Contents |
The First Escape
An overpowering, unrelenting stench saturated the unventilated
coach, emanating from its filthy toilet, from the vomit of drunks, from bodies and clothes too long unwashed.
The windows, grimy and flyspecked, could not be opened. And the unupholstered wooden benches of the
coach, with their high, straight backs, made any posture miserable. Yet the very squalor of the train sustained him
by reminding him that he was journeying away from squalor.
On the fifth morning he awakened from a half sleep and
saw that during the night the train had entered the rich
plains surrounding Armavir. Under the yellow sunshine
they were moving through fields of green wheat, then past
blooming orchards and vineyards. Bounding from the
train as if springing out of a cage, he delighted in the
comparative cleanliness, warmth, and gaiety of Armavir.
It was an old city with cobblestoned streets, trees, flowers,
and a number of colorful prerevolutionary buildings that
had withstood war and social change. Among the 200,000
inhabitants were substantial numbers of indomitable Armenians
and Georgians and an abnormal proportion of
pretty girls, many of whom attended a nursing school or
teachers' college.
[62] The clime was balmy and benign, and wanting to exercise,
Belenko jogged to the camp for applicants eight miles
outside the city. A spirit of high expectancy and camaraderie
pervaded the throngs of young men he joined there.
They had traveled from all reaches of the Soviet Union,
more than 4,000 of them, lured and united by the hope
that they would be chosen to fly. No one told them that
the slightest physiological flaw, no matter how irrelevant
to health or flying, would disqualify them. No one told
them that survivors of the physical scrutiny would have to
score almost perfectly on the written tests to have a
chance. No one told them that out of the thousands, only
360 would be selected. Consequently, they talked of imminent
glories and rewards in the sky, never acknowledging
that they might be among the rejected, condemned to two
years of harsh servitude as common soldiers. Few complained
about the drudging tasks assigned them while they
waited their turn to be examined — unloading bricks, digging
ditches, laying concrete slabs for runways, weeding
fields. This was a small price.
Physicians inspected, probed, pressed, X-rayed, tested,
interrogated, and listened to Belenko for five days; then
one stamped his medical records "Fit for Flight Training
Without Restrictions." For him, the written examinations
assessing basic knowledge of the sciences and Party theory
were easy, and he did well. When the names of the first
180 successful candidates were posted in alphabetical
order the last week of June, his was there.
The morning Belenko was formally sworn into the Soviet
armed forces, a squat sergeant, the right side of his
face jaggedly scarred almost from ear to chin, lined him
and nineteen other cadets into a squad. Pacing the line,
he put his face close to that of every second or third cadet,
glowered, and sniffed like a dog. Belenko thought he was
either slightly daft or trying to be funny. Suddenly the
sergeant stepped back and commenced to revile them, obscenely
and furiously. "So, you dripping chickens, you're
in the Soviet Army, and I'm going to tell you something
about our Army. They say that life in the Soviet Army is
like life in a chicken coop. You know you're going to get
screwed; you just don't know when, how, and by whom.
[63] Well, I'11 tell you when — whenever you do anything different
from what I say. You obey me absolutely, day and
night, or I'll have your head as well as your ass. We have
another saying. The chicken began to think and wound up
in the soup, shit soup. From now on, I think for you.
You will think, you will behave, you will look just as I
say. Look at your miserable selves; you look just like the
scum you are. The next time I see you, I want you to look
like Soviet soldiers. I want your boots to be as shiny as
the balls of a cat...." In ever more curdling language
the abasement and intimidation continued until Belenko
concluded the man was serious, that all this was real.
Well, millions of others have been in the same situation.
It's bound to be better when we start flying.
They would not fiy, however, for a long while. After
completing basic military training, the standard Course
for Young Warriors administered to all recruits, the cadets
were transferred to an air base on the other side of Armavir.
There they began fifteen months of academic studies:
science of communism, history of the Party, Marxist/
Leninist philosophy, mathematics, physics, electronics,
tactics, navigation, topography, military regulations, and
aerodynamics. Classes started at 7:30 A.M., after breakfast
and inspection, and continued until 7:30 P.M. six days a
week. On Sunday morning they swabbed, swept, or dusted
all crannies of the barracks; then a political officer treated
them to a two-hour dissertation about current world events.
A television crew preparing a special program about
flight training at Armavir filmed the cadets as they took
state examinations in September. A couple of days afterward
Belenko was summoned to the office of the commandant
and informed that because of his handsome
appearance and because he ranked first on the exams, he
had been designated to appear on the program. A commentator
interviewed him before the cameras, and he became
something of a celebrity after the program was
shown on Armavir television.
The cadets received their first leave in September and
vouchers enabling them to fly via Aeroflot anywhere in the
Soviet Union for a few rubles. Various friends invited
Belenko to stay with their families in Moscow, Leningrad,
[64] and Kirov. But a feeling of obligation or the yearning for
a sense of family he never had had or a vague hope that
things might be different impelled him to visit Rubtsovsk.
