had almost one thousand rubles. That certainly was not enough to bribe smugglers to guide me over the mountains into Turkey or Iran, but I discovered a way to invest my money profitably.
My Georgian friend Malhaz had asked me to bring back color posters of girls, preferably blond Western girls in skimpy bikinis or lingerie. These tantalizing items had just appeared in Moscow, but were unknown in the southern republics. Georgian men were crazy about girls, especially blondes. Although patients were under orders not to leave the hospital grounds, many of us ignored the restrictions. One afternoon I climbed the low wall and took the elektrichka commuter train into Yaroslavski Station. I found exactly the posters I needed in a new private stationer’s store in a narrow street off the Arbat. The shopkeeper was a young Estonian in stonewashed jeans with matching jacket. At first he wanted five rubles apiece. But I pointed out that the color separation was blurred on several, and offered to buy a hundred on the spot for two rubles apiece. We settled for two rubles fifty kopecks.
I got through on the phone to Malhaz the next night and described the posters. “Can you see their tits?” A good businessman, he was never one to mince his language.
“Yes, most of them.”
“Blondes?”
“Redheads and blondes, four different girls.”
“I’ll pay you twenty-five rubles each. Buy as many as you can.”
The next day I sneaked over the wall through Sokolniki Park and went into the Arbat again to buy another hundred. By investing five hundred rubles, I stood to gain five thousand.
I realized that money for my trip would not be an insurmountable problem. But I began to have second thoughts about using smugglers’ trails into Iran or Turkey. Smugglers were close-knit tribesmen who lived desperate, often bloody lives. You paid them in cash, and once paid, there was no longer a reason to keep you alive.
Moscow had excellent libraries and bookstores, so I used the coming days for research. A tourist visa to Hungary or Czechoslovakia was now out of the question, so I would have to find the means to travel alone over the southern mountains frontier of the USSR. What I discovered was encouraging. Since I was an experienced pilot, it made more sense to fly. From aviation club journals and hobby flying magazines, I learned that the Baltic Republics were now manufacturing hot-air balloons. I could order a small balloon with a propane burner and plans for a passenger basket for less than seven thousand rubles. And hang gliders were now available to authorized sports clubs. It would be relatively simple to form a one-man club in distant Georgia and obtain a suitable hang glider.
One hobbyist magazine showed how you could modify the hang glider with a simple aluminum-tube frame and mount a propeller driven by a motorbike engine, transforming it into an ultra-light airplane with a range of over seventy miles. The article stressed that no one should fly these amateur aircraft without first obtaining the necessary permits. But I did not plan to seek permission for my last flight through Soviet airspace. In any event, a hang glider of thin aluminum tubing and a cloth airfoil would be invisible to radar, a real advantage in the dense PVO air-defense sector on the southern frontier.
But I knew none of these plans would bear fruit if I was already under surveillance from the KGB. It was almost impossible to tell whether my conflict with Prozukhin and my feigned illness had provoked the Osobii Otdel counterintelligence officers at Tskhakaya to begin an official investigation. If they had, I would be arrested when I bought a balloon or a hang glider and began to modify it.
I spent several afternoons in central Moscow, playing the foreign agent, ducking in and out of stores and steamy cafeterias, looking for the proverbial thick-necked comrade in the leather jacket. I ate my fill of stale sweet rolls and swilled dozens of cups of tea, watching over my shoulder. I did not seem to be under surveillance.
But to be certain, I decided to go right to the lion’s den, or at least to socialize with some KGB friends. I had met a fellow named Yuri through my KGB friends in Georgia, where Yuri was completing a field-training course. Now he worked at the “new” KGB headquarters near the Outer Ring Highway. He was a specialist in secure satellite communications systems, and, like many in his service, came from a KGB family. His father was a retired colonel who had also served in secret communications, in overseas missions.
