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grew up around the old military bases.
    Kremlin mandarin General Alexander Lebed went so far as to claim the entire Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994 was simply a cover for the massive corruption in military high command. “These so-called generals needed a big war to break out somewhere,” he admitted, “so that a large number of armored vehicles could be ‘written off.’ ” Armored columns would leave for Grozny; an unusually high number of tanks, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers (RPGs), ammo, whatever, would be “damaged” on the journey, written off, and replacements sent for. Those “damaged” goods, in pristine condition, would then be sold to whichever broker could meet them on a lonely Chechen road and take delivery.
    It was the fire sale of the century. Many of those who had access to the stockpiles simply sold their booty on, becoming dealers either in the “legitimate” marketplace, to Western companies looking to buy up cheap APCs, guns, armor, and aircraft, or to contacts in the rapidly growing local mafia organizations—men like Minin, giving mobsters prime access to former Soviet army stockpiles reclassified as “surplus” small arms. Within a couple of years, defense trade magazines such as the one I was working on were suddenly full of hurriedly written, blurry display ads for MiG fighters and other nearly new defense hardware placed by men like my friend “the Contact.”
    With uncanny speed, the mafia infiltrated the higher ranks of the military, developing a broad network of suppliers, collaborators, and commanding officers with enough clout to sign off military equipment by the truckload. Writing perfectly good equipment off as “damaged in transit” was a favored method, as it kept not only the buyers happy but the government’s suppliers too: the perfect win-win situation and, if they could only forget about the end use for the weapons, a seemingly victimless crime. Enlisted men further down the ladder like Mickey’s loose band of associates set up in business—as private security guards, as mercenaries, as drivers … and as freelance transport outfits.
    So if these reports are correct, then what on earth was an honest soldier like Shaposhnikov—a hero to many, whose good standing, integrity, and trustworthiness were such that President Boris Yeltsin entrusted Russia’s “nuclear red button” codes to him for safekeeping—thinking?
    â€œThese activities were intended to provide men and officers with free food and goods from local farmers and businessmen,” he confirms today. And despite his protestations that “the first post-Soviet winter was difficult for everyone, including our military and air force, but I was impressed that our personnel and operational readiness was up to the mark … discipline and loyalty mean a lot to our men,” Shaposhnikov himself must have felt that aside from being a discreet way of helping the boys, this colossal military fire sale was arguably the only means left of averting something even more explosive than an arms free-for-all: an all-out armed-forces mutiny.
    Russia had endured one attempted coup, the previous year when, in August 1991, government members opposed to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had imprisoned him and used troops to surround the Soviet White House in Moscow. Supreme Soviet Chairman Boris Yeltsin led popular protests against the coup, climbing a tank to deliver a speech denouncing the plotters. It is widely believed that it was only the entreaties of Shaposhnikov (who says he “enjoyed very good working and personal relations with Yeltsin”) that turned the tide, forcing the soldiers’ climb down. But now the men, unpaid, unfed, cold, and increasingly disaffected, were restive. The specter of hundreds of thousands of highly trained, desperate, and starving servicemen and ex-servicemen turning on