Popov looked serious, then shook his head. “Zuyev,” he said, “I can’t do this. You have a more important mission here learning to fly the MiG-29.”
“With respect, Comrade Colonel,” I persisted, “Boris was my friend. I feel an obligation to the other men in the squadron. They need good pilots out there, and also, I’m a bachelor.”
Again Colonel Popov paused, as if to make sure I wasn’t speaking from empty bravado. “They need a lot of things out there, Zuyev, including good pilots.” He stopped himself before speaking too frankly. “I know how you feel, captain. The war will still be there when you finish your training.”
The colonel’s words echoed in my head. I hoped he was right. The week before, I had been at the personnel office of the Transcaucasus Military District in Tbilisi, making inquiries about eventually applying for test pilot school. The old colonel in charge of the section was friendly and helpful. Then he asked if I had served a tour in Afghanistan yet.
“No, Comrade Colonel,” I told him. “I hope to go as soon as I complete training on the new aircraft.”
The gray-haired officer shook his head. “I wish you luck, young man. If you only knew the type of pilot I have to send out there to the war. They’re mostly brand-new Third Class pilots, six months out of the academy, who don’t know a combat turn from a barrel roll. Putting young boys like that into the cockpit of a Su-25 and sending them against Stingers is like sending sheep to the slaughterhouse.”
While we waited for the first MiG-29s to arrive in Tskhakaya, I was able to pay attention to other matters than flying for the first time in months. And once I was able to lift my nose from the training manuals and mission plans, I discovered there was only one topic of discussion among my military colleagues and my fellow citizens. Mikhail Gorbachev — affectionately known as “Mishka” to many people — had launched an anti-alcohol campaign that threatened to careen off course.
In quick succession, Gorbachev had addressed the Politburo, the Supreme Soviet, and in an unprecedented, unscripted television speech, the Soviet people themselves, warning all who would listen about the danger of alcohol in our national life. He named alcohol as the root cause of the nation’s economic stagnation.
Drunkenness, he said, provoked absenteeism and low productivity in the work place; alcohol destroyed families and sparked crime. In his speeches Gorbachev repeatedly made reference to a report of the Novosibirsk Scientific Academy that presented a dizzying array of statistical evidence on birth defects, domestic violence, and dismal industrial productivity caused by the presence of bountiful, cheap alcohol. This was a national scandal that had to be met face-on in the new spirit of glasnost.
Naturally the Party apparat all across the Soviet Union echoed the Moscow line. At the very next meeting of our regimental Partkom, the zampolit urged that we join the Communist officers of the division staff in voting that our dining room and sauna become completely abstemious.
“Not even beer?” Lieutenant Colonel Torbov asked, echoing the uneasy skepticism of his pilots.
“We have to set an example,” the zampolit answered, parroting the division line.
Luckily the commander was able to defer that vote.
At first I agreed with Gorbachev’s approach, because I had seen firsthand the destructive force of alcohol on our society. Certainly you could never ride a train or visit a city center on a weekend without encountering drunken hooligans. In recent years it had become very unpleasant to travel in civilian clothes. Every train station was full of drunken hoodlums, ready to curse and fight with strangers. And if you went to the summer open-air dances every town organized in their Gorky Park, you were sure to be challenged by a gang of drunks.
And the clumps of pathetic, burnt-out alcoholics forming in front of the State liquor stores every morning to “go three” on a seven-ruble bottle of Pshenichnaya were, indeed, a national disgrace.
But under Gorbachev’s lead, the government seemed to have lost all sense of proportion on this issue. The Politburo ordered the Ministry of Planning, Gosplan, to slash the production of all alcoholic drinks, and the Ministry of Finance to triple beer and vodka prices. Gorbachev had decreed that moderate wine consumption was still acceptable, so naturally wine prices immediately shot up. To make matters worse, the Gosplan order to abruptly limit alcohol production was interpreted by zealous apparatchiks in the South as a mandate to destroy valuable vineyards. Night after night the Vremya newscast from Moscow showed Crimean and Ukrainian vineyards, and even some plum orchards, blazing, while the obviously glum kolkhozniki were forced to smile grimly beneath unfurled anti-alcohol banners.
