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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.
    In the split second between the command and the commencement of an orgy of privateering and black-market arms sales the likes of which had never before been seen in peacetime, the world (Shaposhnikov’s closest cabinet colleagues included) all asked themselves the same question: What on earth was the commander in chief thinking?
    â€œCertain steps had to be taken officially in this