The heavier of the two women glanced at me, taking in my uniform. “So,” she said rudely, “not from here, I suppose.”
“No,” I said, “I’m just visiting the center.”
The second clerk wrinkled her nose. “Don’t they feed you, then?”
I shook my head.
The first clerk yawned. “Well, this is all we have.”
“Is it always like this?” I asked, looking at the bare, dusty shelves.
The fat clerk shrugged. “Sometimes we get shipments, but it all goes fast.”
Outside it was almost dark, a cold, windy twilight. People were hurrying by, bundled against the chill. I looked back at the two clerks. “Where can I find a restaurant?”
The thinner clerk laughed so loudly, spittle formed on her lips. “Are you kidding with us?”
That night I went to sleep hungry.
The next morning I did manage to find an acceptable breakfast of sweet rolls and tea at the officers’ canteen on the base. This was fortunate because I didn’t want to face my interviews with an empty stomach.
Colonel Yuri Rizantsev, who chaired the three-officer panel, seemed friendly enough. The officers slowly verified my Armavir Academy records and my training certificates. They noted that I had never had an accident and that my overall record was excellent. The thin engineering major on the right read his questions from a notebook. He seemed interested in the aerodynamic damage my regiment’s planes had suffered at Mary One. But before anyone asked any truly challenging questions, the colonel was on his feet, thanking me for my visit.
“You will be notified in a few months when to return for your formal examination,” he said, stacking rny papers.
That was it. I had just become a finalist for the biannual Akhtubinsk selection exams. I knew that over four hundred candidates among the ten thousand fighter pilots in the VVS had applied this year and that there were only forty-eight chairs in the examination room. Now I would sit in one of them.
“Try not to become complacent, Zuyev,” Colonel Rizantsev warned me. “Work hard, study, and keep up your flying skills. They will definitely be tested next summer.”
On the bus back to Volgagrad, I sat beside an electronics instructor, a jovial middle-aged lieutenant colonel. He revealed how the staff of the Akhtubinsk center managed to eat. Every day, he said, a Tu-154 jet transport flew a regular shuttle route from the Akhtubinsk Air Base to Pushkino airfield near Moscow, a round trip of over thirteen hundred miles. And every day, officers and their wives were on board, carrying plastic panniers and string bags. They shopped in Moscow and returned each night lugging their salami, sacks of potatoes and macaroni, and their clinking tins of condensed milk.
“It’s an unusual system,” the officer admitted. “But so far, we get by.”
I nodded. If men with families could manage, I decided, I could certainly do so as well. The bus rolled north through the brown salt marsh toward civilization.
For a while I thought about the kind of country that could build a city like Akhtubinsk but could not put bread or milk on the store shelves. Then I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
Perestroika
1987–88
I was promoted to captain in January 1987, four years and three months after graduating from the Armavir Academy. During the spring of 1987, the regiment was well into the long, complex process of the MiG-29’s combat evaluation. As a lead pilot, I often flew independent two-plane sorties out to the air-combat range over the Black Sea or to the weapons poligons. After each flight, there was always a heavy load of paperwork that most of my friends grumbled about. But I welcomed the demanding and detailed engineering and aerodynamic evaluation reports: Flying these evaluation flights was excellent preparation for my formal examination at the Akhtubinsk test pilot school, scheduled for June. In fact, we had several test pilots and engineers from the Akhtubinsk center at our base who kindly gave me tips on taking the exam.
Mikhail Gorbachev had been Party Secretary and President for two years. His policy of glasnost was expanding rapidly, and he had just announced another major reform: perestroika, the restructuring” of the entire Soviet economy along modern lines. The reform seemed aimed at hacking down the thick bureaucratic deadwood that was strangling the Soviet economy. In speech after speech, “Mishka” spoke directly to the people, urging them to throw off the shell of mindless habit, to work harder, to streamline, to innovate.
This was exciting. Gorbachev constantly stressed that we were a great nation of immense potential, graced with almost limitless natural and human resources. He intended to kick a number of well-rounded asses among the lazy and corrupt apparatchiks and the smug nomenklatura, the affluent class of members who held positions of authority all across the Union that were delineated by the Party. The combination of efficient modern Socialism and the inherent energy of the Soviet people, Gorbachev confidently proclaimed, would be invincible.
As I watched his televised speeches and read his long policy statements in Pravda that spring, I felt a swelling optimism, a confidence that this strong young leader was really going to lead my country to its true destiny.
Certainly the process of glasnost seemed to be expanding rapidly. The scandalous corruption trials of the Central Asian leaders were reaching a sensational climax. The Uzbek Party secretary Sharaf Rashidov had led a truly corrupt mini-empire for decades. After his death in 1984, his successor — a seemingly bland Uzbek with the tongue — stopping name of Inamshon Usmankhodzhavev — and his republic’s Interior Minister were convicted of gross corruption and abuse of power. They had lived like oriental pashas; now they would learn the life of convicts in a corrective labor camp.
Over the months that followed, the scandal spread inexorably out of Central Asia to wash up on the red brick moats of the Kremlin itself. Yuri Churbanov, Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law, and the former first deputy minister of the interior (one of the top policemen in the Soviet Union) were implicated in the Uzbekistan morass and faced a stunning list of corruption charges, including accepting huge bribes from Rashidov and raking off millions of rubles from State enterprises. Every day, the Vremya newscast provided more sensational details of the Churbanov trial.
Sitting with my squadron mates in the duty-alert dayroom, watching our big color television, I was both fascinated and disgusted by the Churbanov trial.
My zveno leader, Yuri Petrukhin, now a major, aptly caught our mood. “That son of a bitch,” Petrukhin swore, pointing at the screen where Yuri Churbanov sat smirking at the courtroom camera. “He’s the type of leech that’s been bleeding this country white for years.”
The trial seemed to be glasnost at its best; Gorbachev appeared determined to rip apart the rotten old Brezhnev system of corrupt cronyism, to sack all the “bloated parasites” who were dragging our country into stagnation. But many of us began to wonder if such deep-seated corruption existed elsewhere in the Soviet Union; were former Brezhnev officials the only ones guilty of such gross abuse of power? Like the rest of the Soviet people, we had to wait for Moscow to shed more light by opening more doors to the unvarnished truth.
Then people began whispering rumors about shocking revelations by Western historians concerning the brutal execution of Czar Nicholas and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. According to accounts, the royal family had been butchered with bayonets, their bodies dissolved in acid and the bones thrown down an abandoned mine shaft. The zampolits dismissed these rumors as slanderous provocations. But confirmation came from a strange source. Major Yuri Petrukhin, our intelligence officer, a great pilot and a loyal Communist, told several of us in the ready room one afternoon that the reports were true.
“How do you know this, Comrade Major?” Nikolai Saratev asked. He was a Siberian country boy, a Party zealot with an “admirable” Komsomol record.
Petrukhin merely reached in his pocket and pulled out the beautiful little transistor radio receiver he had built himself from spare parts. “Radio Liberty” was all he said.
Nikolai gaped but did not challenge Petrukhin.
It was against State Security regulations to listen to Western radio broadcasts, which were known to contain
