I had not understood the difference between the two services as a schoolboy in Samara. But a year at the academy had taught me that the PVO Air Defense Force provided much more comfortable duty than the VVS. Despite the dire warnings about the guardhouse, Armavir was a quiet sanctuary from overly strict military discipline. On the other hand, the VVS had a reputation for rigid adherence to regulations and snap inspections by incorruptible teams from the Ministry of Defense. In the PVO command, inspections were usually scheduled months in advance.
The PVO had evolved during the Great Patriotic War from antiaircraft artillery units and had less of the traditional elan than the VVS, which had descended from the colorful Hussar cavalry regiments. Senior PVO officers had a reputation of being stolid dolts, oxen not thoroughbred horses. One of the forbidden stories at Armavir concerned an account of several PVO generals being flown by helicopter on an inspection tour. When they kept the helicopter crew waiting at one base several hours while the generals enjoyed a long lunch, the pilot got revenge by claiming his engine wouldn’t start because the battery had run down.
“Comrade Generals,” he said, “you’ll have to get out and push.”
The credulous generals climbed down, took off their bemedaled uniform blouses, and pushed the gawky Mi-8 along the runway until the pilot decided to hit his start button. Later, one general wrote a report condemning the poor design of the helicopter.
But we soon discovered that Air Force generals had both similarities and differences. A delegation of senior VVS officers descended on Pirsagat to look over their new charges. One tough, clearly arrogant colonel general named Gorelov, who wore the wings of a Sniper pilot, inspected our barracks. He seemed aghast that the floors and furniture were painted in pleasant shades of blue and green.
“In the Air Force,” General Gorelov bellowed, hardly controlling his outrage, “we do not have painted furniture. Scrape it all to bare wood.”
Once Tveretin was satisfied I had mastered the feel of basic flight maneuvers, he nipped any overconfidence I might have exhibited by setting out a more difficult challenge: precision flying.
“You can even teach a bear to fly,” he said. “It’s really not hard to fly dirty. But a good fighter pilot flies clean.”
By “clean” he meant flying the aircraft with absolute control and certainty, so that you could consistently arrive at any given point in the sky with a minimum correction. Tveretin’s approach to instruction combined multiple repetitions of basic skills like flying landing approaches with more challenging maneuvers.
All the cadets were required to keep a personal logbook to record their training sorties. But I had a separate, private logbook in which I carefully noted every phase of my training with brutal honesty. “Cannot manage power for climbing right. Lost 120 feet of altitude on 60-degree turn,” I wrote. Two days later I noted, “Poor elevator trim on left-hand descent to final approach.” The next week I logged, “Huy ovo, all fucked up,” after a sloppy landing flare.
In early October, six weeks into our flight training, I was expected to be the first in my crew to solo. But Siskin, my skinny friend from Uralsk, was doing just as well with his instructor. We had each flown over thirty training sorties and could now accomplish the basic curriculum maneuvers required for solo flight. Lieutenant Tveretin, however, was not completely satisfied with my performance, although he assured me I wasn’t a “giraffe,” a student pilot with impossibly slow reactions, as if his hands and feet were too far from his eyes and brain. That was a compliment, coming from him.
On October 5, 1979, Siskin became the first in our class to solo after thirty-six sorties. Tveretin and I stood on the parking apron, watching Siskin complete his mandatory triple krug oval racetrack maneuver and descend onto final approach for landing.
“He’s a little short,” I commented.
Tveretin smiled. “So were you this morning.”
As always, the lieutenant was right. Siskin had to add power and climb out of his smooth glide slope to make the runway threshold. But he did manage a beautiful touchdown.
“Tomorrow we practice landings,” Tveretin said.
And practice we did. I flew five sorties that day and racked up three touch-and-go landings. After we put the airplane to bed that evening, Tveretin turned to me and coolly stated, “If the weather’s halfway decent tomorrow, you will solo.” That night it was hard to fall asleep.
And the next morning after one quick circuit of the course, my thirty-eighth training sortie at Pirsagat, the deputy squadron commander pronounced me ready to solo.
“Good luck, Zuyev,” was all the lieutenant said.
Taxiing out to the runway felt completely familiar. But I didn’t hear Tveretin’s terse comments in my earphones. When I turned onto the centerline and ran up my engine for the instrument check, I somehow still expected to hear his voice. It was hard to believe that I was the only man in the plane.
I released the brakes. The L-29 was supposedly slow on takeoff. The fellows said you had time to smoke a cigarette before you reached rotation speed. But on this sunny autumn morning in Azerbaijan, the takeoff roll seemed impossibly quick.
I was climbing straight above the runway. The gear was up and I raised my flaps at 300 feet altitude, just as Tveretin had taught me, before I fully realized I was flying solo. Then I banked right and climbed to fly the oval three-circuit krug pattern at 1,800 feet without incident. Once I was level, I craned my neck to look in the rear cockpit to make sure no one was there. I burst into a loud rendition of the Volga folk song “Stepan Razin,” which celebrated a brave and audacious rebel from czarist times. That was exactly how I felt, brave and daring.
I was less than three months past my eighteenth birthday, and I had just soloed in a jet aircraft.
When my class returned to Armavir that December, we found that the Air Force had ordered a complete landscaping of the parklike campus. The old laurel and plane trees that had provided pleasant shade in the summer — and welcome concealment for cadets following the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” to slip over the far wall and into town — were hacked down. The quaint old model of the MiG-15 rotating above the mossy fountain in the parade ground was demolished, replaced by an abstract sculpture of a missile, which the cadets quickly dubbed the “Monument to Hockey Players,” because of its resemblance to stacked hockey sticks.
Our third semester began just after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Official publications, including Red Star, all proclaimed satisfaction that Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had allowed the Army to fulfill its “internationalist duty.” In January a political administration colonel from the military district headquarters in Rostov lectured us about the events in Afghanistan. The colonel was unusually informative because he had helped plan the operation. He went through the predictable rationalization for the Soviet invasion, explaining that it had been our duty to protect Socialist democracy in that fraternal country, which was under attack by medieval Muslim fanatics, who had murdered many Soviet citizens struggling to improve backward conditions in Afghanistan.
Then the colonel described the actual invasion in great detail. He noted how Spetsnaz forces had been infiltrated into Kabul, the capital, where they had seized the international airport, which became an airhead for the Airborne intervention force. Our forces had completely overwhelmed the Islamic bandits who had resisted them. Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan prime minister who had betrayed his Socialist principles, had been “eliminated,” the colonel added. Socialist democracy would soon be restored, despite the machinations of the imperialists, who were trying to stir up resistance among the bandits.