regiments maintained a Category 2 certificate, which was only slightly less rigorous than the highest standard. And we each had to preserve our perfect “one-by-one” vision if we wanted to keep flying. No one with eyeglasses flew a Soviet fighter. But if any of these pilots developed a medical problem or ejected from a crippled aircraft, he was brought to Moscow for a complete reevaluation. And here in the Kingdom of the Bureaucrats, that damned ministry directive was enforced: A pilot had to be recertified to a full Category 1 before he could fly super-maneuverable fighters again.
On previous visits to the hospital, I’d learned from other officers that perfectly qualified MiG-29 and Su-27 pilots were being grounded because they could no longer meet the impossibly high standards of the Category 1 health certificate. The slightest irregularity in heartbeat, reflex, or motor response might mean a man’s flying career would end in a medical discharge.
It certainly was ironic that the generally soft and overweight medical staff of this hospital controlled the destinies of the country’s most vigorously fit pilots and cosmonauts. In the past, I understood, a politically well connected pilot — or certainly an experienced cosmonaut — could bypass these doctors’ authority. A few years before, a playboy cosmonaut had even begun an extended mission to the Mir space station while suffering from gonorrhea. It was a pretty bad bout of clap, however, and the cosmonaut had to cut the mission short and descend in a Soyuz spacecraft for emergency treatment. There had been similar excesses by senior Air Force pilots who had managed to circumvent medical authority. But now the medics reigned supreme, and we were controlled by harsh regulations like the chief of staff’s directive.
In December 1988, two months before my last flight, an event occurred that made clear to me the logic behind this directive, and also presented me with an opportunity to honorably stop serving the system that I had come to hate. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had dramatically announced to the United Nations General Assembly in New York that the Soviet Union would “unilaterally” reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men and 10,000 tanks, in order to ease military tension in the world. Both Pravda and Izvestia had praised Gorbachev for this unprecedented gesture, and had gone on to explain that the reduction of Soviet armed forces graphically demonstrated the peace-loving nature of our government. We were told that the reduction in force of 500,000 men would be shared by all branches of the military, including the Air Force.
Four days after my February 13 flight, when my air division’s medical staff formally requested that I be sent to Moscow for a complete medical evaluation, I presented a formal request of my own to Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli Antonovich, my regimental commander:
To: Commander, 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment
I hereby request a discharge from the ranks of the VVS due to my physical condition, and to the fact that I am not willing to continue service on the ground.
Signed: Zuyev, Alexander M., Captain
Now I was in Moscow, completing three weeks of intensive medical examinations. The Air Force hoped that I could soon be returned to flight status. But I had other plans: to secure a medical discharge from the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. Once out of the service, I planned to emigrate to the West and a life of freedom. I was confident that I would find a way out of the Soviet Union without an exit visa. Most Soviet citizens believed the frontiers were impassable, tightly sealed by KGB border guards. But people had simply built these prison walls in their minds after decades of repression. I had traveled the southern republics, and I knew there were plenty of smugglers’ trails connecting Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Turkey and Iran.
I nodded to a pair of Su-27 pilots on their way to the gym in the hospital’s administrative wing next door. In their blue warm-up suits, they looked like young Olympic athletes. All of us who flew the “fourth generation” aircraft were fine specimens, representing the top one percent of our peer group in terms of physical condition, mental ability, and psychological balance. And Air Force propaganda made the most of our physical perfection and skill. In the crowds at airport terminals and railroad stations, and on the Metro among sophisticated Muscovites, the uniform and wings of an Air Force pilot still drew expressions of respect.
Even those who bitterly opposed the Afghan war recognized our skill and dedication. This was noteworthy because popular support for that war had been almost completely eroded by shocking revelations made possible by glasnost. Independent Soviet journalists now brought the country the truth about the performance of our “internationalist duty” in Afghanistan. The Muslim Mujahedin were now called guerrillas, not dismissed as dushmani, “bandits.” And we now had to accept the grim reality that these guerrillas controlled most of the country. The Soviet Army had been driven back into a few fortified enclaves that the Mujahedin raided and shelled at will.
Finally, one month earlier, the last Soviet troops had been withdrawn, a defeated army.
However, the average citizen on the street did not blame Soviet soldiers and airmen for this disaster. They knew we had been trained and equipped at great expense to defend the Motherland, the Rodina. This trust, of course, grew as much from fear as from sincere patriotism. Fear of invasion ran deep in our history. The Motherland had been overrun and pillaged so many times-by Mongols, Swedes, French, and Germans-that most people believed it was only a matter of time before the tanks of the NATO imperialists or the renegade Socialist Chinese hordes spilled across our borders. Naturally the Party did much to keep this fear alive.
But the people’s respect for the military did not depend on artificial stimulation. They sincerely admired us, which was remarkable, considering that there had always been so much official pokazuka — the all-pervasive and transparent official sham — in everyday Soviet life. Despite glasnost and perestroika, slogans were still plastered across building fagades on banners half as wide as a soccer field, proclaiming the Party’s eternal concern for the welfare of the toiling masses, the profound wisdom of Marxist-Leninist dogma, the steady progress of Soviet agriculture and industry… and all the rest of the empty claptrap. Few people out in those food lines believed that shit anymore.
Fundamental doubts about the Soviet system were even splitting the ranks of the military, basically along the lines of the generations. I shared my ten-bed dormitory here at the hospital with four other pilots, two of them young officers like myself, and the two others elderly retired veterans who had seen combat in the Great Patriotic War and had served out their careers in the preglasnost totalitarian decades. Every time a new issue of Argumenti i Facti or Ogonyok was published, the young pilots found some hot issue to debate late into the night with the veterans. Usually they argued the validity of the shocking revelations of past repression, Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, the gulags of the postwar years, or the cruel treatment of dissidents in the State psychiatric hospitals.
The old veterans simply could not admit that they had spent their lives serving a corrupt and evil system. The stories in the new publications, they said with bitter scorn, were just lies spread by Jews and imperialist agents. But the younger pilots, who, like me, slipped away from the hospital to walk the streets of Moscow, recognized the truth. And they also recognized the swelling impatience and frustrated anger that were gripping their fellow citizens.
No matter how persuasive the evidence in the published exposes of mass deportations and the genocidal deaths of millions-sealed in boxcars during the cruel etape and worked to death on starvation diets in the countless gulag camps-the elderly veterans could never admit they had protected a system as cruel as the Nazi regime against which they had fought so bravely. My younger colleagues dismissed these bitter retired officers as “skiers,” an allusion to their shuffling gait. But I knew that there was a more robust generation of senior officers still on active duty who were every bit as adamant in their defense of the rotten system. It was those marshals and generals who held my fate in their hands.
Coming toward me down the corridor, I spotted the ambling figure of a tall, young pilot. Only one fellow I knew had those long, heavy legs, stooped shoulders, and huge feet: Igor “Karpich” Karpov, whom I had first met as a cadet at the Armavir Academy eleven years before.
“Karpuha,” I called, using our old nickname for him, “since when do they admit the slackers of the PVO to this fine Air Force institution?”
He turned to face me. It was Karpich, all right. Nobody else had that eagle’s beak of a nose.
“Shurka,” he said, grabbing my hand and smiling. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be Air Force chief of staff by now.”
We grinned at each other. Karpich hadn’t changed much in those years. He looked like the same rumpled, good-natured braggart I’d always known. The last I’d seen him was two years before on a visit to his MiG-23 PVO regiment near Smolensk, west of Moscow.
“So,” I asked, “what’s up with you?”
Karpich moaned and flashed me his old cocky smile, then glanced quickly up and down the corridor. “Never
