changed the figures. They had used correction fluid and simply altered the original calculations to make the land area conform almost exactly to the official records.
“They told me I was suffering from stress and had made serious errors.”
Mother continued her grim recitation. When she went to the Party secretary to protest, she brought her own copies of the original surveyors’ figures to show that documents had been illegally altered. Instead of helping with a formal investigation, the Party apparatchik scolded her for insubordination and meddling.
She realized the entire institute was aligned against her. Obviously they were either all party to the massive fraud or had been intimidated into silence.
“They kept saying I was emotionally unbalanced,” Mother said. “I was angry, certainly. But I was not deranged.”
Then the resistance to her one-woman campaign took a cruel turn. “Misha was out on the neighborhood playground,” she said, her jaw trembling with outrage. “A man stopped his car and called him. ‘Hey, malchik, do you want a ride?’” Mother smiled. “But Misha remembered I had always told him never to take a ride from a stranger. He ran, and the man tried to catch him. Sasha, that man chased him almost to our podyesd. That incident was not an accident. I am sure of it.”
“That is terrorism…” I sputtered, too outraged to speak clearly.
“Under Stalin,” Mother whispered, “our parents warned us about ‘Dark Forces,’ the Black Raven van from the NKVD that came in the night. Sasha, I realized after they tried to kidnap Misha that these same forces still exist.”
Two days later when Mother raised this issue with the chief engineer, demanding a criminal investigation, the institute director arrived with two big ambulance attendants. The director insisted she was suffering emotional stress and ordered her to receive a medical evaluation. Only when she had been examined and returned with the proper health certificate, he said, would she be readmitted to the office. Mother was taken directly from the institute to the clinic.
She refused the capsules the first psychiatrist offered her. When he insisted, Mother demanded to leave. She had come for a health evaluation, not sedation.
Then the drug treatment began. She was forcibly injected with antipsychotic drugs, mixed with more common sedatives. This “therapy” left her in a stupor for days.
Mother had her hands around my fists. “Sasha,” she whispered, sobbing now, “all my life I believed that if I studied hard and became an engineer I would earn respect. I would help support my family and do honorable service to my country and to Socialism. Now…”
None of us spoke. The spring sunshine fell through the window, warming the kitchen.
Mother wrung her hands in anguish and stared out the window. “It wasn’t just the institute or the Party, Sasha. This does sound crazy, but there’s an invisible apparat out there that we never knew about. The Party is in it, State Security…”
Through other patients at the clinic, Mother had learned there were entire warehouses jammed with meat and produce from the kolkhoz and State farms. All this bounty was controlled by the local Party bosses and their accomplices. They not only took this booty free of charge, they shared in the profits from the sale of the goods on the black market. The authorities responsible for stopping this corruption were part of the banda who profited from it. It was a perfect criminal system, until Mother — a good Socialist — tried to derail their train. She had to be stopped.
And they succeeded. “By the time they took me to the clinic,” she added, again shaking her head as if stunned by a blow, “even the original survey records had been altered. There is nothing more any of us can do.” Now Mother grimaced at some private memory. “All those terrible people in Sochi,” she said, “they are part of their own network elsewhere in the Union.”
“Mama,” I said, taking her hand, “I’m afraid you are right. Those famous corruption trials in Moscow have just skimmed the surface. If you read Ogonyok, you will see the scale of this… octopus.” It was difficult trying to explain the sheer size and brazen nature of this enterprise. “In Georgia the State jewelry factories lose half their production. Half the gold from the mines in Kolyma is never counted. It’s the same for the caviar from the Caspian and the sable furs at the collectives in Siberia…”
I raked my hand through my hair in frustration. “Mama,” I said, “they call them the Mafia.”
Before I left Samara, I went back to the senior psychiatrist at the clinic. It was not necessary to detail the criminal abuses to which my mother had been subjected. Glasnost had already exposed the corruption of Soviet psychiatry. The previous autumn, Komsomolskaya Pravda had sparked an official investigation of these repressive “medical” practices. Without being specific, I alluded to friends in the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and the KGB who would be interested in how the mother of a Soviet Air Force pilot had been abused. The psychiatrist seemed terrified that the scandal of my mother’s treatment might become public. He assured me all drug therapy had been canceled. She would be granted an indefinite convalescent leave at full salary.
It was a small victory. But I felt no elation.
Jana reluctantly agreed to fly to Samara and help in my mother’s recovery. Mother was still too weak from the weeks of heavy sedation to cook and clean, and she certainly couldn’t face the long food lines. I had requested additional emergency leave, but Division refused. The MiG-29 combat evaluation was more important than minor personal matters.
But after three weeks, Mother called and said Jana was returning the next day. Instead of helping, Jana had simply whined and complained, often sleeping until past noon. When she went out to buy food, she usually returned empty-handed. Jana did not have the patience to stand in line. They were better off without her.
That summer the original trickle of information about officially sanctioned corruption became a steady flow in publications such as Argumenti i Facti. Now everyone knew the true meaning of the word “Mafia.” But aside from the politically motivated and well-publicized ongoing trial of Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, there was constant public outrage, but almost no official action. When the newly independent magazine Ogonyok suggested Gorbachev and the Politburo themselves were beneficiaries of the Mafia, the magazine suddenly was found to have exceeded its authorized quota of ink and paper.
I read all I could, keeping my own counsel. There was no sense even mentioning the subject to Jana. She was a true daughter of her family. To her, anyone who found the means to acquire wealth — no matter by what method — was to be admired.
That summer I became more familiar with Argumenti i Facti and Ogonyok than with my aircraft manuals. I spent more time alone in the kitchen hunched over my small Riga transistor receiver listening to Radio Liberty than writing engineering reports.
Stories of corruption and rumblings for real democracy were no longer sensational news. Another, much more historic issue gripped the Soviet Union. Under glasnost, Gorbachev had made repeated references to the cruelty and “excesses” of the Stalinist period. But he had carefully restrained from specific detail.
Now that the floodgate was open, however, other, unofficial groups came forward to provide that terrible detail.
One of the most prominent was a private organization simply called Memorial. It began as a small gathering of middle-aged intelligentsia in Moscow, determined to rehabilitate the reputations of good Communists who had been unfairly persecuted under Stalin. But once intellectuals like Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Andrei Sakarov joined with the group, the new, freer news media ran story after story about the repressive decades of Stalinism. For the first time, the official acronym gulag, Central Administration for Corrective Labor Camps — which exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had apparently made infamous in the West — became fully understood among millions of Soviet citizens. In fact, “gulag” quickly became a common noun, not just another meaningless bureaucratic term.
Week after week, the stories ran with numbing authenticity. I learned about the purge trials of the 1930s. Thousands of senior Red Army officers had been unjustly executed. Thousands more had been sent to the gulag. Millions of innocent citizens had joined them in those bleak camps, their only crime an accusation by some faceless informer that they were “enemies of the people.” An unofficial historical colloquium in Moscow estimated that somewhere between twenty and forty million Soviet citizens had died in the four decades that the gulag had existed.
This holocaust now had a name: the Great Terror. This wholesale murder had been ordered and managed by Communists. Millions died in the name of Communism. The proof was undeniable. Memorial demanded that the KGB
