Gorbachev’s message was clear. Despite glasnost, despite perestroika, anyone questioning the authority of Moscow would be crushed. And the Soviet military was the chosen instrument of repression.
Around me in the dim room, my fellow pilots were glum and silent. I knew better than to speak to them here.
Back at my apartment building, I again encountered Valery, who had just returned from Tbilisi. We went to my kitchen to talk. He immediately described the massacre that his father and others had witnessed that terrible night in central Tbilisi.
After the patriarch’s warning, other speakers had taken their bullhorns and urged the crowd to remain calm. “It was late,” Valery said, his voice thick with anger. “Many of the women were already walking home, carrying their small children. Then it began.”
The streetlights suddenly were cut and the city center went completely dark, Valery related. People heard the throaty rumble of BRT armored cars and the snarl of tracked BMP armored personnel carriers. These armored vehicles converged on the demonstrators from several directions. Rank after rank of paratroopers and MVD troops charged the crowds, which had already been dangerously compressed by the advancing armor.
“They had no place to run,” Valery added. “The troops pushed them up against the stairs of the Council of Ministers. It was like driving livestock to a slaughter.” The flesh on his left chin was pulsing uncontrollably, a tic I had first noticed two years before when Valery had described some of his worst experiences in Afghanistan.
“The troops separated about three hundred people, Sasha,” Valery continued, his voice flat and slow, as if he were tiredly recounting yet another combat operation. “They pushed them directly toward the armed squads at the top of the stairs. Don’t you see? They were trying to simulate an attack on those guards. It was a provocation planned to trigger the massacre.”
He stopped speaking a moment and looked away. Sinews and ropy veins throbbed on his rigid neck. Valery was gripped by a turmoil I had never seen before. “Luckily the fellows from one of the rugby teams managed to break the paratroopers’ cordon,” he added. “And a hundred people escaped the trap. But the rest of them were chased down in the shrubbery to the right of the building. That’s where they were slaughtered with the trench shovels and gas.”
“It was poison gas?” I asked, because Valery had experience with these chemical weapons.
“A combination, Sasha,” he explained. “One gas we call cheryomukha because it smells like cherries. There’s about four variants of different strengths. The troops in the square used them all, both in gas grenades and with the MVD’s cloud sprayer. The other gas is called phenyl chloride,” Valery continued. “In open spaces, it’s not lethal. But everyone knows it’s deadly if used in a restricted area. The women and children on the ground didn’t have a chance. If the gas didn’t get them, those bastards with their trenching tools did.”
“Who did this, Valery? What troops?” I was prepared to believe that OMON thugs from the Interior Ministry were capable of such slaughter. But it did not seem possible that regular Soviet soldiers had taken part in the massacre.
“There were OMON troops from Perm, Voronezh, and Tbilisi,” Valery said, a veteran soldier reciting tactical details from memory. “But at least half the troops were from the Army, Sasha.” He looked at me sadly. “From our Army.”
I shook my head, as much in sad recognition as disbelief.
“This was not a riot, Sasha,” Valery said, staring into his cup of cold tea. “It was a coordinated combat operation involving both Defense and Interior Ministry forces. Moscow must have approved it.”
At our regimental briefing the next morning, Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich announced that the base had been placed on a high security alert status. Each squadron would organize nine-man foot patrols to guard base buildings, the parking aprons, and the main gate. The regular guards on the aprons would be doubled. Because we were short of soldiers, they would be placed on indefinite four-hour-on, four-hour-off duty and sleep rosters.
We all knew that Georgians in the city of Tskhakaya were simmering with anger and anti-Russian hatred, and that there had been mass protest strikes and spontaneous demonstrations all across Georgia. But now Antonovich explained how dangerous the situation had become. Soviet officers in the bazaar had been caught by mobs and severely beaten. Until further notice, he said, our enlisted soldiers would be restricted to the base.
“And if any of you officers go into town,” he said, “I suggest you wear civilian clothes, not uniforms.”
