I sat down again and rubbed my hand repeatedly through my hair, an unconscious mannerism I’d had since childhood, whenever concentrating on a difficult problem. Despite the hazard and audacity of my planned escape, I felt calmer than I had in months.
CHAPTER 13
Counterattack
April 14 — May 20, 1989
In mid-April I flew to Samara for one last visit at home. Once I actually hijacked a MiG-29, the chances were slim that I’d ever see my family again. I contacted my mother and had her obtain a certificate for emergency treatment. When her telegram arrived in Tskhakaya, Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich immediately granted me five days’ compassionate leave.
This was another indication that Colonel Ivanov in Moscow had not found an ally in the military district in Tbilisi or the 283rd Aviation Division in Tskhakaya to initiate Osobist surveillance on me. But I couldn’t count on my good luck holding much longer.
Those few days in Samara passed too quickly. Mother was still weak, but recovering steadily. Through discreet inquiries, she had discovered that the staff at the psychiatric clinic had spared her from the worst brutality that had been originally ordered for her. If the clinic doctors had actually carried out their instructions and injected her with the full treatment of multiple antipsychotic drugs, she would have suffered irreversible brain damage, the fate of so many countless thousands of the “mentally ill” who had run afoul of corrupt apparatchiks and been committed to Soviet psychiatric hospitals.
Now she was in numb limbo, her mind still clouded by the drugs. I certainly did not intend to bring my family into my plan.
They would be subjected to a KGB investigation, whatever the outcome of my escape attempt. So the less they knew, the better. But I did give them sixteen hundred rubles, as much as I could spare from the war chest I had built from the sale of the posters to Malhaz.
Whatever happened, my family were in for a rough time in the months ahead. But one advantage of glasnost was that the KGB would not be able to simply swoop down and haul them off to some camp in the gulag. With a few exceptions, those camps were now empty, ghost settlements inhabited only by the spirits of the millions of innocent victims who had starved and frozen in the shoddy barracks and concrete punishment cells. The State no longer took vengeance on the families of traitors. And I was confident that the American government would help protect my family. With the failure of perestroika, Gorbachev found himself increasingly dependent on the West, especially the Americans. That dependence would be the insurance policy for my family.
But that was all in the future. Now I just wanted to say goodbye. Mother and I walked one afternoon in a neighborhood park. The spring foliage was already well advanced, and the streets and sidewalks had been swept clean of winter sand and cinders.
“I will be leaving the military soon,” I told her.
She nodded. I didn’t have to explain my reasons. Mother now believed that the system I had so proudly served had been taken over by “Dark Forces” that she had never suspected existed in our Socialist Motherland.
“I’ll build a new life… somewhere,” I added.
Her shoulders were stooped and her head still moved slowly. But I saw recognition in her eyes. “That’s for the best, Sasha,” was all she said.
We passed the large bronze statue of Lenin, the Young Revolutionary, his quaint tailcoat eternally flapping in the riverside breeze of Samara. The handsome government buildings and solid apartments of the affluent microrayon seemed monuments to Socialist wisdom and energy. But I knew they were hollow shells.
Mother, however, smiled at the statue in the well-groomed park. “Samara,” she said, “is so lovely in the spring.”
We sat on a bench in the sunshine. Across the street, a gray line of women, many still wearing drab quilted winter coats, appeared around the corner of the red brick building. There was a State dairy store on the side street, and this long line had spilled over to the park square. We watched them a moment, noting their empty plastic mesh and net avos’ka shopping bags.
“Sasha, why do we live so badly?” Mother asked. “What has happened to our country? Why this disaster?”
“It’s taken a long time for us to reach this point, Mother,” I told her. “Decades, really. And for all those decades our people have been forced to live in fear, enslaved, not just their bodies, as when you were young, but their minds as well. And for all those years the Communists have used us in their bloody experiment. But that experiment has failed. And now people are no longer afraid. Now we are brave enough to look around with our eyes open and talk about what we really see.”
A gaudy scarlet propaganda poster, showing a giant Lenin beaming at the production line of the Buran space shuttle, occupied half the building facade above the drab line of women. They did not seem impressed. To me, that pitiful scene was the essence of the Soviet Union in its eighth decade. The Communists had squandered so many countless billions on the pokazuka of our glorious space program and our massive military establishment. But old babushkas still had to stand on their swollen feet, shuffling for hours to buy a bottle of milk. I glanced around the handsome square, wondering where the bosses’ secret storerooms were located. Lenin’s paternal gaze seemed to follow mine.
Later that afternoon when Misha returned from school, I sat in the kitchen with him as he laid out his schoolwork, just as I had done so many years before. Although only eight, he was proud of his calligraphy and arithmetic papers. Then he presented his most challenging assignment.
“These are poems to memorize, Sasha,” he said, staring seriously at the pages of his textbook. “They’re twenty-four lines long and we have to have them perfect.”
I hadn’t been paying close attention, but now I focused on the poems and felt a sudden flush of anger.
“It’s all about Dedushka,” Misha continued, “about Vladimir Ulyich Lenin when he was a young man in prison.”
I found myself scowling. Not that old lie. The myth we taught our children was that the brave young Lenin, imprisoned by the Czar’s secret police, had taken his milk ration but refused to drink it, using the precious fluid instead as invisible ink to write revolutionary tracts that galvanized the masses. What shit. Didn’t the idiots who still pushed such propaganda realize that people would look fondly to those evil days when there was still milk available, even for prisoners?
I picked up Misha’s book. The chapter of poems began with the bold red title “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live.”
I slammed the textbook shut. “Misha,” I said loudly to the startled boy, “do not learn this crap. Remember this always. Lenin was a liar.”
He blinked with confusion. My mother looked up from the sink where she was peeling vegetables. “Sasha,” she admonished me, “what are you telling the boy? That is his class assignment. Do you want him to fail in school?”
I clenched my teeth. The afternoon in the park she had asked me to explain the disaster that had overcome our country. Yet here, in her kitchen, her younger son was staring at the ultimate source of that disaster. How could I explain to her that our nation, the Rodina, had not simply been stolen by renegades who had abandoned Lenin’s golden dream of a Socialist Utopia. Leninism had not been abandoned by those corrupt shadowy men. Lenin was the source of all their evil.
When I returned to the Ruslan Air Base, I was ordered to see Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich. The “report” on my conduct that Colonel Ivanov had threatened to send had passed through the district and division, and now lay on the desk of my regimental commander.
Antonovich stared glumly up from the folder on his blotter. When he spoke, his voice was cold, devoid of any friendship. “I should have grounded you last autumn.” He tossed the report across the desk, and I had to reach
