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  I was surprised how tough the strength tests were and glad I had worked so hard at Spartak. Our upper-body strength was tested with spring apparatus similar to the ones I had used in my weight training. I passed easily, but many likely candidates failed. Our endurance was measured by a timed 3,000-yard run, repeated 100-yard sprints, and a 100-yard swimming test. Again, fellows who had scored high on the academic exams were cut after the endurance tests.

  Our reflexes, reaction time, and hand-eye coordination were tested over a three-day period in a very simple cockpit simulator that combined a control stick and a crude “gunsight.” Sitting in a regular chair, you worked the stick to keep the gunsight ring aligned along a waving curve on a moving scroll. It was a tough challenge. We also had to follow rapid commands to write an endless series of O’s and X’s in random patterns. These tests broke us down into four aptitude groups. The lowest group were washed out; those in group three could continue only if they scored well in the academic tests; and the top two groups qualified in motor skills. I was in group one.

  Many of the candidates were obviously not up to the tough academic and practical-skill tests. They came from Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. Some guys ridiculed these “national heroes,” because they had been selected as token candidates to demonstrate the fraternal Socialist bonds of the Union. In reality, there were almost no non-Russian or non-Slav pilots in either the PVO or the VVS.

  And the demanding math, physics, and Russian language examinations weeded out some of the candidates from State farms whose rural schools had not prepared them well. The winnowing process continued through a series of personal interviews. Although all the officers on the panels wore the same uniforms, our Samarskiye mentors had warned us that there would always be a zampolit political officer present and sometimes a man from the KGB’s Osobii Otdel “Special Department.” Lucky for me, Lieutenant Colonel Gusev, my military instructor at School Number Two, had attached a glowing testimonial to the Kharacteristika “Personal Characteristics” record that accompanied my application forms.

  The interviewers seemed satisfied that my family background did not include any “enemies of the people,” criminals, or psychopaths. And they seemed genuinely impressed with my mother’s academic and professional accomplishments. They verified that no one in my family was a member of a religious sect or ever traveled abroad or had been a prisoner of the Germans. Of course I did not reveal my father’s captivity during the war. Since he’d been a civilian child, there was no military record. And, fortunately, both Ivanov and Rema had done a masterful job of disguising my delinquent attitude and rebellious behavior.

  After a hot, exhausting month of basic training, I found myself standing in Armavir’s Lenin Square with three hundred other successful candidates, taking the Soviet military’s Oath of Loyalty. We solemnly promised to be “honorable, brave, disciplined, and vigilant” soldiers who would defend the homeland, sparing neither blood nor life if necessary to achieve full victory over our enemies.

  “And if I should break this solemn oath,” I recited in unison with the boys around me, “then let me suffer the severe penalties of Soviet law and the universal hatred and contempt of the Soviet people.”

  A young senior lieutenant shouted an order and we marched off the square with the band playing the Air Force Anthem. Our polished boots sounded with the drumbeat.

  “We were born to turn fantasy into fact,” we sang, referring to the miracle of flight. “Higher! Higher! Higher!” The brass instruments gleamed in the southern sun; the drums pounded. “Faster! Faster! Faster!” Our column marched down the broad avenue toward the walled Armavir Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots on the outskirts of the city. I was no longer a schoolboy. Now I was a Soviet soldier.

  I was proud that my mother attended the ceremony. My selection for the academy was certainly proof that I was neither stupid nor lazy, as Rema had once scornfully suggested. My mother took me aside to explain that she hoped to marry again, to an engineer named Valentin. But she wanted my permission. My grandmother had already raised the subject with me. “Give her your blessing, Sasha,” she’d said. “Your mother should not have to grow old alone as I have.” Naturally I wished my mother happiness.

  The academy was an attractive, well-shaded complex of dormitories, classroom blocks, and a military airfield that bore the call sign “Burav.” First-year cadets were assigned to a long three-floored dormitory facing the cement-block wall that enclosed the front of the academy.

  The top of this wall was studded with broken wine bottles set in the cement, a crude but efficient deterrent to cadets tempted to slip into the city without leave. “Actually,” one of the older cadets joked, “the glass is there to keep all those horny, good-looking nurses from assaulting you handsome young fellows.”

  Jokes aside, we learned on our first day that we were expected to act like soldiers, not simply privileged students at a State academy. On our familiarization tour of the campus, the escort officer pointed out the gaupvakhta, the guardhouse manned by tough conscripts of the school battalion who performed the manual labor and administrative duties at the academy.

  “They don’t like you kursanty very much,” the captain warned us.

