revenge, a prerogative of senior Soviet officers. A few months earlier Torbov had been unusually friendly and highly complimentary of my performance. I had quickly discovered the reason for the colonel’s pleasant attention. His wife had a relative named Tamara, an attractive woman of thirty, who had just been divorced and had sought refuge on their doorstep. Although Torbov was a regimental commander, with an ample supply of blat, he couldn’t find an apartment or job for this domestic refugee. So he had to marry her off to free the sofa in his small living room. Apparently he and his wife sorted through personnel files of all the bachelor pilots, and my name was on the top of the pile.
They invited me to dinner, then to tea, then encouraged me to escort Tamara to the November Revolution Day reception at the officers’ dining room. I declined. The blatant, passionless manipulation of the situation was distasteful. Tamara seemed an attractive and pleasant enough woman, but I found the crude matchmaking degrading for both of us. The whole situation was embarrassing. What the hell kind of country was this that could equip Colonel Torbov’s regiment with the world’s most versatile combat aircraft and forty skilled pilots to fly them, but could not provide decent housing for a young divorcee? Instead, an intelligent and energetic senior officer like Torbov was reduced to playing the role of a village babushka, trying to snare a valuable husband for his relative.
As soon as Torbov realized I was not interested in Tamara, he turned cold toward me. Within days his lavish attention was focused on my friend Yuri, one of the twin Siberian maintenance officers. Three weeks after that, Yuri and Tamara were married, and Yuri received an unexpected plum assignment to a regiment in Germany. This was his reward for marrying Tamara. But it was also a breach of the unofficial policy not to split up twin officers who had joined the service together. In fact, Yuri’s assignment drove a wedge between the two brothers and eventually destroyed their close relationship. Once again, the sordid reality of everyday Soviet life had a destructive effect on normal human relationships. But at least Tamara had found a husband. We all knew terrible stories of divorced couples who were forced to continue sharing the same small living space because there were no other apartments available. In some cases, a divorced man or woman brought the new spouse or paramour back to the one-room apartment where they “lived” on a cot or sofa separated by a curtain from the former spouse — and usually a child or two. And yet the editorialists in Pravda lectured us about the weak moral fiber of those who turned to alcohol to escape the brutal reality of their lives. I couldn’t blame Yuri for snatching up Tamara; her unofficial dowry — orders to a VVS regiment in Germany — made her a very attractive bride.
These foreign assignments paid at least double salaries in convertible currency. After five years in Germany, a young captain could return home with a houseful of furniture and enough money saved to buy a Zhiguli. Real “overseas” assignments to third world Socialist countries like Syria, Angola, or even Cuba were still more prized. There a man got five or six times his normal salary, paid in hard currency. “Frying your ass” three years in Africa or the Middle East set you up for the rest of your life. Colonel Torbov had dangled such a prospect in front of me, before I made it clear I didn’t want to marry Tamara.
The lesson of this sequence was clear: If you cooperate with the system, you will be rewarded. Conversely, I had to be punished for resisting Torbov’s pressure.
In May the 1st Squadron flew off to Akhtubinsk, and I went to Vaziani.
Both glasnost and perestroika were subjected to bizarre scrutiny on a bright afternoon in early May, when a teenage West German pilot named Mathias Rust flew a rented, single-engine Cessna 172 across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, on across the coastal plain, all the way through Moscow’s ultra-modern air-defense zone — which even included antimissile weapons — and landed on a bridge near the Kremlin. He then proceeded to taxi the light aircraft directly into Red Square, where he hopped out and began signing autographs. Before glasnost, this would have been a nonincident; official Moscow would have staunchly denied it had ever happened. Reports of the intruder aircraft would have been dismissed as imperialist provocation, just as Moscow had refused to admit that the Korean Airlines Flight 007 had successfully penetrated our most concentrated air-defense sector in the Far East. But under glasnost, Western journalists and tourists were allowed to videotape the landing and even chat with the young pilot, who stated he was on a peace mission and wished to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Unfortunately Gorbachev and his new reformist Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, were at the Warsaw Pact conference in East Berlin when Rust landed. With much fanfare, Gorbachev had just announced that the forces of the Warsaw Pact were undergoing their own perestroika, based on a new military doctrine that was purely “defensive” in character. Efficiency based on high technology, not the brute force of numbers, was to be the hallmark of the Socialist nations’ military, a restructuring to be led by the Soviet Armed Forces. Unfortunately for Marshal Sokolov, the penetration of Moscow’s vital airspace by a light plane flown by a young civilian was hardly a tribute to this newly efficient defense. Gorbachev summarily dismissed Sokolov, replacing him with a mere general of the Army, Dmitri Yazov. The head of the PVO Air Defense Force, Marshal Alexander Koldunov, was also fired. In the official announcement he was referred to simply as “Comrade Koldunov,” without his name or patronymic, a cutting insult to a Marshal of the Soviet Union.
