Outlaws Inc. (3 page)

 

PART II

Everything You Know Is Wrong: The USSR

 

CHAPTER THREE

The Lost Boys

Soviet Union, 1992

BY DECEMBER 1992, for Mickey and his crew, not only was the disastrous, drawn-out Soviet-Afghan war over: The Soviet Union had given up the ghost completely, bankrupted by its own arms-race supremacy and torn asunder by the tensions between reformers like President Mikhail Gorbachev and the old guard, between satellite states from Lithuania to Georgia making their bid for secession, and by the instinct for stamping out dissent. From the Berlin Wall to the McDonald's in Red Square, from universal comradeship to the “new Russians” sweeping around Moscow in armed cavalcades of BMWs, the times were changing indeed. When he'd left for Afghanistan in the early 1980s, Mickey had left a home he knew. By the time he'd returned, that home was no longer there.

Drafted in small numbers initially to shore up a “tame” Afghan communist government, like America's Vietnam, the game quickly changed for the Russian military. Now huge numbers of men with the world's best weaponry, tanks, aircraft, and intelligence found themselves struggling to survive the stealth-and-sabotage tactics of Afghans fighting for their own land and familiar with the endless mountain passes. Increasingly motivated by fear, desperation, and the thirst for revenge, both sides quickly developed a reputation for playing dirty. Reports of torture, looting, the massacring of civilians, booby traps and poisoned supplies and indiscriminate dropping of explosives began to emerge. And as the Afghan tribal leaders and mujahideen began receiving covert backing from Pakistan, the Gulf, and the CIA alike, flights of the “Gruz-200s” (Soviet military code for the Il-76 and giant Antonov cargo planes that carried Soviet soldiers' bodies home) stepped up their frequency. Soviet withdrawal went from unthinkable to inevitable, and having delivered and supplied the Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan, Mickey and his comrades became the ferrymen who would spirit them back out, alive or dead.

Returning home, Mickey and his fellow veterans saw everything they'd thought was eternal, secure, and structured turning to ashes in a matter of months. The campaign was lost, their wages (when the government could afford to pay them at all) rendered worthless by a collapsing ruble; the air force itself was a busted flush, the economy going down the pan, and their hopes for any kind of future, in the armed forces or out, were looking bleak.

In a parallel universe, a Russian-set version of
The Full Monty
would portray the sense of listlessness, despair, and betrayal felt by these erstwhile Soviet poster boys of heroism and virtue, suddenly told they're no longer needed, won't be paid, and that everything they fought for was wrong anyway. The Soviet army was on the scrap heap, and whole garrison towns had become dilapidated and abandoned, almost postapocalyptic husks. One of them was Mickey's.

TORRENTIAL RAIN DOES few cities any favors, but it's hard to believe Vitebsk could ever really be beautiful. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Like anywhere, the fourth-largest city of the Socialist Republic of Belarus has its old town, though it's now reduced to a couple of whitewashed promenades, and the center—all potted auto routes, soot-spouting Volgas, and dirty yellow buses full of elderly ladies in headscarves—is no worse than many of the former Eastern bloc's industrial centers. But there's something about the way the slate sky pushes down on acre after acre of horizontal concrete blocks (offices, houses, hospitals, and municipal car parks all seem to have been designed by the same firm of architects who may or may not have been heavily influenced by Tetris) that can make a man itch to get into his car, or anyone's car, and drive very far away, very quickly.

Like so many former Soviet towns, it had its pet industries beyond the air base and military-transport regiment, and like all of them, the clues are in the football teams. The two big local names are Lokomotiv Vitebsk (in the Soviet workers' paradise, the Lokomotivs were originally teams of engineers and railwaymen, just as the Dynamos were power-plant workers), also known simply as Vitebsk FC, and Kimovets Vitebsk (workers at the town's KIM tights and hosiery factory). After a disastrous 1995 season, they went under.

Eight miles out of town as you go northeast toward the lorry-choked E95 motorway and the Russian border, there's a rather bleak military field with a conning tower, planes, gates, and a few scattered concrete buildings: the ghost of a once-mighty air base that, give or take tours of duty in Afghanistan and across the Union, was home to Mickey and his crew and the hundreds of men and planes of the Third Guards Military Transport Aviation Division. It had all seemed so permanent: The men, the base, the planes—some thirty giant Il-76s and more An-22s—were part of the greatest standing armed force the world had ever known. And then one day that force simply evaporated.

