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  One of the visiting officers who interviewed me was a major from the PVO’s advanced instructors’ school at Savaslayka. He had a list with the six most promising cadets in the MiG-23 program. Although I was still averse to the idea of becoming an instructor, he did pique my interest when he mentioned the instructors there would be trained for advanced “fourth generation” aircraft, such as the MiG-31 and the Su-27, that were just completing flight testing in prototype.

  “Zuyev,” he said, “we can certainly use a man like you. Think it over.”

  I promised the major I would and he left the interview room reminding me that the sign-up deadline for his program was the next afternoon.

  That night we had our graduation party. I didn’t go to bed until dawn, and I didn’t wake up until midafternoon, my mouth dry and my head pounding. Still fuzzy, I rolled out of bed, now convinced that the opportunity of flying truly advanced fighters at Savaslayka was too good to miss. Wandering down the corridor in my hangover daze, I discovered that all six openings for the major’s program had already been filled. The guys said that everyone with family connections had pulled out the stops to get on that list. If I hadn’t enjoyed the party so much, I might have made the deadline.

  The suspense about my assignment was finally broken when one of Sergei Mashenko’s girlfriends, a typist in the commandant’s office, revealed I was on the list of six cadets destined for Frontal Aviation regiments in the Transcaucasus Military District. That was good news. There were three MiG-23 regiments in Georgia, the 176th at Mikha Tskhakaya, the 512th at Vaziani, and the 614th near Meria. Rumor had it that these regiments were training hard, preparing to send squadrons to Afghanistan. That was the kind of action I wanted.

  Besides, I had visited Georgia on my summer leave with my friend Gary and knew what a pleasant place it was. The small republic was wedged between the high wall of the Great Caucasus and Turkey, bounded on the west by the Black Sea and the east by the mountains of Armenia and Azerbaijan. It had a mild, subtropical climate and lush vineyards and citrus groves. Georgian families were renowned for their hospitality and Georgian women for their dark-eyed beauty.

  When my friends asked if I was pleased to be heading for Georgia, I quoted that old Air Force saw, “It’s better to eat white bread by the Black Sea than black bread by the White Sea.”

  But the guys who were headed to isolated bases on the Arctic shores of the White Sea reminded me of the heat and food poisoning that had plagued us in the South. Deep Freeze Morozov shut them up.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s better to wash the sweat off your balls than to have to defrost them.”

  At the graduation parade, I watched as Lapwing Siskin and Deep Freeze were presented with the coveted Red Diploma, signifying academic excellence. And their noses were definitely not blue. But I was more than satisfied with the citation on my own diploma, which noted my flying skills and dedication to duty.

  “Staunch in aerial combat, prepared to give his life for the Motherland and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Combat Training

  1983-84

  I spent my graduation leave at home in Samara, working on my grandmother’s tiny apartment in the old wooden house in Bezimaynka. I had received a 540-ruble bonus after four years at the academy, and it gave me great pleasure to spend most of it on paint, plaster, and electrical fittings for Grandma’s little room.

  Life was certainly becoming difficult for elderly pensioners, especially those who lived alone. As a boy in Samara there had always been plenty of food on the shelves of the grocery stores and clothes on the racks of the State department store. But around the time I graduated from school, shortages of meat and cheese became more frequent. And I had been so busy with my flight training over the previous two years that I had hardly noticed the general deterioration in living conditions. Now people actually had to wait in line for staples like milk and flour. And I saw many more drawn, angry faces on the crowded sidewalks.

  When I had visited home from the academy, I had always brought flowers and a small gift of cheese for my mother. Now I saw that the precious cheese, which was still available in Armavir, was even more appreciated than the flowers.

  My mother and stepfather had been able to exchange their two small apartments for a comfortable larger flat in Microrayon 4. But even the food stores of “Micro-Israel” were no longer well stocked. My family, however, was able to build a tiny “dacha” on a parcel of land outside the city, which they could garden in the summer. They rented 450 square meters from the oblast, where they planted tomatoes, potatoes, and a variety of berries. They even planted a line of apple and cherry trees. This was still a hobby for them, but one that promised to see them through any real food shortages.

  And now people were beginning to complain about the chronic, unexplained shortages. Their complaints, however, went unanswered, unless an important delegation of Party officials visited the city. Then, miraculously, the shops were always stocked with meat and dairy products people hadn’t seen for months.

  I reported to the 176th Frontal Aviation Fighter Regiment at Mikha Tskhakaya in December 1982. The base, known by its call sign “Ruslan,” was just south of this western Georgian city. The Republic of Georgia was ringed by high, rugged mountains, with a hilly plateau in the east and the marshy Kolkhida lowlands running to the Black Sea in the west. Our base stood on this rich alluvial plain, not far from the Rioni River. The region was a citrus-growing area that had been reclaimed from stagnant marshland since the Soviet Union had annexed the republic in the 1920s. The city of Mikha Tskhakaya was the ancient Senaki, which like so many Soviet cities had been renamed for a local hero of the Revolution.

