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  On previous visits to the hospital, I’d learned from other officers that perfectly qualified MiG-29 and Su-27 pilots were being grounded because they could no longer meet the impossibly high standards of the Category 1 health certificate. The slightest irregularity in heartbeat, reflex, or motor response might mean a man’s flying career would end in a medical discharge.

  It certainly was ironic that the generally soft and overweight medical staff of this hospital controlled the destinies of the country’s most vigorously fit pilots and cosmonauts. In the past, I understood, a politically well connected pilot — or certainly an experienced cosmonaut — could bypass these doctors’ authority. A few years before, a playboy cosmonaut had even begun an extended mission to the Mir space station while suffering from gonorrhea. It was a pretty bad bout of clap, however, and the cosmonaut had to cut the mission short and descend in a Soyuz spacecraft for emergency treatment. There had been similar excesses by senior Air Force pilots who had managed to circumvent medical authority. But now the medics reigned supreme, and we were controlled by harsh regulations like the chief of staff’s directive.

  In December 1988, two months before my last flight, an event occurred that made clear to me the logic behind this directive, and also presented me with an opportunity to honorably stop serving the system that I had come to hate. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had dramatically announced to the United Nations General Assembly in New York that the Soviet Union would “unilaterally” reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men and 10,000 tanks, in order to ease military tension in the world. Both Pravda and Izvestia had praised Gorbachev for this unprecedented gesture, and had gone on to explain that the reduction of Soviet armed forces graphically demonstrated the peace-loving nature of our government. We were told that the reduction in force of 500,000 men would be shared by all branches of the military, including the Air Force.

  Four days after my February 13 flight, when my air division’s medical staff formally requested that I be sent to Moscow for a complete medical evaluation, I presented a formal request of my own to Lieutenant Colonel Anatoli Antonovich, my regimental commander:

  To: Commander, 176th Frontal Aviation Regiment

  I hereby request a discharge from the ranks of the VVS due to my physical condition, and to the fact that I am not willing to continue service on the ground.

  Signed: Zuyev, Alexander M., Captain

  Now I was in Moscow, completing three weeks of intensive medical examinations. The Air Force hoped that I could soon be returned to flight status. But I had other plans: to secure a medical discharge from the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. Once out of the service, I planned to emigrate to the West and a life of freedom. I was confident that I would find a way out of the Soviet Union without an exit visa. Most Soviet citizens believed the frontiers were impassable, tightly sealed by KGB border guards. But people had simply built these prison walls in their minds after decades of repression. I had traveled the southern republics, and I knew there were plenty of smugglers’ trails connecting Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Turkey and Iran.

  I nodded to a pair of Su-27 pilots on their way to the gym in the hospital’s administrative wing next door. In their blue warm-up suits, they looked like young Olympic athletes. All of us who flew the “fourth generation” aircraft were fine specimens, representing the top one percent of our peer group in terms of physical condition, mental ability, and psychological balance. And Air Force propaganda made the most of our physical perfection and skill. In the crowds at airport terminals and railroad stations, and on the Metro among sophisticated Muscovites, the uniform and wings of an Air Force pilot still drew expressions of respect.

  Even those who bitterly opposed the Afghan war recognized our skill and dedication. This was noteworthy because popular support for that war had been almost completely eroded by shocking revelations made possible by glasnost. Independent Soviet journalists now brought the country the truth about the performance of our “internationalist duty” in Afghanistan. The Muslim Mujahedin were now called guerrillas, not dismissed as dushmani, “bandits.” And we now had to accept the grim reality that these guerrillas controlled most of the country. The Soviet Army had been driven back into a few fortified enclaves that the Mujahedin raided and shelled at will.

  Finally, one month earlier, the last Soviet troops had been withdrawn, a defeated army.