But as Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign rumbled ahead mindlessly, driven by the clumsy bureaucracy, I began to realize he was not the perceptive, astute, and decisive young leader I had imagined. With vineyards destroyed, wine was in short supply, so moderate consumption was not an option. Either people stopped drinking completely, or bought home brew, samogon.
And after a short visit home, where I saw crowds of sober, angry people in the streets of Samara after a football match, I realized that Gorbachev had no valid insight to the mood of the people, as he had claimed.
Here in Georgia, where many of the vineyards and fruit orchards were in private hands, the bootleggers were having a field day. In Russia scarce vodka at the State liquor stores had become very expensive, a bottle of Siberskaya jumping to ten rubles. But in Georgia there was plenty of liquor, wine, and champagne in State stores. And there was always some friendly Vasily or Antanasy willing to sell you black market cognac. A sudden black market in bootleg alcohol began to spread from the South throughout the Soviet Union. Drinking was just too deeply ingrained in Soviet life to be abolished by decree. Gorbachev should have understood this. But he obviously did not.
One dramatic result of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign was the rapid spread of criminal trafficking in aircraft alcohol among the maintenance personnel of the PVO and VVS. All our jet fighters used grain alcohol in their air-conditioning and electronics cooling systems. The more modern the aircraft, the more refined the grade of cooling alcohol that was used. In fact, some of the most highly distilled alcohol — far “smoother” than the cheap grain vodka sold by the State — was used in PVO Sukhoi interceptors. And in Lipetsk, I’d learned that the new MiG- 29 used an even purer cooling spirit officially called “SVS,” which some wag immediately dubbed spirta vodochnaya smes, “pure alcohol mixed with vodka.”
During my training at Lipetsk, several officers had commented about the large quantity of super-pure alcohol in the plane’s cooling systems. An instructor had noted the comments of the MiG OKB designer Comrade Belosvet on the subject: “This is the MiG-29. If necessary, we’ll use five-star Armenian brandy.”
There had always been a problem in the PVO and VVS with maintenance officers and soldier mechanics siphoning off a little alcohol, for their own use or sale on the black market. And pilots in remote regiments in the Arctic or the Far East occasionally played a devastating drinking game called Polar Bear, in which they drank aircraft alcohol. The pilots playing sat around a table with a shot glass of alcohol in front of them. They bet money on each shot, which went into the bank. At regular intervals, someone shouted, “Polar bear.” They all downed their shots and jumped under the table to hide from the imaginary bear. This could go on for hours. The winner was the last man who could still climb out from the pile of drunken pilots passed out beneath the table.
But these excesses had been rare, and usually limited to dead-end PVO regiments.
Now not just burnt-out maintenance officers but some squadron and regimental staff began stealing and selling aircraft alcohol. The shpaga “fencing foil” alcohol from MiG-21s and Su-15s was so rough that it had to be mixed with fruit juice to be palatable. But some PVO units flying the big MiG-25 interceptors — known to pilots as the “flying cocktail lounge' — had access to almost unlimited quantities of much better refined alcohol, which could be diluted slightly with distilled water and sold in vodka bottles with counterfeit labels at an incredible profit. MiG-25 pilots also used this alcohol as valuta, hard currency, to buy construction materials to build small dachas, garages, or as bribes to place their kids in a decent kindergarten. That summer the aviation regiments in the Transcaucasus began using much greater quantities of cooling alcohol than ever before, even though the weather was not noticeably warmer. We all knew what was going on, yet the zampolits and commanders ignored the matter because no one wanted to stand up to expose the glaring policy failures of the new leader.
Another unanticipated result of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign was a spreading disrespect for State authority, the Militia, and the KGB. Because no Party official was willing to admit the campaign had boomeranged and had spawned a huge new bootleg-alcohol black market, the black marketeers began to flourish, unmolested by authorities. They quickly branched out into other fields, including luxury goods such as video players, pornographic cassettes, and hard currency. So while the Politburo was proudly announcing the rapidly spreading popularity of temperance groups in government offices and State factories, an entire new criminal class was getting rich.
And apparently Gorbachev was unaware of the problem. Obviously he was unaware of the growing food shortages undercutting morale in many regions. Still maintaining his popular image, he often visited factories and