I had visited Yuri’s family in their comfortable three-bedroom apartment off Rublovskoje Chaussee in the affluent Kuncevo district on other visits to Moscow. I telephoned Yuri’s family to announce I was in Moscow, and, as I knew they would, Yuri’s father insisted I come for dinner. Next I filled a two-liter bottle from my large canister of Armenian cognac and rode the Metro across the river to visit them. Yuri’s mother was a former physics teacher, a gaunt, very cultured person who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke. She and her husband were Communist true believers who had benefited from the system. Their apartment was furnished with handsome possessions Yuri’s father had amassed overseas. And twice a week a medical van arrived to take Yuri’s mother to the nearby Kuncevo Clinic, which was reserved for Politburo and high-ranking KGB patients.
He was overjoyed to see me. When Yuri came home that evening, the young officer was already a little drunk. That was good. I planned to get him truly drunk this evening. I helped in the kitchen, preparing a nice collection of zakouski, small plates of herring, pickles, Hungarian sausage, and aubergine salad.
Yuri’s mother sat stiffly at the kitchen table, speaking softly as she directed the three of us. It was an informal, relaxed situation, and I made sure to keep Yuri’s tumbler well filled with cognac as we sampled the food and exchanged toasts. This was a crucial moment. If I were under KGB surveillance, my phone call to their apartment would have alarmed the investigators. Yuri’s position was one of the most sensitive in State Security.
Yuri and his family seemed sincerely glad to see me. I saw absolutely nothing unusual in their behavior toward me. We were still eating zakouski when “Sergei,” one of Yuri’s colleagues, arrived to join us for dinner. I had skied with him at Terskol and knew he was in training for a clandestine overseas assignment. He would be another coal miner’s canary.
We moved to the dining table, and I kept the cognac flowing.
Naturally the conversation turned to the unprecedented rash of street demonstrations in Moscow. In the month I had been in Moscow, unauthorized demonstrators had assembled in the thousands, not only in Pushkin Square, the traditional site for dissident demonstrations, but also at Moscow University, in the red brick pedestrian streets of the Arbat, and on the windy, cobbled expanse of Red Square itself.
Many of these demonstrators demanded independence, or at least self-government for their republics. The Baltic independence movements were the best organized, and demonstrators brazenly unfurled illegal Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian flags. Other crowds were more surly, less stable. Armenians and Azerbaijanis sometimes fought each other with fists and the wooden staffs of placards. Although the city Militia and newly formed OMON counterdemonstration troops from the Interior Ministry had intervened brutally on several occasions, the sheer scale of the demonstrations overpowered the resources of the forces assigned to oppress them.
And when the paramilitary troops had intervened, not only Western news organizations recorded the brutality, but camera crews from Vremya and a new State television investigative program, Vzglyad, “Glance,” also recorded the awful images of the OMON thugs beating peaceful men and women with rubber truncheons.
But the pro-independence demonstrations were not the only tangible image of popular unrest broadcast over State television. Under prodding from reformers like Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow Party chief whom Gorbachev had deposed, the hardliners in the Politburo had reluctantly agreed to the first free national elections in the history of the Soviet Union. On Sunday, March 26, 1989, hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens would assemble for the golosovat, the “vote” that was the most absorbing topic of conversation all across the country. They would elect the new Congress of People’s Deputies, an actual parliament that would be theoretically empowered to pass laws independent of the Communist Party. The Congress certainly fell far short of what I understood to be democracy in the West, but it was a major departure from the Party’s absolute control of Soviet life.
Now thousands of otherwise docile citizens assembled under placards and banners to hear political candidates openly defy government dogma, their voices rasping through electric bullhorns, and the people chanting back slogans in return.
I had seen the sullen faces of uniformed Militia and plainclothes KGB officers assigned to monitor these demonstrations. Clearly they would have loved orders sending them into the crowd with their truncheons swinging. But the rusty door of glasnost had creaked even further open. The angry men from the “Organs” had to stand there impotently and watch. And it wasn’t just political chanting that assailed them. The Memorial organization actually organized moving demonstrations in Dzerzhinski Square, opposite the brown sandstone facade of KGB