  I don’t know who stared at my group with more menace, the guards or their German shepherds. Stealing State property, being absent without leave, or showing disrespect to a commissioned officer were all offenses punishable by time in the guardhouse.

  The Armavir Academy, we learned, had an honored history. Founded in 1940, the academy had barely begun classes when it had to be evacuated as the Nazi armies advanced south toward the Caucasus. Once the Kuban Valley had been recaptured from the Nazis and the school reopened, cadets were pushed through accelerated training, and many flew their first combat sortie directly from the school’s airfield. Legendary Red Army aces like Alexander Pokryshkin and the Glinka brothers had flown Shturmoviks and American lend-lease P-39 “Kobras” from our Burav runway. Among the aviation academies of the PVO and VVS, Armavir was known as the “Kuznitsa,” the Forge of Pilots.

  There were about eleven hundred cadets at Armavir divided into four classes. During any given academic year, two classes would be “in the South,” at air bases in Azerbaijan, receiving flight instruction on L-29 jet trainers, or in nearby Maikop, taking the advanced flight course on MiG-21 fighters. The other two classes remained at the school taking academic courses or practice flying at the Burav air base. We were expected to complete forty-three academic courses in eight semesters to graduate with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Simultaneously we would train as jet-fighter pilots and receive our wings with our commission on graduation.

  I was appointed the cadet sergeant of the 112th Platoon. Even though the rank doubled the basic cadet pay from seven to fifteen rubles, I had not sought this position and found the extra responsibility annoying, considering the punishing work load that first year.

  Six days a week we were rousted out of bed by the national anthem blaring on the loudspeakers at 0600 and had forty-five seconds to pull on our uniform. After a quick stop in the latrine, we fell in on the parade ground for running and calisthenics at 0610. At 0700 we were given half an hour to wash up and prepare the barracks for inspection. I had to verify that the cadets in my platoon all wore presentable uniforms and that the linen liners sewn into the collars of their blouses were changed at the regulation two-day intervals. Some guys were lucky; they had skinny necks and could keep a liner looking clean for a week.

  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 rigorou
s 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.

  Sergei Mashenko came all the way from Sakhalin Island in the Far East. His father was a well-to-do manager in oil production and his mother was a schoolteacher. One of the first things he did at the academy was order tailor-made uniforms. He was well read and, like Dmitri, knew English. He took everything with a sense of good-humored grace. Nothing seemed to faze him. And as soon as we all trusted each other completely, Sergei was telling an endless series of witty political jokes, often at the expense of the stuffed-shirt zampolits.

  Gary Tselauri came from Tbilisi in Georgia. His mother was Russian. His father, a Georgian, had died several years before. Gary was tall, husky, and a natural athlete, well trained in judo. Because of his dark good looks, we called him the Prince of Georgia. At first, Gary stubbornly refrained from rough barracks-room language and wouldn’t say a vulgar word until parachute training. But after slamming into the ground on
the slide wire, it was “fuck” this and “fuck” that.

  And then there was Igor Karpov, Karpich. He was tall and gawky and had just made it under the six-foot height limit. His feet were huge, and with his eagle’s-beak nose we told him he had a natural “pilot’s profile.” Karpich came from the city of Armavir and tantalized us with tales of all the good-looking lonely nurses across the town at their school. His father had a wonderful collection of Western rock music records and we later had some great parties at his family’s apartment.

  By the end of our second semester, we were deeply involved in preflight training, studying the systems of the L-29 jet trainer. My class was flown to the preliminary flight-training center at Pirsagat in Azerbaijan in August 1979. The base was on an arid stretch of Caspian Sea coast south of Baku. I was not prepared for the baking heat of the Azerbaijan summer. We slept in old wooden barracks with no mosquito nets, and a few slow ceiling fans moved the stifling air. The soldiers showed us the trick of sleeping under wet sheets so that the evaporation cooled us.

  Like most of the cadets, I had just turned eighteen. We knew, of course, that the L-29 was only a jet trainer, not a combat fighter, but standing next to the gleaming three-ton aircraft and sliding my hands along the hot alloy skin of the thirty-two-foot wingspan, it seemed incredible that the State would give me the responsibility of flying such a complex and powerful machine.

  Dmitri, the keen observer of the West, told us that student pilots in the American Air Force and Navy received their basic flight instruction on propeller planes, and didn’t progress to jets for many months. When you considered that our American counterparts didn’t even begin to fly until they had completed their university or service academy education, this meant they were almost twenty-three years old before they soloed in a jet. By that age, most of us would be line pilots in combat regiments with hundreds of operational sorties under our belts.