name.
“I am Alexander Mikhailovich Zuyev,” I solemnly recited. “I want to live in the United States of America as a free man. I am asking for political asylum.”
The ambassador smiled and shook my hand again. “Alexander Zuyev, you have been granted political asylum in the United States. Welcome to America.”
I stood on the soft carpet of my living room, gazing at the familiar television image of the red brick Kremlin walls. It was night in Moscow but a bright noon on this Christmas Day in Virginia. My little brother, Misha, now a tall, husky boy of ten, stared silently at the television screen.
The night before, Misha had told me what his life had been like in Samara after my escape. The teachers at his school had publicly castigated the “brother of the traitor.” They encouraged older boys to beat him daily. He endured all that. Every night he came home from school and washed away the caked blood from his face before my mother saw him. He was determined to accept this suffering stoically. The KGB was pressuring my mother ruthlessly, and Misha did not want to add to her misery.
As I had hoped, the KGB pressure on my family had been more of an annoyance than an actual menace. They had been questioned repeatedly, but not harmed in any way. Glasnost had protected them. And the rapidly changing political conditions in the Soviet Union had permitted them to request official authorization to emigrate without fear of retribution. Their first request for tourist visas to the West had been denied, as I assumed it would be. But then, in 1991, they finally managed to obtain refugee status, and the Soviet government reluctantly granted them exit visas. After several false starts, Mother, Valentin, and Misha had arrived at Kennedy Airport only ten days earlier, the best Christmas present I could imagine.
My mother was cooking in the kitchen. I heard the electronic chime as she boldly investigated the mysteries of the microwave oven.
The red hammer-and-sickle banner of the Soviet Union rippled in the floodlit wind above the Kremlin. The CNN announcer proclaimed the flag of the “former Soviet Union” was about to be lowered for the first time in seventy-four years. It would never rise again. That afternoon in Moscow, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev had delivered his resignation speech as the last President of the Soviet Union. He had then signed a decree transferring control of the former Soviet military to the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.
Waiting to watch the Soviet flag drop, I thought of the eventful thirty months that had passed since I had climbed into the ambassador’s sedan beside that Turkish wheat field.
Before 1989 had ended, the Berlin Wall had crumbled. Communism began to die all across Eastern Europe. One by one the nations enslaved by the Soviet Empire threw out their Communist bosses and embraced democracy. And, after ten years of bloody struggle, all Soviet forces finally withdrew from Afghanistan.
In the Soviet Union itself, however, Communism would take longer to die.
But as I worked with my new American military colleagues, I was confident that the criminal clique that controlled my former country would one day be defeated. Meanwhile, I helped the American Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force prepare to defeat Soviet-trained Iraqi pilots flying Soviet-supplied fighters in the Persian Gulf War. One of the F-15C units I worked with destroyed five MiG-29s and over eleven MiG-23s and Sukhoi attack aircraft during Operation Desert Storm. Before I began assisting in the intense training of these American pilots, they had believed many of the comforting myths about obsolete Soviet equipment and tactics. But I had been able to convince them that the MiG-29 Fulcrum, armed with modern missiles and flown by a skilled pilot, represented a dangerous threat. They took my words to heart.
During the five historic days of the failed coup d’etat in Moscow that August, I was pleased to learn that other military men had apparently taken my words to heart as well. I was able to broadcast a message on Radio Liberty, appealing directly to the Soviet officers and soldiers in the BMPs and armored cars on the streets of Moscow. I reminded them of the Tbilisi massacre and asked them to consider to whom they owed true loyalty, the Party bosses or the people. Perhaps these words made some difference. In any event, Soviet soldiers refused to obey orders to fire on civilians, or to storm the Russian Parliament to arrest Boris Yeltsin.
And I was also able to influence my former colleagues in another unexpected way. The tape-recorded message I had left behind in my apartment at Tskhakaya had never been seized by the KGB. Instead, pilots from my regiment had found the tape before the Osobists. My friends had apparently passed the tape unofficially among their colleagues. One officer that I knew for certain had heard my message was Lieutenant General of Aviation Yevgeni Ivanovich Shaposhnikov, the deputy chief of staff of the Air Force, who led the official investigation into the hijacking. Shaposhnikov was a real reformer, a patriotic professional officer who knew where his true loyalties lay. After the failed coup, when Yazov and his Communist proteges in the Defense Ministry were disgraced, General Shaposhnikov became the new Defense Minister.
“Sasha,” my brother, Misha, said, tugging my sleeve. “Look.” The red hammer-and-sickle banner was sliding down the flagpole above the Kremlin ramparts. Mother came from the kitchen. Valentin stood up beside the Christmas tree. We watched in silence. Then the blue, red, and white banner of the Russian Republic rose in the Moscow wind.
“Is it really over?” Mother asked. “Has it ended?'
“Yes,” I answered, stretching my arms around my family. “It has finally ended.” I stared at the ancient flag of Russia. Where would all this really end? I spoke again. “It is over. But there is still so far to go.”
Glossary
Afghansti: A Soviet military veteran of the Afghanistan war.
afterburner: A thrust augmentation system for jet engines, which sprays fuel to be ignited in the exhaust pipe.
air brake: A movable flap to induce drag and decelerate an aircraft.
AK-47: Avtomat-Kalashnikova: A Soviet 7.62 mm assault rifle designed by Kalashnikov.
Akhtubinsk: One of the key Soviet air-test centers, located in the southern Russian Republic.
AKM: A modernized version of the AK-47 assault rifle.
Alamo missile: The Soviet R-27 radar-controlled Air-to-Air missile.
An-12: A four-engine Antonov military transport, similar to the U.S. C-130.
An-2 (
angle of attack (AOA): The angular distance of an aircraft’s lifting surfaces (wings, etc.) above the horizontal.
apparat: Soviet government bureaucracy. apparatohik: Soviet government bureaucrat.
Archer missile: The Soviet R-73 infrared-homing Air-to-air missile.
avos’ka: A string or plastic shopping bag; the ubiquitous symbol of the failed Soviet economy.
AWACS: U.S. Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, which directs modern air battles.
babushka: Russian, grandmother.
bantia: Russian, criminal gang.
Black Raven: The black van used by Stalin’s secret police to transport people under arrest.
blat: Russian, “clout” or influence.
BMP: A Soviet-designed, tracked armored personnel carrier.
CAP: U.S. military acronym, Combat Air Patrol.
chaff: Radar-blocking system employing clouds of thin aluminum strips, ejected in packets from a military aircraft. Crocodile (MiG-23): Soviet pilots’ slang for the MiG-23 fighter.
dacha: Russian, “cottage,” size depends on status.
DShK: A Soviet-designed 12.7mm machine gun, often used in air defense.