  However, the average citizen on the street did not blame Soviet soldiers and airmen for this disaster. They knew we had been trained and equipped at great expense to defend the Motherland, the Rodina. This trust, of course, grew as much from fear as from sincere patriotism. Fear of invasion ran deep in our history. The Motherland had been overrun and pillaged so many times-by Mongols, Swedes, French, and Germans-that most people believed it was only a matter of time before the tanks of the NATO imperialists or the renegade Socialist Chinese hordes spilled across our borders. Naturally the Party did much to keep this fear alive.

  But the people’s respect for the military did not depend on artificial stimulation. They sincerely admired us, which was remarkable, considering that there had always been so much official pokazuka — the all-pervasive and transparent official sham — in everyday Soviet life. Despite glasnost and perestroika, slogans were still plastered across building fagades on banners half as wide as a soccer field, proclaiming the Party’s eternal concern for the welfare of the toiling masses, the profound wisdom of Marxist-Leninist dogma, the steady progress of Soviet agriculture and industry… and all the rest of the empty claptrap. Few people out in those food lines believed that shit anymore.

  Fundamental doubts about the Soviet system were even splitting the ranks of the military, basically along the lines of the generations. I shared my ten-bed dormitory here at the hospital with four other pilots, two of them young officers like myself, and the two others elderly retired veterans who had seen combat in the Great Patriotic War and had served out their careers in the preglasnost totalitarian decades. Every time a new issue of Argumenti i Facti or Ogonyok was published, the young pilots found some hot issue to debate late into the night with the veterans. Usually they argued the validity of the shocking revelations of past repression, Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, the gulags of the postwar years, or the cruel treatment of dissidents in the State psychiatric hospitals.

  The old veterans simply could not admit that they had spent their lives serving a corrupt and evil system. The stories in the new publications, they said with bitter scorn, were just lies spread by Jews and imperialist agents. But the younger pilots, who, like me, slipped away from the hospital to walk the streets of Moscow, recognized the truth. And they also recognized the swelling impatience and frustrated anger that were gripping their fellow citizens.

  No matter how persuasive the evidence in the published exposes of mass deportations and the genocidal deaths of millions-sealed in boxcars during the cruel etape and worked to death on starvation diets in the countless gulag camps-the elderly veterans could never admit they had protected a system as cruel as the Nazi regime against which they had fought so bravely. My younger colleagues dismissed these bitter retired officers as “skiers,” an allusion to their shuffling gait. But I knew that there was a more robust generation of senior officers still on active duty who were every bit as adamant in their defense of the rotten system. It was those marshals and generals who held my fate in their hands.

  Coming toward me down the corridor, I spotted the ambling figure of a tall, young pilot. Only one fellow I knew had those long, heavy legs, stooped shoulders, and huge feet: Igor “Karpich” Karpov, whom I had first met as a cadet at the Armavir Academy eleven years before.

  “Karpuha,” I called, using our old nickname for him, “since when do they admit the slackers of the PVO to this fine Air Force institution?”

  He turned to face me. It was Karpich, all right. Nobody else had that eagle’s beak of a nose.

  “Shurka,” he said, grabbing my hand and smiling. “What are you doing here?
I thought you’d be Air Force chief of staff by now.”

  We grinned at each other. Karpich hadn’t changed much in those years. He looked like the same rumpled, good-natured braggart I’d always known. The last I’d seen him was two years before on a visit to his MiG-23 PVO regiment near Smolensk, west of Moscow.

  “So,” I asked, “what’s up with you?”

  Karpich moaned and flashed me his old cocky smile, then glanced quickly up and down the corridor. “Never trust a zampolit with a combat airplane.” He laughed out loud now. “I got shot down by my deputy regimental commander for political administration.”

  “You what?” This seemed to be the lead-in to a standard pilot’s joke, but Karpich was serious.

  “We were out on the missile poligon, firing R-23s at LA-17 target drones,” he said quietly. “GCI was vectoring a pair of aircraft on the target because the drone was almost out of fuel.”

