open the archives, and offered a victim-tracing service. The group’s small Moscow office was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds and hundreds of letters from relatives of innocent people who had disappeared, victims of the “Dark Forces” my mother had mentioned.
One issue of Ogonyok offered a detailed analysis of the holocaust in the Ukraine in which at least seven million peasants died of starvation. Stalin had sealed the borders of that republic to keep food out while his NKVD troops confiscated every grain of wheat, every apple, every egg. It was no wonder the Ukrainians hated us. Chernobyl had only been the latest disaster of the Soviet system.
I simply could not keep silent about this. But when I tried to discuss the Great Terror and its impact on the Soviet military during the regimental Party meeting, our chief zampolit, Lieutenant Colonel Dovbnya, muttered that this was inappropriate and “irrelevant.” Ogonyok, however, had already presented a quite relevant, two-part series proving that the disastrous initial military reverses during the first year of the Great Patriotic War had been a direct result of Stalin having decimated the professional officer corps in the late 1930s. When the zampolit refused to allow a legitimate discussion of this important issue, I simply posted the Ogonyok article on the “Local News” section of our regimental dayroom bulletin board.
What made the clipping especially provocative was the reproduction of the painting Requiem, by Alexander Lozenko, which ran the full width of the page. The painting showed a long line of boxcars curving across the bleak steppes, shrouded beneath a plume of coal smoke from the distant locomotive. Superimposed on the battered slats of the windowless railcars were the ghostly faces of the victims: intellectuals, workers, women, boys and girls, soldiers just like us.
In all our years of school and training, we had never been told. Now we had to face the truth. Our nation was built on a dictatorship much crueler than the Nazis we had defeated in that heroic war. We had been taught that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews, Gypsies, and other “subhumans' — including Soviet war prisoners — in extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. But now we learned that our own Organs of State Security had killed at least three times as many citizens of the Soviet Union, all of them just as innocent as the victims of the fascist terror.
The Nazis had used their perverted scientific techniques for mass murder, herding the victims into gas chambers.
The Soviet methods had been cruder, but equally effective: Beginning in the 1930s, NKVD execution squads had simply loaded suspected “enemies of the people” into their Black Raven vans, driven them to the forests outside the cities, and shot them through the head. Those who were not immediately murdered were automatically convicted in Peoples’ Courts, and sentenced to hard labor in the frozen Siberian taiga or the “death mines” like Kolyma.
Only the strongest of these prisoners survived. If you worked people twelve hours a day cutting timber in forty degrees of frost and only fed them a “harsh regime” food ration calculated to result in starvation, the outcome was inevitable: death. Reading the carefully documented reports from the Memorial organization, I finally understood the plight of the helpless zeks, the political prisoners of whom Alexander Solzhenitsyn had written so eloquently in his searing novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In his monumental Gulag Archipelago, which was now being privately circulated in photocopy, Solzhenitsyn dramatized the institutional barbarity of this system. One third of the population had been sent to the camps to work as slaves. Another third of the Soviet people closed their eyes to this cruel reality and lived reasonably well on the production of the gulag economy. The top stratum lived in luxury. Solzhenitsyn had dared to expose all this. He had been the conscience of our entire nation. And when the Party finally deported him, men like Andrei Sakarov stepped forward to fill the void. Now we all knew the dirty secrets of the past. And the Dark Forces who had tormented my mother with their illegal treatment could not deport an entire nation. But they were not yet ready to relinquish power.
The foreign fascists had been vanquished. Unfortunately the ones who had survived were not alien to our Motherland.
One hot bright morning in late July, I was in the squadron locker room pulling on my G-suit. We had a long day of flying scheduled. But I could hardly remember the details of the first training sortie, which Colonel Antonovich had just briefed us on. My mind was focused instead on the dark image of those thousands of unmarked mass graves, stretching like an invisible crescent scar all the way from the pine forests of the Polish frontier to the ancient larch groves on the granite bluffs above the Pacific. That terrible image was not just remote history. Now I saw the steel door of the psychiatric clinic in Samara, I felt the rusty grate in my hands, and I smelled the dank despair of the prisoners who had been held there for “treatment.” Then I saw the sunlit pool terrace of the Pearl Hotel in Sochi. The profiteers sat around the outdoor bar, smearing oil on their hairy chests, leering at the pretty young girls who came forward to sell themselves. Those criminals always reminded me of half-boiled crayfish, cold, predatory.
Suddenly it came to me, as I bent to zip up the legs of my flight suit. I could no longer defend the fascist system that ruled my country. Somehow I would leave the Air Force. I no longer wanted the exciting career of a test pilot. I no longer wanted any of this. I no longer wanted to be married to Jana, a true daughter of the system.
I slammed my locker shut. For the first time in months, the way ahead looked clear.
When Jana returned from Kiev after her summer examinations, I decided to confront her.
“I want a divorce,” I told her, pulling back the shade to flood the room with morning sunshine.
I had to catch the bus to the base in five minutes, and, as always, it had taken a long time to wake her up. As she sat on the edge of our makeshift bed, wincing at the early morning sun, I wasn’t sure she had understood my words.
“Be ready this afternoon at three,” I told her. “We are going to the ZAGS to file the papers.”
Now Jana had definitely understood. She gripped the sleeve of my flight suit. “No, Sasha… no. We can find a way…”
Angrily I pulled back. Jana was completely unrealistic. The night before, I had tried to discuss our country’s bloody history and the criminal class that now controlled every aspect of our lives. But she had moped and pouted, finally haranguing me for not having enough money to buy a proper television set or a car. We would find no “way” to reconcile our differences. “Be ready at three” was all I said in reply.
It took two more days to convince her. But on a rainy Thursday afternoon we went to an office in the large ZAGS building in central Tskhakaya to file our first divorce petition. By Soviet law, we had to attend regular counseling sessions for a month, attempting a reconciliation. Only then would our formal divorce petition be forwarded to the courts.
I tried to spend as much time as possible at the base during this period, and actually volunteered as a replacement duty-alert officer so that I wouldn’t have to sleep at my apartment. All I wanted was for this marriage to end.
But, despite her childlike demeanor, Jana had inherited much of her mother’s native cleverness. Although she signed the preliminary divorce papers, Jana was bound to resist the process in any way she could. Luckily her parents were already in Syria, which deprived her of powerful allies. I hoped there would be enough time to complete the divorce before her family tried to intervene. But this was a gamble.
When we completed our first divorce papers, I knew the news would reach Colonel Baglai in a matter of days. And he would be sure to retaliate. It really did not matter, however. I no longer planned ahead for an Air Force career.
But Jana actually struck the first blow herself. She had confided in the wife of Colonel Prozukhin, the division zampolit who had tried to stage the alcohol-free wedding. His wife, Nadezhda, another chunky matron with even tighter ringlet curls than Jana’s mother, was the head of the division officers’ wives’ committee. This was a powerful position, which gave her as much authority over family matters as her zampolit husband had over our “political maturity.” In addition, Nadezhda was a close friend of Jana’s mother.
One evening when I returned from the base I found Jana serving tea to Colonel Prozukhin and his wife. Obviously they had hatched a plot, because for the first time in weeks the bed was properly made, the apartment was neat, and the kitchen was actually clean. From all appearances, Jana seemed the perfect young wife.
Colonel Prozukhin came directly to the point. “Are you serious about this divorce, Zuyev?” He tried to sound like a real officer, a man used to confronting troops and making hard decisions. But his voice broke into a squeak.
Prozukhin’s wife glared when she saw me smile.