  The area was historical. Known as Colchis to the ancient Greeks, the hero Jason and his Argonauts had struggled hard to journey there in search of the Golden Fleece. And judging from the bustling open-air markets beneath the towering eucalyptus trees and palms, there were still plenty of riches to be found. I had never seen such diverse and beautiful produce. The vendors’ stalls were piled high with gleaming peppers, pyramids of huge oranges, and bunches of the season’s last fat purple grapes. There were stacks of yellow squashes, mounds of big white onions, beets, carrots, and yams. Freshly butchered lambs and goats hung on hooks in the butcher stalls, and old peasant women in bright head scarves sold both plucked and live chickens. There was an exotic southern spice to the air. Beyond the snowy wall of the Caucasus to the north, there was winter. Here the December sunshine was bright, and the air smelled of jasmine.

  Riding the bus out to the base, I saw farm carts and trucks carrying even more produce to the city. Obviously the prosperity in Georgia was due to more than just the favorable climate of this protected, subtropical valley. The Georgians had a reputation for being energetic and enterprising. For every hectare of collective farm down here, there were two still held in private hands. I later found out that many of the “State” farms were actually run by Georgian families for their own profit. Probably the biggest difference between Georgia and the Russian Republic was the attitude of Georgians toward wealth. Where I came from, people were universally jealous of anyone who saved enough money to buy a car, for example. Here a wealthy person was respected. And people didn’t mind spending money on themselves. The small, family-owned kebab stands and marketside canteens offered better food than most State restaurants I had seen elsewhere.

  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.

  Andropov took the unusual step of appealing directly to the Soviet people via radio and television. The incipient decline of Soviet industry over the past thirty years, he said, was due entirely to the weakening discipline of the Soviet people. Socialist Planning could only work to the benefit of all if the individual citizen on the shop floor or the farm took his job seriously. But absenteeism and tardiness, which led to drunkenness and widespread alcoholism, were sapping the vitality of the Soviet economy. These abuses, he added, had been tolerated in the past — a brutally frank, and accurate, aspersion on Brezhnev’s decrepit leadership — but Andropov made clear there was a new leader in charge of the country.

  The reform movement seemed to be sweeping the Soviet Union. People were afraid to leave work during the day, even if that was the only chance they had to buy scarce necessities. My mother told me that workers at her institute were encouraged to report anyone arriving even two minutes late. I felt great satisfaction at watching these events unfold. Andropov was exactly the kind of leader we needed: tough, practical, and resourceful. I knew from my own experience that the Socialist sys
tem rewarded those who worked hard. I had sworn to defend that system, with my very life if necessary. And I wanted everyone else to show the same level of dedication.

  By order of the chief of staff of the VVS, all new lieutenants had to qualify as Third Class pilots within one year. This meant we had to work harder than Colonel Homenko could have ever imagined possible.

  Our maneuver training circuits and weapons poligons — rectangular bomb, missile, and cannon firing ranges — were close enough to the Ruslan base that we could fly three or four sorties a day and at least two each night we trained. Ruslan lay in the middle of the flat Rioni delta, less than thirty miles from the coast, equidistant from the Great Caucasus to the north and the Maliy Kavkaz mountains to the south.

  After our initial jet training in the L-29, the complex attributes of the MiG-23 combined to produce a seemingly sophisticated airplane. In effect, we had to learn three completely different sets of aerodynamic limits with their accompanying power-setting and angle-of-attack restrictions. The plane would behave one way at low speed with unswept wings and completely differently at another wing angle and throttle position.

  At Ruslan I learned how this flawed design had been accepted as one of the Air Force’s first-rank combat aircraft. Apparently Marshal Pavel Kutakhov, the Air Force commander in chief, was a close friend of Brezhnev’s. Kutakhov was also a crony of the heads of the Mikoyan Design Bureau. The marshal convinced Brezhnev to accept the bureau’s new aircraft without submitting the design to a very rigorous competition among the combat aircraft OKBs, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, and Yakovlev. So the Air Force received thousands of MiG-23s, a design with many strong points, but one whose flaws had not been “wrung out” in competition.

  Unfortunately the Sukhoi Design Bureau, which had done brilliant work during the war, fell out of favor in the late 1940s. Stalin was influenced by Anastasi Mikoyan, his foreign minister, and the brother of the Mikoyan OKB chief, Artem. The Sukhoi bureau was disbanded and its brilliant, forward-thinking designers and engineers dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. The Mikoyan OKB was now top dog in Moscow. Although their MiG-15 and MiG-21 were well-conceived and innovative aircraft for their time, the bureau lacked the vision of Sukhoi. Instead, they relied on political connections and pokazuka to push through their MiG-23 design.