The next afternoon Antonovich and other senior officers returned from their regular monthly commanders’ conference at Vaziani. A lieutenant colonel zampolit from the 7th Air Army flew back with them to brief us on the situation. Like Antonovich, he stressed that the situation was extremely volatile. “The Army has to be prepared to maintain law and order,” he bellowed, his voice echoing in our briefing room. “We must stand ready to stop the extremists before they go any further.”
After his stirring patriotic address, Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Dovbnya, our own zampolit, rose to assure us that the “legal actions” of the security forces in Tbilisi had been made necessary by the violent demonstrators. And these same adventurist elements, he added, could rise up here in Tskhakaya. We were to check our personal weapons and conduct careful inventories of the arms and munitions assigned to us, to be certain no guns or ammunition was stolen by extremists.
The message of the two zampolits was just as clear as Gorbachev’s televised warning two nights before. If necessary, the Army would crush all those who threatened Moscow’s authority in any way.
That evening I again sat alone in my kitchen, hunched over my transistor, listening to Radio Liberty. To emphasize Gorbachev’s message to the people, I heard, the Army and MVD had just staged military “maneuvers” in the capitals of the three Baltic Republics, terrifying citizens still in shock at the news of the Tbilisi massacre. Tanks and armored vehicles rumbled through the Baltic cities, a stark warning that, like the Georgians, anyone defying Moscow risked death.
Sitting there in the shadowy kitchen, I could picture other Soviet tanks crushing demonstrators, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, in the streets of Azerbaijan the year before when reportedly scores had died. But they were only Muslims like my friend Boris Bagomedov. Now Soviet European troops had been ordered to kill their own people. And they had obeyed those orders.
The local Party hack in Tbilisi had been purged as a scapegoat, only to be replaced by the head of the KGB. How long would it be before the pilots of the 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment were ordered to bomb and strafe “adventurists” in the streets of nearby cities?
In his national address Gorbachev had warned that nationalist demonstrators in Georgia had delivered a “stab in the back for perestroika.” What shit. They had been peacefully exercising their rights as Soviet citizens when their Army attacked them with poison gas and sharpened shovels. And now we had been ordered to prepare for similar action to “defend” Soviet law and order.
I found myself standing, twanging with outrage. “I’ll show you bastards perestroika,” I shouted in the empty room.
Suddenly everything was clear. All the ass-licking zampolits, the Osobists, the military bosses in Moscow, and the Mafia bosses in cities like Samara — who used illegal psychiatric “treatment” to destroy honest citizens — all this privileged, corrupt gang ultimately depended on the Soviet military for support. As long as the Army blindly obeyed the Party, my country would never be free of the criminal clique, the Mafia, that controlled our lives.
Standing on the hot pavement of Lenin Square in Armavir so many years before, I had sworn an oath to defend the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, to do my duty with courage and discipline, even in the face of death. Now, in this tiny spartan kitchen, I saw where my true duty lay. My life was no longer balanced on a tochka opori, a fulcrum. The balance had tipped. I had made a decision.
I would not leave the Soviet Union like a fleeing criminal on some smugglers’ trail through the mountains. I did not want my friends in the regiment scrambled from duty alert to chase me some night hanging from a balloon or slung beneath an ultra-light aircraft. But I would fly to freedom. As soon as I could prepare and execute a practical plan, I would seize one of my regiment’s MiG-29s, take off, and loop back on a cannon run to destroy as many of the parked aircraft as possible without killing any of my colleagues. This would be an act of vengeance and a warning; vengeance not just for the victims of the Tbilisi massacre, but for all the other faceless millions crushed in the name of Soviet Communism. And the warning would be read clearly by the criminals who ruled my country: If a skilled and dedicated young professional officer like me had been driven to such desperate action, whom could they trust in the future?
Then, if neither PVO missiles nor fighters from other regiments shot me down, I planned to fly the aircraft to the nearest NATO base in Turkey.