Looking at it from this historical distance, in the rain on the deserted perimeter, it's hard to see how the empire's sudden collapse and so many former Soviet states' crazed “transition” to freewheeling capitalism could have ended up producing anything but a pan-global underground network of airborne traffickers. Or how the world could have expected anything but a proliferation of organized crime, profiteering, black markets, terror, and instability in its wake.

For ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, the sudden, galloping disintegration of the Soviet Union and its subsequent carve-up by privatizing entrepreneurs was nothing short of a disaster. A universal share-voucher issue by the Russian state went disastrously wrong when starving and impoverished ordinary Russians, with little or no idea what it meant to be a stakeholder in anything, swapped their shares almost immediately for food or vodka. As a result, almost 100 percent of the shares in newly privatized state operations and utilities worked their way back to the few men already wealthy enough to buy them up, share by share, with booze and bread.

Meanwhile, many among the first generation of Western firms to do business in former Soviet lands more than lived up to the Soviets' image of the robber-capitalist adventurer, turning up with much-needed liquid capital and tying Russian companies into swingeing and impenetrable contracts. Some Russian businessmen—soon dubbed “new Russians,” or
biznesmeny
—caught on quickly: Coca-Cola's head office in Ukraine reportedly hired its own militia after being raided by gunmen who forced their way past reception demanding the directors sign a “partnership agreement.” A Russian friend in credit control succeeded in tracking down a debtor with an invoice inquiry, only to be told by a voice on the telephone that he recognized her accent and her family wouldn't be too hard to trace should they not be able to “write off the debt amicably.”

As the economy seized up, ordinary people across the former Soviet Union became increasingly desperate. The World Bank's chief economist Joseph Stiglitz noted in disgust, “Not only was the [former Soviet states'] national economic pie shrinking; it was being divided up more and more inequitably so the average Russian was getting a smaller and smaller slice.” The effects were clear: From being a society in which only 2 percent lived below the poverty line—then defined as living on the equivalent of two dollars a day or less—by 1998 Russia's poverty trap had claimed one in four, with over 40 percent living on less than four dollars a day.

But if it was a disaster for ordinary people, for anyone employed by the military—and even by 1985, that figure was reckoned by the Central Committee to be a massive 20 percent of the entire working population of 135 million—it was nothing short of an apocalypse.

As the lands of the Union split away to try their luck as independent states, army units, air bases, nuclear submarines, men, machinery, and warheads suddenly found themselves claimed as sovereign property, as residents or unwilling occupiers of newly independent states far from home. Even at home, funding for the armed forces simply evaporated. Wages went unpaid. Rations of food, fuel, and clothing just failed to arrive. Equipment went unrepaired. Ghostly, hunger-ravaged soldiers lost confidence in the chain of command and simply wandered off. Nuclear warheads lay unguarded in padlocked sheds and on abandoned rolling stock, their guards forced to forage in the woods. Elite weapons scientists on the verge of starvation appealed frantically to an impoverished state for help in keeping their crumbling research facilities going and their families provided with food, shelter, and medicine. High-ranking officers took payment in whatever form they could get, from vacuum cleaners to breakfast cereals, and spent their days AWOL, trying to sell them for their supper on the black market. Army platoons hired themselves and their equipment out for cash, laying roads with their tanks and enforcing security for whoever had the money to feed them, while airmen diverted avgas, planted potatoes in air base soil, did whatever it took to feed their families, their men, themselves.

Pilots and other air force personnel were laid off en masse; those who remained often went unpaid for months, even years. As late as 1996, four MiG-31 pilots at the Yelizovo air base in Russia's far east resorted to a hunger strike in an attempt to claw back several months' back wages. The rate of “extracurricular” deaths among conscripts—from suicides, murders, and unfortunate accidents—jumped from next to nothing to three thousand a year. It had all happened so quickly that the sheer numbers of servicemen returning from erstwhile Soviet posts in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states, Central Asia, and beyond found there simply weren't enough houses for them; camps were set up in which soldiers and airmen and their families were forced to live in tents.

