sentiment, but I felt real pride as I spoke those solemn words.
That autumn, Colonel Rinchinov offered us new Second Class pilots a radical proposal for earning our First Class rating. Instead of taking our mandatory forty-five-day annual leave, we would take a minimum one-week stand-down from flying duties that would permit us to delay the long leave for three months. In those three months, he said, he would guarantee us the flying time and instructors to have us qualified as First Class pilots before New Year’s. In short, he proposed compressing a year’s training into ninety days. Naturally we jumped at the chance.
On the last day of this brief leave, a squadron runner told me to report to Colonel Rinchinov as soon as convenient. The colonel’s secretary immediately showed me into his office. Given Rinchinov’s expression of gravity and excitement, I thought I was about to receive immediate replacement orders for duty in Afghanistan. This was great news. But I was wrong.
“Tomorrow,” the colonel announced, “a transport will arrive to take you to the Air Force test center in Lipetsk.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“You have been selected for training in the MiG-29.” He looked at me hard, then smiled broadly. “Congratulations,” he said, rising to shake my hand. “This is a real honor.”
“Comrade Colonel,” I asked, “does this mean I’ll be leaving your regiment and not going to Afghanistan with my squadron?”
“Yes, it does,” Rinchinov said gruffly, brushing back his thick black hair.
“Comrade Colonel,” I said, looking into his frank, open face, “what if I don’t want to go to Lipetsk?”
“Comrade Lieutenant,” Colonel Rinchinov said with a gleam in his dark eyes, “it’s not your job to make such decisions.”
I was on my way to Lipetsk.
Alexander Zuyev, age nine months, with mother, Lydia, Samara.
With American MiG-29 killers after Operation Desert Storm; Left: Lt. Nick “Mongo” Mongillo, USN, of VFA-81; Right: Capt. Chuck “Sly” McGill, USMC, serving as exchange pilot with USAF 33 TFW.
With the Navy’s Blue Angels,
Lt. John Foley, USN,
San Diego Air Show, 1990.
USS Abraham Lincoln, welcoming ceremony afte carrier landing, with F-14 Aardvarks Squadror VF-114, 1991.
CHAPTER 6
MiG-29
1984–85
In the first week of December 1984, I joined a group of Air Force officers boarding an An-26 “Curls” transport at a military airfield near Tbilisi. We were en route to several other bases in Georgia to pick up more officers and eventually fly north to the VVS Fourth Flight Tactical Advanced Training and Test Evaluation Center at Lipetsk. My group was the core of a regiment to be equipped with the new MiG-29. The Lipetsk training center had already given the MiG-29 orientation course to two similar groups, one from the prestige fighter base at Kubinka near Moscow, and the other from a Combat Leader Regiment in the Ukraine. There were only a few production-line MiG-29s already in service, and our assignment, once we received the new aircraft, would be to complete the complex, and rigorous, combat evaluation tests.
Igor Novogilov and I were the only two lieutenants selected from Vaziani. The other three officers from our base were First Class pilots; two were captains, the other a major. Major General Shubin, the VVS deputy military district commander, and two full colonels from his staff made up the Tbilisi contingent. At Tskhakaya we picked up three captains from the Meria regiment and a colonel who was division deputy commander. Late that afternoon we landed at Gudauta on the Black Sea, where four more experienced pilots climbed on board to round out our party. Novogilov and I exchanged glances as these officers settled in for the long flight north. We were the only two Second Class pilots on board. Apparently our performance had rated high enough to merit selection. I certainly appreciated the honor, but I knew a lot of hard work lay ahead.
Whatever other advantages came from this assignment, the selection of Igor and me to fill senior pilot slots in the new regiment was a pleasant surprise. This guaranteed us promotion to captain at the earliest opportunity. Even as an experienced First Class pilot, a senior lieutenant could not be promoted in military rank unless he filled an appropriate position. So most junior officers in established regiments had to accept flying as wingmen. Only a senior pilot could lead a two-plane formation. In fact, there were some fellows at Vaziani who had been serving as senior lieutenants for years. Now I was going to become a captain well ahead of my peers.
As the plane droned along, the late afternoon sun lit the high glaciers of the Caucasus off to the east. I could distinguish the twin white cones of Mount Elbrus, the tallest peak in Europe. In the Abkhas language Elbrus meant “untarnished virgins’ breasts.” My regiment’s young pilots joked that Elbrus was the only virgin with tits in the whole Transcaucasus. The mountain’s lower slopes were thick with snowfields glowing pastel peach in the sunset. I was scheduled to take my delayed mandatory annual leave after New Year’s up at the Terskol military ski resort on the slopes of Mount Elbrus, where I’d learned to ski the year before. This was a nice prospect, which had kept me going through the rough training at Vaziani. But now I was more excited about what lay ahead at Lipetsk.
Listening to the senior officers banter back and forth as they played poker and preferans in the transport cabin, I learned that we would receive an intense one-month orientation on the new aircraft’s systems, but no actual flight training. We would then return to our own bases and only report to the new regiment when at least one squadron of MiG-29s was available. The regiment would be formed at Gudauta, a base which had bounced from the PVO to the VVS under Ogarkov’s reorganization. The last PVO Su-15 regiment at Gudauta was transferred to Anadir in the Arctic in only three days, after an American SR-71 overflew Soviet Far East. A Yak-28 regiment was then transferred to Gudauta. That was fine with me. Gudauta was close to the resort town of Sochi, which had some of the best nightlife on the Black Sea, including beachside discos with authentic Western music. It was a splendid town to visit as a single fighter pilot. Some of the married fellows from Transcaucasus regiments also patrolled the pebbly beaches and swimming pools. And the flying weather was less humid than in central Georgia.
Lipetsk was a fast-growing industrial center in the Don Basin. Some of the most modern Soviet iron and steel works and related machine-tool and chemical plants were clustered here. In turn, a number of aviation enterprises and support factories for the big military design bureaus were located in Lipetsk. The town had a reputation of being very hospitable to visiting pilots.
And I discovered just how friendly the people of Lipetsk were, the very first night when Igor and I went for a walk after dinner. We were on the way to the telephone office to call our parents when two good-looking young women in stylish fur jackets approached us on the icy sidewalk. Because there were so few single Russian women in Georgia, I was always attracted to pretty girls when I traveled. Usually I checked out their legs first, but on this occasion I was mesmerized by one of the girls’ luminous blue eyes. To my surprise those innocent blue eyes were fixed just below my waist. She was blatantly inspecting me.
After the girls passed us, I turned to Igor. “I feel like she just opened my zipper with her eyes,” I said. “I’ve never seen a woman so bold.”
Luckily I still had a good supply of high-quality condoms from my years in Armavir. Besides being the site of an illustrious VVS pilots’ academy, Armavir had the only condom factory in the entire Russian Republic. We had so many condoms that we even decorated our New Year’s trees with them. And before I left, I had laid in a good stock of their products.
Condoms were as valuable as gold in the Soviet military. They were the only form of contraception available — besides abortion, of course. And the venereal disease rate in towns like Lipetsk was quite high, so I made sure to bring a good supply of Armavir’s best-quality condom with me. It was a real shame that the Defense Ministry wasn’t prepared to outfit all the troops so well. Apparently our imperialist enemies were more generous. Intelligence officers had told us that the American Army was so rich that they actually gave their “boys” two
