“Sasha,” he said, “you’ve got a real chance at the 170-pound championship. The team needs you.”
Once more I sensed my mother’s hand in this conspiracy. But the chance of traveling to Moscow and winning a weight-division title was a lot more appealing than earning money as an electrician. I had struggled too hard to throw away my chance at a title. Most of the boys I knew wore their hair long, fashioned after the pictures of Western rock stars we sometimes saw in magazines. That was how you got the girls. But wrestlers could not wear long hair because that just gave your opponent another handle to grab. It wasn’t fair, but I knew you had to give up one thing you wanted to have something else you wanted more.
That September I began the upper form of advanced academic courses to prepare students for professional institutes and universities. But my first love was still wrestling. I traveled with the Spartak senior team now, coached and refereed the juniors. Because I correctly assumed Rema had conspired with Coach Karanov to keep me in the academic program, I thought she would not mind if I missed a few days’ classes traveling with the team. I was wrong. My homeroom teacher, Ludmilla — “the Rat with Glasses” to me and my friends — turned me in to Rema for unexcused absences.
Once more Rema dangled the dread wolf’s ticket over her desk blotter. “It’s not too late to throw you out.”
I got her point. From then on, I had to be a student first and a wrestler second.
All ninth- and tenth-year boys were required to attend twice-weekly military training classes at the school. Our instructor was a rather indecisive retired Army lieutenant colonel named Nikolai Gusev. I didn’t care for the mindless drill ritual in the school yard, but I enjoyed handling Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades and studying famous battles like Stalingrad and Kursk. Still a rebel, however, I made it plain to the good comrade lieutenant colonel that military training was not my favorite class.
The next summer I was not eager to sweat through another vocational camp, doing the same work as the men but earning only twenty rubles a month. Oleg, a friend of mine, said his father could get me in as a summer replacement worker at a local machine-tool factory that produced precision boring and milling machines and lathes for the aircraft plants and for export. When I took the job, I hoped to make contacts that might lead to an apprenticeship at the plant. Skilled professional toolmakers earned 500 rubles a month and had access to cheap vacations on the Black Sea or Baltic.
Even as a summer replacement, I would earn 150 rubles a month, a great salary for a kid of sixteen. Maybe I couldn’t yet afford real blue jeans, but I had already ordered my first pair of bell-bottom slacks from the girls at the fashion design school.
A master tool and die maker named Alexander Konstantinovich was my mentor in the export shop. I had heard a lot about the high-quality work at the plant. Machine tools from this factory were exported around the world, where they earned hard currency and compared favorably to similar products from West Germany or America. So I was shocked the first day on the job to find the assembly floor practically silent with Inen lounging around in groups playing cards and dominoes.
My mentor explained the situation. It was the first workday of the month, in this case July. All the factories that supplied us parts and raw materials were also beginning the month. They would not be required to complete their month’s quota under their ministry or directorate’s all-important Plan for thirty days. Neither would we. So all across the industrial heartland of the Russian Republic, workers like these sat around the factories, watching the clock, smoking to kill time.
But at our plant the men eventually got bored with card games and used expensive machine-tool steel to make kitchen knives for their wives. Konstantinovich taught me how to weld beautiful stainless-steel anchors that I could peddle to men with small fishing boats on the river.
Then, in the third week of the month, our regular quota of metal stock and electrical supplies began arriving. Things got busy. But still the tool and die makers and assemblers only completed ten machines a day. That was the norm. They were paid the maximum rate to meet that norm. If they completed more than that number, they risked having the norm increased by the factory bosses. So we worked slowly to produce only ten machines every workday.
By the end of the summer I had lost any illusions about a satisfying career in Soviet industry.
But I certainly wanted to pursue some kind of profession to match my interest in technology. One Sunday that autumn I watched the weekly military television program, I Serve the Soviet Union. The entire hour was devoted to the Air Force (VVS) and the Air Defense Force (PVO). The program focused on young officer cadets undergoing pilot training at an air base in the Transcaucasus. Guys not much older than me were strapping themselves into the cockpits of jet trainers and taking off into the clear southern sky. That looked interesting. The next week’s program was devoted to Soviet Army engineers, and my mother encouraged me to think about applying to a military institute specializing in construction engineering. But I couldn’t forget the image of those young cadets flying jet aircraft.
I went down to the Army komandatura headquarters and inquired about the process of applying for an opening at a military aviation academy. Having done some preliminary research, as I usually did before approaching bureaucrats, I’d learned that this was the first day that application forms for aviation academies would be available. But the bored administrative officer I asked said there were “no more openings.” Apparently he thought I wanted to try for a place at the military helicopter academy in nearby Syzran. I then realized that you even needed blat in the military. Only boys with influential families went to that academy, because there was plenty of high-paying work for civilian helicopter pilots after they finished their military obligation. And I learned that the Air Force’s Kacha Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots near Volgagrad, which was nearest to home, was also inaccessible without blat. But the officer finally conceded that there were still openings at the PVO Higher Military Aviation Academy at Armavir down in the south of the republic. The PVO flew supersonic jet fighters, not lumbering transports or fighter-bombers. That prospect appealed to me.
In October 1977 I approached Lieutenant Colonel Gusev, my military training instructor at School Number Two.
“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” I said respectfully, “can you spare the time to help me with my application to the Armavir Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots?”
He was obviously shocked. “Zuyev,” he exclaimed, “you are interested in the military?”
But he quickly overcame his shock, realizing that, even if I wasn’t selected, my application was a sign of his good example and diligence.
Rema, the principal, was even more skeptical when I requested a formal transcript of my academic records. “Young man,” she said scornfully, “you will never make it.”
But Lieutenant Colonel Gusev was the secretary of the school faculty’s Party collective. He was determined to see me placed at Armavir. In quick order, I became a member in good standing of the school’s Komsomol aktiv, at least on paper. Then Rema got to work on the written evidence of my fine academic career. Her resume of my academic record was a monument to bureaucratic cunning. To read her words, I was a brilliant, dedicated young Communist scholar and athlete, whose only fault was accepting too many challenges (which explained my less than stellar exam grades).