The authorities were rattled by the speed and scale of the breakdown. In a panicked 1992 report, first deputy defense minister Pavel Grachev protested that “of the Soviet Air Force's three military transport aviation divisions, suddenly only two regiments remain remotely operational.” To make matters worse, the massive base in Vitebsk, as well as bases like Ukraine's Dzhankoy, Zaporozhye, and Krivoy Rog, suddenly belonged to newly independent countries—which meant that they were not merely outside Russia's control but even more desperate for cash, and potentially even less stable.

Among the hundreds of newly created ex-servicemen at the Vitebsk base, all of whom suddenly found themselves on the scrap heap with no other prospects and often without a final wage packet, were Mickey and his crew.

“What do you do?” says Mickey. “It was a very bad time. There was no money coming in, no housing, no food, the army couldn't even feed us. We all had to find another way to survive—and I mean, really, to
survive
.”

But as it happened, they weren't looking for long before the solution found them. Because in a curious twist of fate, the very forces of free-market capitalism that had rushed in to pick over the bones of the USSR and that were now impoverishing its former pilots suddenly came to rest, for the briefest of moments, in the hands of one of the most powerful men in the erstwhile Soviet Union. And that man was about to take a very close interest indeed in the fate of men like Mickey and his crew.

EVGENY IVANOVICH SHAPOSHNIKOV was born on his family's farm in the southwestern Rostov region of Russia on February 3, 1942, into the tense, impoverished calm that descended between two murderous occupations by the SS. Rostov-on-Don had already been reduced to rubble by the Germans. Regarded by Hitler as having strategic importance for its river port, railways, and land rich in oil and minerals, the area had first been bombed, then briefly occupied the previous November. The Germans would be back to retake it in July 1942, when little Evgeny was just five months old.

Growing up amid the rubble, land mines, and poverty of postwar Rostov, and in a society now severely lacking in adult males, the boxy, well-built boy looked to the skies and Soviet film reels for his role models. From an early age, Evgeny worshipped the brave Soviet fighter pilots. “It was my dream to be a pilot from childhood,” he says today. “After World War Two, all military, including airmen, were highly respected persons. My house was close to the airport, and I used to watch the planes high in the sky. All my friends wanted to be like [legendary 1930s and World War II Russian fighter aces] Chkalov, Kozhedub, and Gromov. So the choice was obvious.”

Shaposhnikov and his schoolmates weren't alone. As with the race for outer space, aviation was very much the sleek, silver shape of things to come in the Soviet Union of the fifties and sixties: Yuri Gagarin himself was a pilot first, cosmonaut second, and the air force was hungry for the best and brightest to man its aircraft—a new, cleaner defense system for the Cold War's new geopolitical borders in the sky.

Graduating from the Kharkov Higher Military Aviation School in 1963, Shaposhnikov was quickly identified as having the right stuff and passed out of the prestigious Gagarin Air Force Academy in 1969. Square-shouldered and handsome, he was the perfect pilot—talented, well liked by superiors and comrades alike, and loyal. By 1991, when he was appointed the last defense secretary of the USSR, he'd already commanded the Soviet Air Force's Sixteenth Army in East Germany. In 1992, when the USSR broke up, he was appointed commander in chief of the armed forces of the newly created Confederation of Independent States—a looser, freer alliance, but one territorially similar to the Soviet Union. Shaposhnikov was a powerful man. And his sympathies, as you might expect, lay very much with air force personnel at this difficult and uncertain time.

That, at least, is as close to an explanation anyone today is prepared to risk as to what Evgeny Ivanovich reportedly did next.

According to documents uncovered by Russian investigative journal
Sovershenno Sekretno
(“Top Secret”) and reported by the International Relations and Security Network, in the winter of 1992 Shaposhnikov issued a command granting the right to anyone of battalion-commander rank or higher to dispose of “surplus property” belonging to the air force. They could dispose of it in exchange for payment—though no indication survives that guide prices were given—and to suitable buyers, though it's unclear precisely who, in this impoverished land, might both have cash and want weapons. Nor was it clear to many men further down the line exactly what was meant by “surplus property,” as distinct from, say, the entire contents of stores, aircraft, ammo, uniforms, and anything else that wasn't nailed down.