“Absolutely, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”
Again, Frolov shook his head. Then he smiled reassuringly. “No, Alexander Mikhailovich, I think you were feeling some temporary confusion during this examination.”
“I answered each question as honestly as I could,” I said with open-faced sincerity.
Frolov nodded and held up another document. I could see it was a printed extract of my service record. Again he slipped on his reading glasses. And again, he used his slim gold pen to emphasize the points of his argument. “Captain Zuyev, there is clearly nothing in your personnel file to indicate the type of unstable personality or antisocial attitudes evidenced by this test.” He seemed honestly confused, eager to find a logical explanation for this strange dichotomy.
I nodded without speaking, then turned away to glance out the window toward Sokolniki Park once more. Poor old Colonel Petrov had tried jogging behind a group of younger officers, but now he was walking stiffly along the path, taking a shortcut to the hospital.
Frolov was reading from my service record. His accent and diction were pure Moscow staff officer, not the rough edge of a Soviet Army field commander berating an insubordinate junior officer. “Comrade Captain,” he said, smiling again to show his concern, “I have reviewed the records of hundreds of pilots during my career. As you know, the Army’s selection process is rigorous, designed to identify the best-qualified young men for flight training.” He looked down again at my service record and frowned with concentration. “Everything in your background is absolutely normal… your school records, the entrance test scores at the Armavir Academy. Your flight training and academic records there demonstrate the highest possible aptitude…” He shook his head and smiled again. “Alexander Mikhailovich, I simply cannot believe that you possess an undetected personality flaw that would account for the answers on this test.” For emphasis, he placed his open hand on the test booklet and the plotted answer graph.
I was carefully weighing Frolov’s sincerity. He might be the critical factor in my campaign for a discharge from the Air Force. If I could convince him I actually was psychologically unstable, he might facilitate the discharge with a minimum of notoriety. On the other hand, Frolov had the power to brand me as a shirker, and incorrigible egoist, which was anathema in the collectivist dogma, of Marxism-Leninism. “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” I finally said, “I answered those questions honestly.”
Frolov cleared his throat and frowned more deeply. “Let me quickly review your record.” His voice was cooler now. “Born Kuybyshev, 1961.” He smiled. “Only twenty-seven years old, Alexander Mikhailovich, and you have been a First Class pilot for four years, a captain for two. You are a flight leader and a respected tactics instructor in one of the Air Force’s leading combat fighter regiments.” He hefted the service record for emphasis, then continued. “Last year you qualified for the military test pilot school at Akhtubinsk. You’ve been a full member of the Party for four years.” He flipped over the carbon copy of an official form. “And I see you have recently received the Defense of the Motherland Medal.”
I nodded. These medals were a joke to good pilots in line regiments. We called this particular citation “the medal for sand from your ass.” It had nothing to do with professional skill, but the staff rats in Moscow put a lot of stock in medals. In fact, you could usually spot a true rear-echelon hero by the number of medals on his chest.
Frolov was staring at me now with a fatherly expression of concern. “Your wife is the daughter of a distinguished Air Force officer. Comrade Captain, your career to date has been nothing short of exceptional. You have an extremely promising future in the Air Force. Yet you seem determined to make us believe that you are some kind of mental defective. Honestly, Alexander Mikhailovich, what are we to make of this?”
Suddenly I knew that it was time, finally and irrevocably, to state my case. I had to accept the fact that all medical tests would be inconclusive, at best, and that this officer was too skilled and politically astute to accept the results of my psychological test as valid grounds to grant me a discharge. “Comrade Colonel, I no longer wish to serve.”
Frolov sighed audibly and closed the dossier. Clearly he was frustrated. He impatiently flipped open my dossier again. “In September 1978, when you entered the Higher Aviation Academy at Armavir, you took an oath, a solemn oath to serve the Soviet Union.” He fixed me with his intelligent eyes. “You told all your superiors that your sole ambition in life was to become a fighter pilot.” He sighed again. “Now you sit there and tell me you no longer wish to serve. Comrade Captain, what has happened? Tell me more about yourself. Help me understand.”
I understood his frustration. The man was a Communist in a privileged position. He had no reason to doubt the system that treated him so well. Until recently, I had been like him, a believer, one of the Communist elite. How could I explain my transformation?
“Well,” I finally asked, “where can I begin?”
Frolov smiled warmly now. “Why not begin at the beginning?”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 3
Samara
1961–78
I was brought up in Kuybyshev, a major river port on the Volga, in the heartland of the Russian Federation. Kuybyshev had been named for a hero of the Revolution, but most people called the city Samara, a name well known in Russian history. Both my parents were engineers. My father, Mikhail, was a technical manager at one of the city’s aviation factories. My mother, Lydia, was a construction engineer at the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Institute.
During the Great Patriotic War, when the Nazi armies threatened Moscow, Kuybyshev had become the temporary capital of the Soviet Union. Our aircraft factories had turned out thousands of combat planes. Assembly lines had worked day and night producing the Ilyushin-2, the famous Shturmovik that had helped defeat the Nazi panzers. And since then, military and civilian aviation manufacturing, as well as the precision-machine-tool industry needed to support those plants, had remained the economic backbone of the city.
The broad blue Volga had always been vital to the life of Samara, just as it still was to present-day Kuybyshev. My mother’s institute had responsibility for an immense, multiyear and multibillion-ruble construction project, eventually meant to harness the power potential of the vast upper Volga system, which included the huge Kuybyshev Reservoir.
My father was a good amateur photographer and supplemented his salary by selling scenic pictures to a local postcard publisher, by photographing wedding ceremonies and sports events, and by producing much better family portraits than available through the crowded State enterprise photo shops in town. We didn’t have money for luxuries, but my clothes were not ragged, we ate well, and I always had five kopeks to buy a sweet roll after school. Every New Year’s there were brightly wrapped presents under the decorated fir tree. We lived in a one-room, hundred-and-twenty-eight-square-foot apartment in an older building. I had my small bed in one corner of the room, and my parents slept in a curtained alcove. The kitchen was hardly big enough for all three of us, but as with so many Russian families, it was the heart of our home.
I had seen families living nearby, crammed into old wood-and-stucco tenements near the railroad station, sharing the same dirty kitchen and a smelly toilet in the courtyard. So I was happy my parents were engineers and we could live in a nice brick building.
The kitchen of our apartment, not school, was where I learned to read and write the year before I began first grade. My mother valued education highly, I imagine, because she had had to struggle for her own. She was the only child from her street to go on to a professional school. And I had been born while she was still in the technical institute. So she took great pride in her engineering degree.