  The LA-17 drone was a fast, very maneuverable target drone powered by a solid-fuel rocket engine. Firing R-23 radar-guided missiles at these drones was realistic combat training. You had to fly well and act with quick decisiveness. Unfortunately for Karpich, one of the other two-plane flights operating that day was led by his zampolit. These officers were always much better chatterboxes than pilots. I thought of the political officer in my own regiment who had almost blasted the Tu-16 with a burst of cannon fire. The VVS recognized the zampolits’ shortcomings. A directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force limited our zampolits to a maximum of four training sorties a day and prevented them from flying late in any given training day’s schedule because “fatigue” might jeopardize safety.

  Karpich checked the corridor to make sure we weren’t within earshot of strangers, a reflexive gesture we all repeated many times a day. “The zampolit was so excited to actually get a solid lock on the LA-17 that he fired his missile without interrogating the target with the SRZO.”

  “That really doesn’t surprise me, Karpich,” I said. The Soviet SRZO was similar to the coded Information Friend or Foe system employed in the West. Any pilot using live weapons with friendly aircraft nearby had to electronically interrogate the intended target to verify it was an enemy before firing.

  “The next thing I heard,” Karpich continued, “was the colonel screaming on the radio, ‘Karpov, eject! Now!’ I ejected just before the missile hit.”

  I couldn’t help grinning, despite Karpich’s pained expression. During our preliminary flight training with the L-29 trainer at the Pirsagat Air Base in Azerbaijan, he had revealed that he was terrified of ejecting from a crippled aircraft. Despite all our efforts to hammer into his thick head the simple truth that a pilot’s life was worth more than an airplane, Karpich had stubbornly refused to even consider using his ejection seat.

  “How was it?” I asked. “Did you hurt your back?” The MiG-23 ejection seat was notorious for compressing your vertebrae.

  Karpich scowled and nodded. “My back is fucked. I probably won’t be flying jets anymore.”

  Thanks to the rotten zampolit system, here he was undergoing the rigorous standard postejection medical exam. That had been bad luck for him, but a pleasant surprise for me. I was happy to have found an old friend in the hospital.

  “So, why are you here?” Karpich asked. “Are you about to become the first cosmonaut in our illustrious class?”

  “No,” I said, “hardly that. It’s a long story, Karpuha.”

  I began to tell Karpich a version of that story, being careful not to reveal any information that might implicate him in my deception.

  But I was interrupted by the arrival of my nurse escort, a good-looking brunette named Nina. She wore her starched white uniform so tight that her nipples — “circuit breakers” to the young pilots — showed clearly through the fabric. Here patients had to be escorted to their appointments by nurses who carried the patients’ medical records. Most pilots objected to the degrading hospital regulation. But, unlike the others, I certainly did not mind walking a few paces behind Nina’s seductively swaying hips. Normally I would have made a pass at her. Nina, however, had made it clear that she was “engaged” to a snot-nosed kid just finishing secondary school. It turned out the boy had relatives in West Germany, and Nina was trading on her good looks for the chance to emigrate to the West. Her story was indicative of the desperation people felt.

  I wanted freedom, too. But I had chosen another means to obtain it.

  Walking down this corridor, we passed the outpatient reception area, where the hospital’s unofficial clientele arrived each morning. They stood out in dramatic contrast to the young pilots. The paunchy old men with faces as red and mottled as a plate of borscht were the elite of the military nomenklatura, active duty and retired. Their black GAZ-31 sedans crowded the parking lot. You knew they were the big shots by the number of zeros on their license plates. The sleek men in their thirties dressed in well-tailored American suits were the rising stars of the KGB. Their equally stylish wives and well-groomed children were always led to the head of the line at each diagnostic or treatment department. These people had never stood in line for cabbage or laundry detergent. Their chins were not nicked by dull, rusty razor blades that had to last through fifty shaves. They took what they wanted. They did not wait to be thrown scraps like those angry millions in the endless lines.

