’s clenched legs. In turn, MiG-23 pilots scornfully called the MiG-21 okurok, “cigarette butt.”
The massive Tumansky R-29 turbofan engine occupied most of the fuselage, terminating in the heavy segmented alloy ring of the afterburner. Thick, swiveling powered differential stabilizers and a hulking vertical tail over twelve feet high made it clear that this aircraft was designed for high supersonic speeds.
The MiG-23 was a variable-geometry fighter, and its wings were the most striking feature of the aircraft. Set high on the fuselage, they had a tapered cross section, thick near the center and saber-thin at the tips. In flight the plane’s wings could be swung back from the low speed configuration of sixteen degrees from perpendicular to the fuselage, all the way to a sharply swept falcon-tuck of seventy-two degrees for the top supersonic speed of Mach 2.35.
Like all high-performance fighters of its generation, the MiG-23 was a design compromise. To perform well at the high-G, supersonic end of the flight envelope, the airplane traded lift for raw power. With the wings tucked completely back, the stabilizers provided responsive pitch and roll control. However, even with the wings returned forward to the minimum sixteen-degree-sweep angle, the MiG-23 could become dangerously unstable at subsonic speed.
To demonstrate the power of the big afterburning Tumansky R-29 turbofan, an instructor climbed into the aircraft, started the engine, and ran it up to full military power. A deep, rasping roar hit us, and the ground seemed to tremble. There was a heavy concrete block resting on the slope of the steel blast deflector behind the aircraft’s tail pipe. The block must have weighed three tons. When the pilot hit the afterburner, a pulsing tube of orange flame erupted from the tail pipe with a thunderous crack. On afterburner the engine developed over twelve tons of thrust. The concrete block was blown away, spiraling like a maple leaf in the wind, and landed twenty yards behind the blast deflector.
“That’s your engine,” a captain instructor shouted, once the roar had abated. “You will have to learn to control this machine, or it will control you… right into the ground.”
Our MiG-23 ground classes were piled on top of our regular aeronautical engineering studies. There was a cadet saying, “blue nose, Red Diploma,” which referred to the almost superhuman effort required to earn the coveted Red Diploma for academic excellence. All of us felt our noses turning blue that year. But we were old soldiers now and we knew how much slack to expect from the instructors, and what regulations we could bend or break. And the strict rule against unauthorized visits to town was the one regulation we most enjoyed breaking.
It was unrealistic for the academy commander, General Major of Aviation Nikolai Kryukov, to expect healthy young men like ourselves to remain stone-sober and celibate when there were nursing students, vodka, and beer virtually a stone’s throw from the glass-studded front wall of the academy. Again the sense of losing the best years of our youth often overwhelmed us. And our restrictive life seemed so unnecessary when Dmitri informed us that cadets at American military academies actually had telephones in their rooms and were allowed to drive cars to visit girls in towns like Annapolis and West Point. By our second summer at Armavir, the members of my unofficial “crew” were all veterans of the Ho Chi Minh Trail over that wall.
Absence without leave was a guardhouse offense that meant at least three days’ tough confinement, eating stale bread and drinking cold tea, and sleeping on a wooden plank with your shinel, greatcoat, as a blanket. But the tantalizing prospect of sleeping with those willing and experienced nurses overcame our fear. Once we had reconnoitered the town, “the Prince of Georgia,” Sergei Mashenko, and I pooled our money and rented a small furnished apartment nearby from a kindly old babushka whose daughter had married and moved away.
Getting from the campus to that apartment and back was always an adventure. But even with the trees and foliage cut back severely, we found several good routes over the wall.
These routes were also our smugglers’ trail whenever we brought back vodka for a party in the dormitory.
I was on a vodka run just before New Year’s 1981. After making an uneventful sortie into town and returning late at night with my shinel pockets clanking with .75-liter “grenades” of Sibirskaya vodka, I hauled myself back over the wall and dropped down into the shadowy snowdrifts.
“Oh, how nice,” a voice bellowed. “Those are fine trophies you’ve got there, Comrade Kursant.”
It was too dark for us to see each other’s face, but I certainly recognized the voice of Colonel Stonov, one of the battalion commanders. I was looking at a week in the frozen guardhouse.
“Hand it over!” the colonel shouted. “Now!”
I thrust out two squat bottles of vodka. “Comrade Colonel,” I said, disguising my voice with a slur as if I were drunk, “I have more on the other side. Wait one moment, please.”
Before he could answer, I was back over the wall and down on the gritty ice of the pavement on the city side. I dashed all the way around the walled compound and found the hole under the fence near the runway. Once inside the campus, I sprinted back to my dorm. My friends hid the vodka and brushed the snow from my uniform while I crawled into bed. The lights in our bunk room were out when Colonel Stonov came storming up the stairs. Given the time it had taken me to go all the way around the wall, he must have remained standing like a fool where I’d left him for at least five minutes.
He was not amused. But he was never able to prove who had tricked him.
All of us hated the idea of the guardhouse, which was the main deterrent that kept most of the cadets on campus. In the guardhouse the soldiers shaved your head, threw buckets of ice water on your wooden bunk, and generally made your stay there as unpleasant as possible.
Their favorite trick was screaming “Otboy,” “Go to sleep!” while the prisoners were outside in the exercise yard in the evening. At that command they loosed their vicious German shepherds. One cadet grabbed a shovel and clubbed the dogs to death. And the court of inquiry found in his favor and disciplined the sadistic guards.
As the cadet sergeant, I had to escort prisoners in my platoon to the guardhouse. It was a duty I despised. But at least it allowed me and the Prince of Georgia to pull one of the best ruses in the history of Armavir. Gary was caught AWOL in town and given five days guardhouse confinement. I was responsible for both escorting the prisoner and handing over his paperwork. We took a true gamble instead. Gary crawled back over the wall and spent the five days in our apartment. I ripped up his charge sheet.
No one was ever the wiser. But the experience convinced me to relinquish my stripes as a cadet sergeant.
Luckily I was never directly involved in one of the most daring and eventually dangerous cadet escapades. My close friend Sergei Mashenko had shown a real artistic talent since our first days at Armavir. Using tools in the model shop, he made us beautifully crafted switchblade knives that we could use in an emergency to cut parachute shroud lines. And he could sketch freehand detailed engineering drawings that were far superior to anything others could achieve with compass and protractor. Sergei was also an excellent forger. Our military identity papers were a cardboard-faced booklet, with pages listing our particulars, including the all-important entry “Marital Status.”
Using well-sharpened artist’s pencils, Sergei assigned a number of cadets a wife and perhaps a child or two. This deception was invaluable to graduating cadets who had enjoyed the comforts of young ladies from Armavir, but who had no intention of marrying. These were girls who had been urged by their ambitious families to spare no pain in order to snag a new Air Force lieutenant in marriage. Armed with their newly acquired proof of marriage, the cadets would break the sad news to their girlfriends just before graduation. There was not much the girls could do, as bigamy was against the Soviet constitution.
But Sergei was not as lucky as the Prince of Georgia had been. One of his many girlfriends decided to go work as a prostitute in the international hotels on the Black Sea. The managers there let only married girls work as whores because they were supposedly free of disease. Sergei altered her internal passport. But the KGB picked her
