diminutive form of Vladimir), would later recall how Markov taught him
to navigate the dense and trackless forest along the Bikin.
During his military service, Markov also became a paratrooper, maybe
because he was strong and well coordinated, and maybe because—at five
and a half feet tall (the same height as Stalin)—he had something to
prove. If fate had taken one more twist, Markov and Trush could have
been jumping out of planes together. Both men were in the army in 1969
and Trush was a paratrooper, too. Because he was eleven months older, he
had already been assigned to a battalion in Turkmenistan, but after the
Damansky clashes in the spring of 1969, his battalion was mobilized to
Primorye. Only at the last minute were they recalled.
In the end, Markov never had to test his skills in battle, despite the fact
that both Russia and China remained on a war footing for years after the
Damansky incident.* The stakes were high enough that the Chinese and
Russian premiers, Zhou Enlai and Alexei Kosygin, saw fit to meet
personally in order to resolve the festering border issue. Although the
meeting was considered successful, Moscow continued its Far Eastern
troop buildup into the early 1970s.† By the time Markov was discharged
from the army in 1971, his father was dead; ten years later, he lost his
sister. Markov never returned to Kaliningrad (perhaps it was simply too
far) and, according to his wife, Tamara Borisova, none of his surviving
family ever visited Sobolonye. Had they taken the opportunity to do so,
they probably wouldn’t have recognized the die-hard tayozhnik as their
own.
- Nomenklatura, literally “list of names,” refers to the ruling elite of
communist society who held key positions in all spheres of Soviet
endeavor. The privileges they enjoyed and the proportion of the
population they represented bore striking resemblances to those of the
nobility under the czar. - According to R. Craig Nation, the Far Eastern theater of operations
during this period [1970s and ’80s] came to “absorb no less than one-
third of Soviet military assets.”^5