  This was still the way the world worked, despite the “reforms” of glasnost and perestroika. My fellow pilots and I were the official reason the State had invested so generously in this hospital and its expert staff. But the nomenklatura were here, as always, to skim the cream off the State’s generosity.

  Passing the library, I glanced at the inevitable bust of Lenin. Here he was portrayed in a meditative pose. My entire life I had been watched by Lenin: “Dedushka,” “Grandfather” Lenin smiling down on my kindergarten class, Lenin the Military Expert gracing the walls of the Armavir Academy, Lenin the Friend of Humanity, Lenin the Universal Genius. I was sick of looking at him.

  When I was sixteen, my mother and I visited Moscow. She assumed that, like every other normal young Soviet citizen, I wanted to visit Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square. But when she explained we would have to get up at five-thirty to begin standing in line at six, a full three hours before the Tomb opened, I told her I could wait until I visited the capital in the summer. It was February and I certainly had no intention of risking frostbite simply to pass before the glass coffin of a waxy corpse. Maybe that was the unrecognized first tentative step down the path that led me to this hospital. Maybe not. More probably I was just a typical lazy adolescent who preferred a warm hotel bed to the icy cobblestones of that windswept square. Twelve years had passed and I had not yet made the pilgrimage.

  In any event, Lenin’s body, as rosy and firm as New Year’s marzipan, still lay in that mausoleum. And people from all over the Soviet Union still lined up in the winter frost and summer sun to pay their homage. To me, their devotion to Lenin was a touchstone of our nation’s progress toward freedom. As long as simple people on the street believed in the Great Leader’s Universal Wisdom, the Party would retain control of their minds.

  We turned left from the medical diagnosis wing and climbed the stairs to a quieter, more softly lit department on the second floor. This was the realm of the psychologists. Here the decor was less clinical. Rich wood trim and bookcases replaced the spotless tile and electronic apparatus, giving the department an academic atmosphere. Nina led me to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Frolov, the clinical psychologist assigned to my case.

  Lieutenant Colonel Frolov rose from his desk, took my records from the nurse, then greeted me. He was a lean, vigorous man in his late thirties, with dark hair and intelligent hazel eyes. His white medical coat was starched and spotless.

  “Alexander Mikhailovich,” he said, addressing me formally, a gesture of respect from a senior officer to a pilot captain. His handshake was firm. “Please sit down.”

  His office was large and handsomely furnished. The har
dwood parquet floor glowed from recent polishing, matching the shoulder-high maple wall paneling. The desk was wide and well varnished. There were two telephones on the right corner.

  Frolov’s office reflected his status as the hospital’s chief clinical psychologist. His diagnoses and recommendations were taken seriously by Air Force personnel. I had to accept that the specialists in the internal medicine, neurology, and orthopedic departments had found nothing physically wrong with me during their exhaustive examinations. So Frolov represented my last real hope of obtaining a medical discharge.

  He offered me a comfortable armchair, then sat at the desk and opened the thick pasteboard dossier containing my medical records. He withdrew a neatly penned chart covered with a sharply spiked graph. I saw my name and service number on the corner of the chart. Apparently this was the plotted result of the intensive psychological tests I had taken three days before.

  Frolov frowned as he reviewed the graph. There were preplotted parallel lines running horizontally across the graph, which no doubt measured the “norms” so valued in all official Soviet life. The peaks and valleys circled in red of my plotted test results fell far above and far below these accepted norms.

  Ever since I’d been a kursant at the Armavir Higher Aviation Academy, I had shared a basic tenet of survival with my fellow cadets and later with the pilots in my regiment: “Never tell the truth to a psychologist.” Even as boys fresh out of school, we had understood that there were “safe,” officially acceptable answers to the long psychological profile tests we were obliged to take. And I had followed that policy through four years at the academy and seven years as a fighter pilot. During those eleven years, I must have taken different versions of this test at least ten times, always trying to shield my true feelings. I always got a headache trying to thread my way through the minefield of questions.