tanker trucks stretched along the apron halfway back to the main gate. The Air Force was doing its best to support the international relief effort.
The television coverage of the disaster had been heartrending. Not only had thousands of people died in the collapsed buildings, but thousands more were at risk from the blizzards that swept down after the earthquake. I was proud to do my part, helping to turn the transports around quickly. And it was encouraging to see the massive outpouring of international aid for the victims.
Then one rainy afternoon, I was talking to a tired crew of the An-22, who had just flown in short of fuel from Yerevan. The pilots were unshaven and their eyes were hollow; they had been flying practically around the clock. When I asked how the victims were holding up, the copilot, a lanky senior lieutenant, suddenly laughed bitterly.
“They are dying, of course, Comrade.”
His aircraft commander, a shorter captain my age, shot the man an angry glance.
But the copilot ignored him. “All that food and medicine,” he said flatly, “the tents, the blankets… the sleeping bags for the children…”
Now the captain spoke. “The whole republic of Armenia is controlled by maroder, pillagers.”
“Pillagers?”
The two officers explained. As soon as the relief effort began, armed gangs of survivors-usually aided by the local militia-set up bogus landing zones for the relief helicopters that ferried the supplies from the main airports. When the Mi-8 cargo helicopters set down, the looters rolled up their trucks and loaded the supplies on board. They even had colored landing panels, strobe lights, and radio beacons.
“Obviously the local Party is in it too,” the captain said bitterly.
The copilot added that women and children were literally starving in the ruins while the bands of looters were getting fat on canned Polish ham and French biscuits. They only took the most valuable goods; Army patrols had found boxes of medical equipment dumped in the frozen mud near the landing zones. The looters had thrown away the portable X-ray equipment and kept material that was easier to sell. Already, he said, the thick winter parkas flown in from Finland were for sale in the street bazaars of Baku to the north.
I tried to grasp what all this meant. “What about the Army? Isn’t anyone trying to control this?”
The copilot scowled. “The soldiers are, of course. They have their own methods. They caught a man cutting rings off the fingers of the dead. They led him into the ruins, then knocked down a wall on top of him. But he was just a free agent. They can’t do anything against the organized groups.”
“But who’s protecting those gangs?” I demanded.
The tired young captain slurped his sweet tea and shook his head. “The KGB… the Party… who knows? They call them the Mafia.”
The term “Mafia” had first appeared during the Uzbekistan corruption trials to describe the crooked network established by the local Party officials. Since then, there had been other reports of secret criminal alliances among Party officials, State Security, and profiteers. This Soviet Mafia was not an American-style secret underworld group of pimps, drug dealers, or hijackers, as we had seen in so many gangster films, but rather an unofficial network of corrupt Socialist “entrepreneurs” who abused their positions of authority. And now these officers had affirmed that another absolutely corrupt banda existed in Armenia, a gang so cruel that they would strip relief supplies from the hands of starving women and children.
In a speech that winter Gorbachev had accused the Mafia of brazenly sabotaging the Armenian relief efforts. But the last thing successful criminals wanted was such notoriety. Then I realized that Party officials themselves had to be involved with this criminal enterprise. The only reason they singled out the Mafia was to divert attention from their own crimes. Indeed, corrupt officials seemed to use the Party’s own Union-wide organization to extend their tentacles.
And the corruption seemed to be spreading like a cancer. I wondered where it would end.
CHAPTER 10
Repression
1988–89
One of the few pieces of good news in the spring of 1988 was the announcement of our new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli Ignatich Antonovich. He was a great leader and a very popular officer. Short and wiry, like many fighter pilots, he had a sharp nose and bushy brows above lively, deep-set eyes. He smiled easily and showed none of the cold brooding of Torbov. Antonovich was not carefree, however. He worked us hard, but always explained the purpose of orders in his precise, almost comically basso voice, as if the words were echoing from a railway station loudspeaker. Above all, he was an excellent pilot, and being in his mid-thirties, was much closer in age to his officers than Torbov or other regimental commanders had been.
I got along with him well. Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich made it clear from the beginning that he expected us to hold up our high flying standards, and complete the combat evaluation of the MiG-29 in record time. But he also worked hard to improve the officers’ housing conditions and was continually fighting the bureaucracy-often unsuccessfully-to increase the food supplies in the Voyentorg.
Early that April, when I was due for my annual leave, Antonovich telephoned me at the duty-alert room.
“Shurka,” he said, “people tell me you’re the world’s expert on ski resorts. Can you arrange a vacation package for me?”
I hadn’t known he was a skier, and as it turned out, he was a novice eager to learn. “I’ll try, Anatoli Ignatich.”
“You’ll do more than try, Shurka, because you’re coming along to teach me how to ski.”
That was, indeed, an incentive. I’d been flying hard and my troubling marriage was in one of its sporadic truce periods. Although Jana had not seriously tried to hold a job at the base, she had turned back to her studies with something like enthusiasm. Now she was in Kiev completing her second-year spring examinations, and I hoped to reward her effort by taking her along to the Terskol resort with me and the colonel.
That afternoon I called the military travel office; they called Moscow, and we had three packages in hand before the office closed. Next I called my friend Hamid, who lined up the best skis and rooms for us.
“Ignatich” was a skilled pilot, but did not make much progress in his large class of beginner ski students. So I promised to teach him parallel skiing quickly. The next morning we rode the lift to a remote shoulder of the mountain and I made real progress, using aviation terminology like “thrust,” “bank,” and “pitch” to explain the proper angles for his skis. By afternoon he was progressing well. And the next day he was actually skiing the steep slopes of Cheget, the hardest mountain.
But Jana was a problem. She resented being left behind in her beginners’ class, and clearly she was jealous of the attention I devoted to the colonel. Jana insisted on joining the colonel and me, but complained about the cold and whined that she didn’t have a pretty ski suit like the other girls. Imported ski suits cost three months’ salary, and I told her crossly that she could have paid for one herself if she had kept her job.
When she lashed back at me, I responded in turn. “If you wanted a nice ski suit, you should have brought one from Hungary.”
For months she had been harping on the wonderful trove of luxury goods her family had amassed during their long years in Hungary, and implicitly criticized me for not providing the same.
For the first time she swore at me and stomped away, her shoddy ski boots clomping on the ice. That night we slept in separate beds and were hardly speaking in the morning.
We didn’t have a chance to reconcile. I received an emergency telegram to call my stepfather, Valentin, in Samara. When I finally got through to him on the poor interurban phone lines, he explained that my mother was in a psychiatric hospital, having become unstable and actually attempting suicide. I was shocked. She had never before shown any symptoms of emotional instability, although she had seemed nervous and subdued when she returned from her Black Sea holiday the previous August.
Colonel Antonovich immediately gave me a week’s leave, and the resort commander helped with plane reservations to Samara. I arrived home at nine that night and wanted to go immediately to the psychiatric clinic.
