We sat down to a good breakfast that usually included eggs, skim milk, kasha, and fresh bread and butter. The dining hall atmosphere was always friendly and relaxed. Dmitri, one of my classmates from Leningrad, came from an influential family and had studied English at a foreign language school. He had read about military academies in America, where first-year cadets were harassed and hazed by their older colleagues. We found that a totally alien concept. Here we all needed mutual support to survive the rigorous work load. The idea that cadets would actually join with the faculty to harass newcomers seemed bizarre.
We soon found out just how important the guidance and support of our older Samarskiye friends actually was. They had cautioned us in general terms during the selection process about being punctual and well disciplined. Now they had a more important warning.
“Whatever you do,” Valery Savelyev told us, “don’t joke about the Party bosses, the shishka, or keep any controversial books or Western magazines.”
Even songs, he added, could be suspect. The best advice he could give us was to form a close circle of buddies and confide only in them.
“Who’s going to inform on us here in the platoon?” I asked. “We’re all in this together.”
Valery shook his head sadly. “No, Shurka,” he said, “there are stukachi here, ‘knockers’ who report to the commandant or even to the Osobii Otdel. Your sergeant’s stripes won’t protect you from those little bastards.”
Valery explained that the Osobii would probably try to recruit first-year guys as informers who “knocked” quietly on their office doors to report, late at night when the other cadets were sleeping. “Don’t do it,” he said."Don’t even listen to those shitheads. Once you’re in with the Osobists, they’ve got you by the balls for the rest of your life.”
That was advice we all took to heart.
The older Samarskiye also helped us with another unanticipated problem. A few Armavir cadets had been selected from the ranks of Army conscripts who had completed a year of service before coming here. They considered themselves tough old soldiers deserving of special privileges, and they intended to sustain this privileged status, by brute force if necessary. If a younger cadet refused to polish their boots or change their collar liner after lights-out, they would gang up to knock some sense into him. This was dedovshcina, the brutalizing of recruits by deds — “grandfather” soldiers. The practice had become widespread in the Army, especially in units where one ethnic group dominated another. In some units where dedovshcina was left unchecked, victimized recruits had even been tormented and humiliated into suicide. There was certainly no place for this senseless cruelty at a higher aviation academy.
The Samarskiye collared the worst of the deds for a quiet conversation on the parade ground. The older cadets made it clear that unfortunate accidents could happen at any time during athletics or the upcoming parachute training all first-year cadets received. The deds got the message.
The combination of academic courses and military training was exhausting. None of us had ever taken such advanced courses in subjects like engineering, calculus, thermodynamics, and aerodynamics. We also studied military history and tactics. Our class schedule began after breakfast at 0830 and ran to 1400. After a good lunch that always included fresh vegetables and meat or fish, we had mandatory study halls and tutorials. Unlike the civilian schools we had come from, hard study was not an option taken by a few gifted students. Our instructors were officers, we were soldiers, and the officers gave us direct orders to learn a group of equations or memorize a list of aerodynamic terms. Everyone in class was expected to obey those orders. We were still only teenage boys, but we faced the responsibilities of soldiers.
That first year, we all looked forward to lights-out at 2200. And most of us had to force ourselves to stay awake during the mandatory group viewing of the Vremya television newscast from Moscow each night at 2100.
We were also required to take an active part in athletics and physical training. One of the most challenging routines involved a training apparatus called the lop’ing, a kind of rotating trapeze swing that prepared us for acrobatic maneuvers. The device looked deceptively simple, like a children’s playground toy, and had been developed for the space program. It was said that cosmonauts that mastered it had no problem with weightlessness.
You stood on the metal trapeze, which was suspended from a high outdoor frame in the academy sports complex, your ankles and wrists attached by cuffs to the frame. The steel trapeze frame could rotate in a full vertical circle and also twirl around its own axis. So the cadet could perform the equivalent of a simultaneous loop and roll, one of the most disorienting aerobatic maneuvers. We all had to master a basic competence on this apparatus.
The most demanding routine on the device was a timed sequence of ten forward loops with one complete rotation of the frame for each loop. To accomplish this, you had to let your body completely enter the three-dimensional, fluid motion, flexing your knees as you rose in the loop in order to pump momentum into the falling limb of the circle, all the while keeping even pressure on your shoulder and torso to execute a smooth rotation along your own vertical axis. You could actually “pull” almost seven Gs on this simple rig, or three stomach-churning negative Gs at the top of the loop.
Parachute training was another challenge which came early in the curriculum. Less than two months after we put on our new uniforms, we were strapping on parachute harnesses for practice jumps off a training tower. This was a standard D1-5U military parachute harness, complete with chest-pack reserve. But the risers were connected to a bar that slid down a slide wire that replicated the speed and angle of a parachute landing. We quickly progressed from ground training to our first jump.
Our drop aircraft was the reliable old An-2, a rugged, single-engine biplane originally designed for agricultural aviation. Seven jumpers sat in two rows of folding sling seats that faced inward from both sides of the cabin. The “Anushka” was an ideal parachute-training aircraft. Throttled back at the 2,500-foot jump altitude, the plane droned along at barely eighty knots. The exit door was on the left. All you did was hook up your static line to the overhead cable, follow the man ahead, and leap out the door, keeping your hands crossed on your reserve and your elbows well tucked in. There wasn’t much prop blast from the Anushka.
My first jump was also my first airplane ride.
After our first two jumps, we received seven rubles parachute pay. The next jumps were paid at the rate of one and a half rubles. After twenty-five jumps we would earn five rubles each time we climbed aboard the Anushka. Parachuting a minimum of twice a year was mandatory for pilots. The rule was: If you don’t jump, you don’t fly.
Given the intensity of our training, we quickly formed close friendships. I found myself spending more and more of my precious free time with five classmates who had come to Armavir from widely separated parts of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Chizhov came from Uralsk, a new industrial city in Kazakhstan. His parents were both Russian factory workers, but from his lean intensity and obvious high intelligence, he seemed more like a member of the intelligentsia. He had come to Armavir from a technical college and was a year older than most of us. Because there were so many Vladimirs about, he quickly acquired the nickname Siskin, “lapwing,” because he resembled that keenly observant bird of the steppes.
Vladimir Morozov we called Deep Freeze. He was a brilliant student who helped us all with our math and physics, but he was not a natural soldier. In fact, we all had to help him square away his uniform and sloppy bunk and locker before each inspection.