I came to Tskhakaya with five other lieutenants who had completed the accelerated MiG-23 training program at Armavir. Two of them, Yevgeni “Firefly” Svetlakov and Gennadi Zheleznayk, were good friends. Our enthusiasm at joining a real combat regiment was dampened by the reception we received. The commander, Colonel Homenko, was a sleek Ukrainian in his early forties. He eyed us warily as we stood before his desk. We were the first graduates of a former PVO academy to join his regiment. Leafing through our records, the colonel did not seem impressed by the progress we had made at Armavir.
Finally he looked up and frowned. “We do everything by regulations here,” he growled. “All of my pilots obey official safety standards. You’ll soon discover that the flying weather here is terrible. Just follow orders and you won’t get in trouble.”
We saluted and marched out of the colonel’s office.
Firefly offered one of his sardonic grins. “That was a wonderfully inspirational message,” he whispered as we left the regimental headquarters. “I definitely feel motivated to defend the Socialist Motherland.”
As expected, we were assigned to the 3rd Squadron. In Soviet Air Force Frontal Aviation regiments, the 1st Squadron traditionally has the best-qualified and most experienced pilots and is usually called the Dogfight Masters. The 2nd “Ground Attack” Squadron is made up of less experienced pilots, while the 3rd “Training” Squadron is where new lieutenants are assigned to work with experienced instructors.
Once more, our reception was somewhat less than inspiring. The squadron commander and his deputies made it clear that safety, not combat readiness, was the major concern of all pilots. The 3rd Squadron was equipped with battered early-model MiG-23Ms. The damper system on the flight controls was less precise than on the newer aircraft we had flown at Armavir.
Colonel Homenko had decreed that flying would be suspended during “dangerous” weather. And it was the colonel himself, not the regimental meteorologist, who determined if the weather was acceptable on any given flying day. His methods were not overly sophisticated. He rose before dawn with a call from the weather office, pulled on a robe, and went out on the balcony of his apartment. If, for any reason, Colonel Homenko did not like the smell of the dawn air, the 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment’s flying schedule was delayed while the colonel went back to bed for some well-earned rest.
“The less you fly,” the colonel was fond of noting, “the longer you keep on flying.”
In other words, you could not have a flying accident if you didn’t take off.
We had both the lowest sortie rate and the best safety record in the division. This, of course, was what Colonel Homenko had in mind. To the chagrin of my friends and me, we discovered that the regiment was in fact an unofficial springboard to the 283rd Aviation Division located in Mikha Tskhakaya for regimental officers in search of comfortable staff positions. The way this system worked was that our regiment caused no headaches for the staff rats at Division, and they recommended officers from Ruslan to replace them when they climbed the ladder toward Moscow. Under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, this kind of cronyism had spread throughout the military. It was a cozy system, but had nothing to do with combat readiness.
But this attitude of almost paralytic caution would hardly help my friends and me to become rated pilots. We had graduated from Armavir as junior lieutenants and Non-Rated pilots, qualified to handle the MiG-23 only within a narrow range of flying conditions and maneuvers, which basically encompassed takeoffs and landings, formation flight, and rudimentary ground-attack and air-combat regimes.
Our immediate goal was to become Third Class pilots. This rating normally required a year’s hard training after the academy, which included about 600 sorties or 350 flying hours. At Armavir we had already completed about 550 sorties, totaling around 230 hours. A Third Class pilot was qualified to fly day combat missions under minimum weather conditions that included visibility of at least one and a half miles and a ceiling of 750 feet, in formations ranging from four-plane zveno “links,” up to a full squadron of sixteen aircraft.
Second Class pilots usually achieved their rating three to four years after academy graduation. Most of them had logged 770 sorties, with a minimum of 450 hours. They stood duty alert in combat regiments and flew both day and night. They were fully rated on instrument flying and were qualified for both ground attack and “maneuverable dogfights.” Their daylight weather minimums were the same as Third Class, but their night minimums were three miles visibility and a 1,500-foot ceiling. The written and practical instrument flying examinations and night-formation flying made achieving Second Class rating the military pilot’s greatest hurdle.
Becoming a First Class pilot required around 1,200 sorties and at least 550 flight hours. This usually took six years beyond the pilot’s academy. A First Class pilot was fully instrument-rated and could fly any individual or formation combat maneuver both day and night down to weather minimums of 0.9-mile visibility and a ceiling of only 450 feet.
Both Second and First Class pilots received salary bonuses ranging from fifteen to twenty-five percent of their base pay. This bonus came at the end of the year, if the pilot met all the requirements of his rating during the year.
The next highest rating, Sniper pilot, was limited to a few highly experienced leaders who were selected for a long, demanding qualification process.
Our flying schedule was unexpectedly intensified soon after the New Year. Maybe, we thought at first, the Air Force had requested that the new MiG-23 pilots from the experimental Armavir program continue their accelerated training, or perhaps the operational demands of the Afghan war overrode Colonel Homenko’s habitual caution.
But we soon learned the real reason. There was a movement afoot to modernize the Soviet military. Younger, more dynamic officers were being promoted to general rank. One of them, Major General Gennadi Anosov, took over as commander of the 283rd Aviation Division. He was dissatisfied with Homenko’s leadership of the 176th Regiment. One of the general’s first acts was to send Homenko out to pasture as an instructor at an aviation academy. The general then named a bright, hardworking younger officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Torbov, as our regimental commander.
These changes reflected the political shake-up in Moscow. While I had been on leave in Samara after graduation, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, had finally died. The joke at Armavir had been that he had actually died three years before, but the chest of his fine worsted suit was so encrusted with medals that it had taken him that long to slump over. In any event, Brezhnev was replaced by a leader with a much different style and agenda.
Yuri Andropov was an energetic and sophisticated career Party apparatchik, who had been chairman of the KGB for fifteen years. He was sworn in as Party Secretary only two days after Brezhnev’s death and soon made it clear that he intended to clean house in the Kremlin and stamp out corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet economy.
By spring, his economic reform campaign had taken an interesting turn. Andropov specifically targeted “idlers, slackers, and drunkards” in Soviet industry and collective agriculture. The KGB was beefed up with thousands of plainclothes volunteers who cracked down on absenteeism and public drunkenness, especially during the official workday. Men and women found standing in line or lounging in the familiar groups near the State liquor stores were accosted by KGB agents who demanded their papers. Those found absent from their work place were arrested.