Outlaws Inc. Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œWhat 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