coded messages for spies and saboteurs. But Petrukhin was never without his transistor radio these days. It was as if he had appointed himself an unofficial monitor of glasnost, whose duty it was to verify the accuracy of the State news media. Petrukhin had always been just as loyal a Party man as Nikolai. But something had changed in the major’s perspective. He now seemed obsessed with learning the real truth, not just the official glasnost version of events.
In many ways Petrukhin symbolized a barely perceptible schism between the hard-line Communist senior officers, who had staked their lives and careers in supporting the official status quo, and the restless junior officer corps, senior lieutenants, captains, and majors like Petrukhin who were beginning to have fundamental doubts about the Party’s leadership of our nation.
These were uncertain times, so I decided to keep my own counsel. One thing I knew for certain, however, was that glasnost certainly was not anywhere near as “open” as Moscow would have us believe. This was dramatized a few days later. I was talking to Peotr Tutakin, a visiting engineer from Akhtubinsk. We were alone in the squadron dayroom, so I decided to ask him about an accident report we had received the month before. Apparently a civilian aircraft had been destroyed in a “mishap” involving a combat plane on an Akhtubinsk poligon. The VVS report had been sketchy at best.
“What about all this?” I asked. “What actually happened?”
Peotr smiled grimly. “Last November Major Viktor Stepanenko was flying a MiG-23 on a live-fire test of our new anti-helicopter missile,” he explained, then gave the details.
The weapon’s radar sensor was tuned to detect the Doppler rotation motion of a helicopter’s rotor. There was an old Mi-6 drone flying twenty miles downrange when Stepanenko fired his missile.
“But no one had informed the regional Aeroflot office of the exercise,” Peotr added. “Instead of striking the helicopter drone, the missile locked onto the propellers of a civilian An-26 and destroyed the airliner.”
“Shit!” I said. “How many were killed?”
“Twenty-six. All civilians … women, kids.”
“There was nothing in Pravda, not a word on Vremya,” I blurted out, then suddenly realized I sounded naive. “There wasn’t even a vague token report of an Aeroflot accident.”
Peotr nodded again. “Glasnost is a very flexible policy, Sasha.” He shook his head. “Missiles are dangerous. Remember the American U-2 flown by Gary Powers?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” Peotr said, “we shot down one of our own MiG-19s before we got the Americans that glorious May Day.”
That night I thought more of the missile accident. It reminded me of Chernobyl, not in magnitude, certainly, but in the cover-up that followed. At least in the aircraft, the people died quickly.
In each case, gross bureaucratic bungling had resulted in the tragic death of innocent Soviet citizens. But, despite glasnost, neither tragedy was reported to the Soviet people. Obviously, old habits died hard. But Mikhail Gorbachev had solemnly pledged during his Ail-Union television speeches that glasnost was more than token propaganda, that the new policy of openness was not simply a sophisticated variation on the old deceit of pokazuka, the official sham that pervaded all Soviet life.
Now, like Yuri Petrukhin, I was beginning to harbor serious doubts, not just about cautious bureaucrats sabotaging Gorbachev’s bold policy, but about the popular Gorbachev himself.
Valery was off on his third combat tour to Afghanistan and had graciously given me the keys to his flat. I had planned to use this quiet sanctuary away from my fellow pilots to study for the Akhtubinsk center examination. Sitting alone at night in Valery’s small, comfortable apartment, I found myself pushing aside my aerodynamic and electronics manuals and turning my own transistor to Radio Liberty.
Valery, a bitter, traumatized Afghansti, had recommended I learn the truth from Radio Liberty, not Pravda or Red Star. Major Petrukhin, a New Communist Man if there ever was one, had implicitly given the same advice. I began to listen to the American radio station each night, alone in the center of Valery’s small kitchen, the radio before me on the table, sheltered by my spread arms and shoulders so that no one in the staircase behind me could hear.
