When I was sixteen, my mother and I visited Moscow. She assumed that, like every other normal young Soviet citizen, I wanted to visit Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square. But when she explained we would have to get up at five-thirty to begin standing in line at six, a full three hours before the Tomb opened, I told her I could wait until I visited the capital in the summer. It was February and I certainly had no intention of risking frostbite simply to pass before the glass coffin of a waxy corpse. Maybe that was the unrecognized first tentative step down the path that led me to this hospital. Maybe not. More probably I was just a typical lazy adolescent who preferred a warm hotel bed to the icy cobblestones of that windswept square. Twelve years had passed and I had not yet made the pilgrimage.
In any event, Lenin’s body, as rosy and firm as New Year’s marzipan, still lay in that mausoleum. And people from all over the Soviet Union still lined up in the winter frost and summer sun to pay their homage. To me, their devotion to Lenin was a touchstone of our nation’s progress toward freedom. As long as simple people on the street believed in the Great Leader’s Universal Wisdom, the Party would retain control of their minds.
We turned left from the medical diagnosis wing and climbed the stairs to a quieter, more softly lit department on the second floor. This was the realm of the psychologists. Here the decor was less clinical. Rich wood trim and bookcases replaced the spotless tile and electronic apparatus, giving the department an academic atmosphere. Nina led me to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Frolov, the clinical psychologist assigned to my case.
Lieutenant Colonel Frolov rose from his desk, took my records from the nurse, then greeted me. He was a lean, vigorous man in his late thirties, with dark hair and intelligent hazel eyes. His white medical coat was starched and spotless.
“Alexander Mikhailovich,” he said, addressing me formally, a gesture of respect from a senior officer to a pilot captain. His handshake was firm. “Please sit down.”
His office was large and handsomely furnished. The hardwood parquet floor glowed from recent polishing, matching the shoulder-high maple wall paneling. The desk was wide and well varnished. There were two telephones on the right corner.
Frolov’s office reflected his status as the hospital’s chief clinical psychologist. His diagnoses and recommendations were taken seriously by Air Force personnel. I had to accept that the specialists in the internal medicine, neurology, and orthopedic departments had found nothing physically wrong with me during their exhaustive examinations. So Frolov represented my last real hope of obtaining a medical discharge.
He offered me a comfortable armchair, then sat at the desk and opened the thick pasteboard dossier containing my medical records. He withdrew a neatly penned chart covered with a sharply spiked graph. I saw my name and service number on the corner of the chart. Apparently this was the plotted result of the intensive psychological tests I had taken three days before.
Frolov frowned as he reviewed the graph. There were preplotted parallel lines running horizontally across the graph, which no doubt measured the “norms” so valued in all official Soviet life. The peaks and valleys circled in red of my plotted test results fell far above and far below these accepted norms.
Ever since I’d been a kursant at the Armavir Higher Aviation Academy, I had shared a basic tenet of survival with my fellow cadets and later with the pilots in my regiment: “Never tell the truth to a psychologist.” Even as boys fresh out of school, we had understood that there were “safe,” officially acceptable answers to the long psychological profile tests we were obliged to take. And I had followed that policy through four years at the academy and seven years as a fighter pilot. During those eleven years, I must have taken different versions of this test at least ten times, always trying to shield my true feelings. I always got a headache trying to thread my way through the minefield of questions.
But I had answered with brutal honesty the six-hundred-question psychological test that Frolov’s staff had administered in the quiet room down the corridor on Monday. The test had been one of a battery of examinations designed to evaluate my manual dexterity and coordination, professional judgment, and personality in the wake of my aborted February flight. Only two hundred of the questions, the test staff had assured me, actually dealt with “personality traits.” And these questions were often linked to control questions salted throughout the exam to expose any attempt at deception.
I had no problem with that. Rather than attempt to deceive the authorities by espousing reverence for the ideals of Marxism-Leninism, I had proceeded to vent my disgust for the system. And I also honestly revealed the bitter depression I first felt when I’d learned about my country’s history of bloody repression.
Each question had three possible answers: Yes, No, or Uncertain.
To such questions as “Do you believe in God?” and “Are people conspiring against you?” I had answered Yes.
There had been the usual collection of questions to test my loyalty and faith in the wisdom of the Party’s leadership. “Do you read foreign magazines?” “Do you like foreign clothes?” to these I had answered Yes.
My answers to the questions that were obviously testing my attitude toward “collective decision-making” made clear my individualist nature.
One section of the test concerned personal and family relations. “Do you look forward to coming home after duty?” The questions were subtle, but clear in their intent. My answers made it obvious that I was not happy in my marriage.
To make certain my answers would be taken seriously, I searched for the control questions. “Do you like to watch fire?” Yes, I had answered. Any Russian who had camped and fished in the Volga heartland liked his campfire. “Have you ever been attracted to fire?” Yes again. And I had been careful to answer “Uncertain” several times.
In the two hours allotted, I had diligently answered all six hundred questions, then carefully reviewed my answers.
Now Lieutenant Colonel Frolov sat across his tasteful hardwood desk, his lips pursed as he tapped the graphed test results and precisely verified my answers to certain key questions. From his calm, exact manner, I assumed he was a man accustomed to reaching important decisions after some deliberation.
While Frolov reviewed my file, I gazed past the inevitable framed portraits of Gorbachev and Lenin and out the office window at the park. Warm, weak sunshine lit the trees. Pilots in red-trimmed, blue warm-up suits were out on the exercise paths, the younger men jogging, the older officers walking at a steady pace.
I focused on the short figure of a lieutenant colonel who had commanded a fighter regiment in Germany. His name was Peotr Petrov and I had been shocked to learn when I’d met him in my ward that he was only forty-two years old. He looked like a man in his sixties.
A doctor at the centrifuge G-stress unit in the Aerospace Medical Center near Dynamo Stadium had frankly revealed to me the disastrous cumulative effects of flying high-performance fighters. During Lieutenant Colonel Petrov’s twenty years of service, he had chalked up thousands of hours of high-G flight in MiG-21s and MiG-23s. The human body could only take so much of that punishment. When you combined almost daily high-G maneuvers with the adverse effects of breathing pure oxygen, and the hazard of ionizing radiation from supposedly well shielded aircraft radars, the result was a pilot like Petrov, a man we younger pilots called a “squeezed lemon.”