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 trust a zampolit with a combat airplane.” He laughed out loud now. “I got shot down by my deputy regimental commander for political administration.”
“You what?” This seemed to be the lead-in to a standard pilot’s joke, but Karpich was serious.
“We were out on the missile poligon, firing R-23s at LA-17 target drones,” he said quietly. “GCI was vectoring a pair of aircraft on the target because the drone was almost out of fuel.”
The LA-17 drone was a fast, very maneuverable target drone powered by a solid-fuel rocket engine. Firing R-23 radar-guided missiles at these drones was realistic combat training. You had to fly well and act with quick decisiveness. Unfortunately for Karpich, one of the other two-plane flights operating that day was led by his zampolit. These officers were always much better chatterboxes than pilots. I thought of the political officer in my own regiment who had almost blasted the Tu-16 with a burst of cannon fire. The VVS recognized the zampolits’ shortcomings. A directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force limited our zampolits to a maximum of four training sorties a day and prevented them from flying late in any given training day’s schedule because “fatigue” might jeopardize safety.
Karpich checked the corridor to make sure we weren’t within earshot of strangers, a reflexive gesture we all repeated many times a day. “The zampolit was so excited to actually get a solid lock on the LA-17 that he fired his missile without interrogating the target with the SRZO.”
“That really doesn’t surprise me, Karpich,” I said. The Soviet SRZO was similar to the coded Information Friend or Foe system employed in the West. Any pilot using live weapons with friendly aircraft nearby had to electronically interrogate the intended target to verify it was an enemy before firing.
“The next thing I heard,” Karpich continued, “was the colonel screaming on the radio, ‘Karpov, eject! Now!’ I ejected just before the missile hit.”
I couldn’t help grinning, despite Karpich’s pained expression. During our preliminary flight training with the L-29 trainer at the Pirsagat Air Base in Azerbaijan, he had revealed that he was terrified of ejecting from a crippled aircraft. Despite all our efforts to hammer into his thick head the simple truth that a pilot’s life was worth more than an airplane, Karpich had stubbornly refused to even consider using his ejection seat.
“How was it?” I asked. “Did you hurt your back?” The MiG-23 ejection seat was notorious for compressing your vertebrae.
Karpich scowled and nodded. “My back is fucked. I probably won’t be flying jets anymore.”
Thanks to the rotten zampolit system, here he was undergoing the rigorous standard postejection medical exam. That had been bad luck for him, but a pleasant surprise for me. I was happy to have found an old friend in the hospital.
“So, why are you here?” Karpich asked. “Are you about to become the first cosmonaut in our illustrious class?”
“No,” I said, “hardly that. It’s a long story, Karpuha.”
I began to tell Karpich a version of that story, being careful not to reveal any information that might implicate him in my deception.
But I was interrupted by the arrival of my nurse escort, a good-looking brunette named Nina. She wore her starched white uniform so tight that her nipples — “circuit breakers” to the young pilots — showed clearly through the fabric. Here patients had to be escorted to their appointments by nurses who carried the patients’ medical records. Most pilots objected to the degrading hospital regulation. But, unlike the others, I certainly did not mind walking a few paces behind Nina’s seductively swaying hips. Normally I would have made a pass at her. Nina, however, had made it clear that she was “engaged” to a snot-nosed kid just finishing secondary school. It turned out the boy had relatives in West Germany, and Nina was trading on her good looks for the chance to emigrate to the West. Her story was indicative of the desperation people felt.
I wanted freedom, too. But I had chosen another means to obtain it.
Walking down this corridor, we passed the outpatient reception area, where the hospital’s unofficial clientele arrived each morning. They stood out in dramatic contrast to the young pilots. The paunchy old men with faces as red and mottled as a plate of borscht were the elite of the military nomenklatura, active duty and retired. Their black GAZ-31 sedans crowded the parking lot. You knew they were the big shots by the number of zeros on their license plates. The sleek men in their thirties dressed in well-tailored American suits were the rising stars of the KGB. Their equally stylish wives and well-groomed children were always led to the head of the line at each diagnostic or treatment department. These people had never stood in line for cabbage or laundry detergent. Their chins were not nicked by dull, rusty razor blades that had to last through fifty shaves. They took what they wanted. They did not wait to be thrown scraps like those angry millions in the endless lines.
This was still the way the world worked, despite the “reforms” of glasnost and perestroika. My fellow pilots and I were the official reason the State had invested so generously in this hospital and its expert staff. But the nomenklatura were here, as always, to skim the cream off the State’s generosity.
Passing the library, I glanced at the inevitable bust of Lenin. Here he was portrayed in a meditative pose. My entire life I had been watched by Lenin: “Dedushka,” “Grandfather” Lenin smiling down on my kindergarten class, Lenin the Military Expert gracing the walls of the Armavir Academy, Lenin the Friend of Humanity, Lenin the Universal Genius. I was sick of looking at him.