My zveno was on duty alert at Vaziani when Mathias Rust landed. At first we thought the news was just another of the rumors or weird jokes that had mushroomed since glasnost, but we quickly learned that the Defense Ministry was boiling with angry embarrassment over the incident. That night the deputy military district commander, Major General Shubin, drove his own car out to the base from Tbilisi after midnight in a personal attempt to assess our readiness to intercept similar provocation flights down here in Georgia. The scared conscript guard at the gate waved the general through without even checking his identity papers. Shubin drove right to the control tower and the parking apron of the duty-alert section. He called the hapless duty-alert officer on the carpet, bellowing that — like Mathias Rust — he could have a “powerful bomb” in the trunk of his Zhiguli.
The next morning General Shubin returned with a delegation of senior officers from the district to conduct a formal readiness inspection. Because my zveno had the duty alert, we were in the full glare of his scrutiny. Either we had to prove we were capable of intercepting light aircraft intruders, flying low and slow, or Shubin would “squash shit” in our personal dossiers. Luckily the resourcefulness of a wily Soviet pilot did not fail us. My former instructor, Captain Yevgeni Griek, had been up half the night drawing up elaborate diagrams — all convincingly postdated — of the squadron’s interception maneuvers against low and slow intruder flights, including enemy “deception” missions flown on civilian light aircraft.
Shubin and his staff of angry bears were visibly impressed. They left after half an hour to report to Moscow that at least one unit of the regiment of the VVS was prepared to intercept and destroy such provocation flights.
After the general left, Captain Griek rolled up his bogus diagrams and grinned sardonically. He then quoted a very appropriate old Red Army aphorism: “The more paper you use, the cleaner your ass.”
As it turned out, the PVO had certainly not used enough paper. My friend Sergei Rastvorov had a pal who flew a MiG-23 in the PVO regiment that had tried to intercept Mathias Rust north of Moscow on that sunny afternoon. That pilot had, in fact, conducted an effective visual intercept on the small plane droning only 120 feet above the budding orchards and muddy fields of the coastal plain. But when he called in his “visual contact,” to GCI, the battle-control officers said he was seeing things. He was informed that the radar blip he had been sent to intercept was just a “flock of birds.” Frustrated and short of fuel, he returned to base and was angrily trying to convince the GCI wizards he had seen a light foreign aircraft when the news of Rust’s landing came in.
Over the coming days, there was only a curt mention of Rust’s flight in Pravda, and no pictures on Soviet television. For those we had to rely on videos from West German TV recorded by friends based in East Germany and on photocopies of Western magazines.
So much for perestroika in the military; so much for official glasnost.
I did not arrive at Akhtubinsk until mid-June, and came via the long train and bus ride from Georgia, rather than flying in with my squadron.
The first interesting news I received when I signed in was that the center’s test pilots and engineering staff had finally gone on strike earlier that spring in protest of the chronic food shortages. A high delegation from Moscow had eventually appeased them with promises to restock the base Voyentorg. And the officers’ dining room was certainly well stocked with food. My first morning I ate a typically “light” Air Force breakfast that included a plate heaping with fried sausage and eggs, cheese, roll and butter, and a block of real chocolate, all washed down with cups of coffee. But I was told there was still no food in town, and most of the Akhtubinsk officers remained angry and frustrated.
I was one of approximately seventy-five applicant fighter test pilot students. There were two other similar groups, one for bombers, the other for helicopters. We represented the top 0.5 percent of the 30,000-odd Soviet