I heard a steady litany of reports on train crashes, mine and factory accidents, and increasingly, civil strife among rival ethnic groups in the outer republics. None of this was reported by the official Soviet media. I could believe either the American radio station or my own government. Finally I came to believe the Americans. And learning this privileged information gave me satisfaction; I knew things my comrades did not.
One reason I had lost faith in my government’s honesty was the hollowness of perestroika that was becoming more obvious as each month passed. Apparently the much touted “restructuring” of perestroika was just a shifting of the same old inefficient structures of the economy. Gorbachev was taking the same apparatchiks from ministries like Gosplan and Agriculture and shuffling them around into new “super ministries” that were supposedly much more efficient. All that looked wonderful in Moscow, but it had absolutely no impact out in the provinces or the distant republics. Yet month after month, Gorbachev appeared on All-Union television, gazing earnestly into the lens to assure us all that perestroika would soon dramatically improve our lives. He began to sound like a zampolit.
Under perestroika, apparatchiks who earned their living mouthing platitudes — Gorbachev and the Politburo included — still had their fine apartments, their Volga sedans, and access to Beryozka hard-currency stores. They lived in a separate world from the millions of normal “toilers” whom they supposedly cared for so deeply. I saw no future in these splendid reforms.
But glasnost itself was a fascinating concept. I came to realize that there were actually two forms of glasnost evolving simultaneously: the official warmed-over pokazuka glasnost, and a parallel, more authentic and deeper process of national awakening. Once Gorbachev had opened the door to the truth a narrow crack, the doorway itself could never be completely blocked again. For example, his most recent admission that at least thirty-five million Soviet citizens had been killed in the Great Patriotic War — almost twice the previous official number — raised immense questions about other “official” versions of major historical events. New magazines such as Ogonyok and Argumenti i Facti had seized the opportunity presented by glasnost to conduct valid historic investigations, actually based on eyewitness accounts, not the dictates of the Party.
Books by banned authors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Anatoli Rybakov were now available in photocopies of printed editions. Growing up, I had never actually seen a samizdat “self-published” carbon copy of an illicit book manuscript, although I’d heard they had been popular among Moscow intellectuals. But now with glasnost there seemed to be much greater access to copy machines, so that even if Moscow tried to suppress a newly legal magazine by limiting the publisher’s paper supply, the important articles quickly spread throughout the Soviet Union, and were even quoted on news broadcasts in the republics. Perestroika, I knew, was doomed from the beginning. But glasnost, I suspected, had the potential to transform my homeland.
That spring I received my orders to report to Akhtubinsk in June for the week-long official examination and interview process. A few days later the 1st Squadron was unexpectedly ordered to fly to Akhtubinsk for several months’ intensive combat evaluation of the MiG-29. I immediately grasped the potential benefits from this order. The new fighter would be the star performer at Akhtubinsk, and flying as a member of my elite squadron would put me in daily contact with the test pilots who would conduct my formal examination in June. As every Soviet pilot knew, when you sat in a sauna drinking beer and talking airplanes with another aviator, you had a friend for life.
But my sudden good fortune was just as suddenly stymied. Colonel Torbov, my regimental commander, personally assigned me to a four-plane zveno, standing indefinite duty alert at the Vaziani Air Base near Tbilisi. When I requested an appointment with Torbov to appeal his decision, he curtly dismissed me.
“You have your orders, Captain Zuyev,” he said coldly, hardly looking up from his embossed-leather desk set.
“But, Comrade Colonel…”
“Dismissed, Captain.”
Now he looked up, his sharply chiseled features set in a scowl. He was lean and tall, a true “Hussar” of a fighter pilot who could display a definite aristocratic hauteur when he chose to. The colonel was a graduate of the prestigious Gagarin Academy in Moscow and came from a well-connected military family. There was no arguing with his decision.
Walking back to the flight line, I had to face the bitter logic of his order. Colonel Torbov was exacting
