Given his passions it was unsurprising that as high school came to an end Sergei, following in his brother’s footsteps, applied for and was accepted into the Zhdanov Higher Military Engineering School. Becoming an officer in the Soviet Army was not a business for those in a hurry. And Skripal spent four years studying the military engineer’s trade in his home town. At the end of a course that embraced the theory and practice of military engineering from the creation and removal of obstacles to demolitions, bridge-building, and storming bunkers he had a qualification that had the same status as a university degree.
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and swore the military oath. Adherence to this solemn pledge would mark the second great emotional commitment of Sergei’s life, after his loyalty to family in general and his mother in particular. In the Soviet Army much was made of this covenant with service life. Ceremonies for swearing in newly commissioned officers were usually choreographed at huge war memorials, often with flaming torches or floodlights, bands playing, and families looking on. The second half of this vow laid particular emphasis on the obligations an individual was entering into, and the possible consequences of failing to meet them:
I will always be ready to come to the defence of my homeland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, at the order of the Soviet government and, as a fighting man of the armed forces, I swear that I will defend it courageously, skilfully, and with dignity and honour, sparing neither blood nor life itself to achieve complete victory over enemies. But if I violate this solemn oath of mine, may the harsh retribution of the Soviet law and the universal hatred and scorn of the working people befall me.
And as his time at the engineers’ college ended, and he bound himself, quite possibly for life, to the army, Skripal nudged the other great piece of his future plan into place. In July 1972, he married his hometown sweetheart Liudmila Koshelnik. A family photo taken a few months before their wedding shows her standing next to Sergei, a good-looking young woman with her thick dark brown hair cut in a bob. Valery, who had already graduated, is arm in arm with his own sweetheart, wearing his lieutenant’s uniform. Sergei, perhaps knowing he could not compete with his brother’s military glamour, is wearing civilian clothes rather than his cadet’s uniform.
There is a Russian proverb, ‘God loves things in threes’, and as any military engineer will tell you, the triangle is one of the strongest structures there is. It forms the basis of cranes, and its repeated shape can be found in the roofs of houses and the construction of temporary military bridges. In Sergei’s case, the triangle of faith and mutual commitment formed by his mother, the army, and Liudmila would prove the foundation of his adult life.
Although it might have seemed, with all this in place, that Skripal’s path had been set by the time he was twenty-two, he was not content to follow the typical trajectory of a sapper, traipsing with Liudmila from one far-flung garrison to another. For he (and his brother Valery) had decided that the modern form of chivalry and heroism could be found at its highest form in the airborne forces.
Valery, the more dashing of the two, had shown the way, getting into a department of the Zhdanov engineer school that prepared officers for the divisions of the Vozdyushno Desantnye Voiska, or VDV, as these troops are known in Russia. Each of these formations need their own specialists from artillerymen to logistics battalions and of course engineers. So after passing out from the Kaliningrad school, Sergei Skripal progressed to further parachute training and with it, initiation into the elite brotherhood of the VDV.
Having shown his aptitude and fearlessness leaping out of aeroplanes, Skripal was sent to take part in operations in Russia’s far east. There a simmering border dispute had produced actual combat between Soviet and Chinese forces in 1969, after which the Kremlin reinforced its frontier garrisons and updated its war plans. There was a further violent clash between the two communist powers in 1972.
Assigned to what was known as a Reconnaissance Diversionary Company, the young paratrooper engineer would in time enter a twilight world sitting in between the overt side of the Russian military and the covert ‘special designation’ or spetsnaz units that undertook more sensitive war preparations. These special forces formed the ground level or tactical presence of the army staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate, known by its Russian acronym, the GRU. As he would discover, the special company he had been assigned to was like the last stop on the route from the regular forces of the VDV to the spetsnaz.
Skripal was soon drawn into detailed war planning for any renewed clash between the USSR and China. Along which routes would Soviet forces advance into China? Were the bridges, roads, and railways along them suitable? What infrastructure would they have to destroy in order to prevent China opposing this advance? Much of this planning could be done by map and overhead photography – be it from aircraft flying along the border but peering down into China, or satellites. But some of it required closer inspection of the relevant bridges, tunnels, and so on.
So in the mid-1970s the young officer from Kaliningrad became involved in covert operations. He was a member of small groups infiltrated to conduct detailed reconnaissance inside the People’s Republic. ‘I have been to China three times,’ he later quipped, ‘never with visa, only with Kalashnikov.’
This potentially highly dangerous work was followed by time spent in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, at that time still very much under Soviet rule as one of the constituent republics of the USSR. Despite decades of receiving diktats from the Kremlin, initially by Russian royalty, and later by the communists, it had retained an unsettled feel. Sergei, his wife Liudmila, and their little boy Alexander (or Sasha as he was always known in the family), born in 1974 and so a toddler, found themselves in a tight-knit airborne forces community housed in a military cantonment on the edge of the Uzbek city of Fergana.
The town and area around it had been conquered by the tsars during a series of campaigns in the 1860s and 1870s. That advance was motivated by a desire for imperial expansion, great-power rivalry with Britain, and economic self-interest. The Fergana Valley was a fertile oasis nestling in the high mountains of Central Asia. It became a major source of cotton for Russia and later the Soviet Union.
Skripal arrived in this far-off land, posted to 345th Guards Air Assault Regiment, one of the rapid deployment units that gave the VDV particular value to the Kremlin. He and his fellow officers were living through what some have called ‘the Golden Age’ of the Soviet airborne force. Under the leadership of General Vassily Margelov, who founded then ran the VDV for a staggering twenty-three years, they had gained a reputation in Soviet decision making, and indeed military culture, similar to that of the Marine Corps in the US. Lacking a big seagoing tradition, Soviet Russia did not have a strong force of naval commandos, rather Margelov had given sky-blue berets and striped sailors’ shirts to his paratroopers, styling them the marines of the modern age, crossing oceans by air rather than sea in order to protect their Soviet Motherland.
The VDV had spearheaded Moscow’s 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, had been stood by to fly to Syria’s aid in 1973 as Israeli tanks pushed towards Damascus, and used time and again to reinforce military districts experiencing periods of tension. Along with this vital operational role, a powerful organizational culture developed around these airborne forces. From the moment they were sworn in, paratroopers were encouraged to look down on lesser mortals, and their vodka-fuelled celebrations of the VDV’s annual day every August were regarded with trepidation by law-abiding citizens the breadth of the Soviet Union from Vitebsk to Khabarovsk, and indeed Fergana.