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direction,” explains Shaposhnikov today from his office at the Flight Safety Foundation International in Moscow. “Firing and training grounds were leased to local collective farms; military trucks were used for fetching nonmilitary goods, men were sent to help collective farmers with crops.” Then he adds: “And surplus military property was given to local businessmen.”
    Whether he foresaw it or not, it was a looters’ charter. As if a whistle had sounded, the quartermasters’ stores from Vladivostok to Vitebsk, and all the air and weapons bases across Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, became a January sale. Selling at low, low cash prices to the right people—and that meant more or less anyone with the wherewithal to come knocking—lined the pockets of the sellers (with the battalion commander inevitably taking an 80 percent cut for turning a blind eye and signing the docket) and gave the buyers access to weapons-grade material for a fraction (usually less than 10 percent) of the guideline market value. Every serviceman with access to equipment, from high explosives, guns, and ammo down to night-vision gear and regulation thermal vests, liberated what he could. According to senior Moscow military analyst Colonel Oleg Belosludtsev, “Freelance arms merchants took over in cahoots with army officers, plundering the vast surplus stocks and selling wherever buyers could be found.”
    â€œIt might not have been a written memo,” says historian Dr. Mark Galeotti, academic chair of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, a historian who’s spent his career tracking organized crime in the former Soviet Union. “But it’s clear that there was an understanding. We can’t pay you, so sell what you need to in order to get by. At this point, you’ve got Russian fields being plowed by ‘tractors’ that are basically Red Army tanks with the turrets yanked off and a piece of metal soldered over the hole. So in that context, you want an Il-76? Sure!”
    At the same moment, the masses of ordnance, ammunition, planes, vehicles, and supplies returning from former Soviet bases abroad had become problematic. If there was a shortage of homes for the airmen, there were certainly no facilities to house the gear being repatriated in a procession of trucks, Il-76s, Antonovs, and ships from erstwhile Soviet garrisons in East Germany, Poland, Central Asia, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and further afield. Between the announcement of withdrawal and the last arms-laden Candid leaving East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport in 1994, it was widely understood that anyone who could make a buck for himself by disposing of some of the “load” would be doing everyone a favor.
    The sheer scale of this pilfering from the world’s greatest arms stockpile is staggering. “Ukraine, where [notorious illicit cargo baron and gunrunner to Liberia, Leonid] Minin came from, is a great example, like all the former satellite republics,” wrote PBS’s Frontline World journalist Matthew Brunwasser. “During the Soviet era the Second Soviet Army was based in Kiev as part of the Soviet Union’s defense strategy against a western NATO attack. Ukraine was equipped to maintain a standing army of 800,000—almost three times the size of Ukraine’s military today. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited these Soviet stockpiles of military goods intended for a military far larger than Ukraine’s.”
    In practice, that means that in Ukraine alone military equipment, weapons, and transport sufficient for 630,000 troops was now officially “surplus”—and fair game for anyone with enough cash and chutzpah. Colonel Oleg Belosludtsev estimates that a staggering 80 percent of all arms exports made after 1991 were through these “shadowy,” mafialike dealing networks that