He appeared in a new blue uniform with the gold, black,
and blue shoulder boards of a cadet, emblems denoting
that he was, as he looked, a special soldier picked and destined
by his country to be much more. The pride he
thought he saw in his father's face momentarily made him
proud, and his stepmother fawned over him. They were
impressed, and wanting their acquaintances to be impressed,
they gave a party ostensibly in his honor. His father's wartime
friend, the truck factory manager, a Party underling
assigned to the factory, and a couple of others from the
plant were invited. Belenko realized that all were people
who might help the family in the future, that the party
really was not for him. He did not blame them. He felt
only embarrassment at the irreducible emotional distance
apparent between him and his father and stepmother
whenever they were alone. They had nothing meaningful
to say to each other. They did not know each other; they
never had and never would. Politely lying about his schedule,
he moved out on the third day and looked up friends
from high school.
One of his schoolmates had been killed in an automobile
accident, and another imprisoned for black marketeering.
Two had escaped to Moscow, one was in medical school,
and another studying engineering. Most were working in
factories, mainly the truck factory. The approbation his
uniform and status evoked saddened, rather than heartened,
him as he contrasted the richness of his future with
the desolation of theirs.
In Omsk, Belenko sought out his best DOSAAF friend,
Yuri Nikolayevich Sukhanov, who had grown up pretty
much like him, largely forsaken by divorced parents. He
remembered him as a tall, broad-shouldered boxer good
enough to try out for the 1968 Olympics team, a freespirited
hell raiser, and one of the most promising flight
students.
Now the sight of him appalled Belenko. He had gained
twenty-five pounds, looked fifteen years older, and seemed
sapped of all his characteristic vibrance. Nevertheless, he
[65] insisted that Belenko share a bottle of vodka in his room,
and the entreaties were so earnest Belenko had to accede.
An injury Sukhanov sustained in boxing had permanently
impaired his vision, precluding him from passing
Air Force physicals and from fighting anymore. He had
married a wonderful girl, a secretary at the electronics
plant where he worked, and had tried to study electronic
engineering at night school. But with the birth of their
baby, the combined pressures of work, study, and family
overwhelmed him, and he dropped out of school. They
could find time for little other than what daily subsistence
required. Sometimes food shopping alone, which they
could undertake only before or after work, consumed two
to three hours because they had to line up at different
stores for bread, vegetables, staples, and meat.
Sukhanov's wife, Irina, was sitting on the bed nursing the
baby when they entered. Belenko judged the room was
about nine yards long and three yards wide. The bed, a
crib, a small desk, one chair, and the cupboard and refrigerator
took up most of the space. There was a small
communal kitchen at the end of the hall; the toilet was in
an outhouse. Irina welcomed Belenko as graciously as the
circumstances allowed, putting the baby in the crib and
setting out bread and canned fish on the desk, which also
served as a dining table. Half-consciously, Belenko, in recounting
life in flight school, tried to emphasize the negative
— the petty tyrannies, hardships and restrictions and
seeming stupidities of military life. Sukhanov finally
stopped him. "Thank you, Viktor. But I would give anything
to be in your place."
Raucous shouts greeted Belenko at Factory 13, and a
crowd of workers formed around him. "Send out for
juice!" But Belenko produced the vodka, making himself
all the more of a hero. He questioned them, hunting for
evidence of change, of some improvement. There was none.
It was the same except that in his eyes the swamp now was
more fearful than ever. For once, he drank with them
without restraint and for the same reason, but no amount
of alcohol could blur or alter what he saw.
There was alarm at Armavir when Belenko returned
from leave. A cholera epidemic had spread from the shores
[66] of the Black Sea through the region, and all military personnel
were being quarantined indefinitely on their bases.
A military physician briefed the cadets about the nature
and dangers of cholera, noting that one good antidote was
"vodka with garlic." Belenko was astounded, for from his
own reading, he already knew about cholera.
Cholera! If we have the best medicine in the world, why
should we have cholera? Cholera is a disease of the yellows
and blacks. It is a disease of filth. Well, of course. There
is shit and filth and garbage everywhere: on the beaches,
in the outhouse and garbage pit of every house, every
apartment building. People can't bathe or even wash their
dishes properly. What can you expect? How many toilets
could we build for the price of one spaceship?
The cholera epidemic was followed by an outbreak of a
virulent and infectious respiratory ailment, then by an
epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease. In consequence, the
cadets were locked on base throughout the autumn and
winter. The knowledge that he could not look forward to
even a few hours of freedom had a claustrophobic effect on
Belenko and may have contributed to his brooding. Regardless,
he experienced a resurgence of intellectual conflict
and corrosive doubts. The political officers, to make
their points intelligible, had to disclose some facts, and
Belenko's analysis of these facts plunged him into ever-deepening
spiritual trouble.
To demonstrate the inherent injustice and totalitarian
nature of American society, a political officer declared
that the Communist Party was terribly persecuted in the
United States. Wait a minute! You mean they have a Communist
Party in the United States; they allow it? Why, that
would be like our allowing a Capitalist Party in the Soviet
Union!
To illustrate the persecution of the Communist Party,
political instructors dwelt on the case of Angela Davis, a
black and an avowed communist, once dismissed from the
faculty of the University of California on grounds of incompetence.
She was subsequently arrested but ultimately
acquitted of murder — conspiracy charges arising from the
killing of a California judge abducted in the midst of a trial.
You mean the Americans allow communists to teach in
[67] their universities? Why did the Dark Forces let her go?
Why didn't they just kill her?
To prove that the American masses were basically sympathetic
to communism and opposed to the imperialistic
policies of the Dark Forces that held them underfoot, the
political officers showed films of some of the great antiwar
demonstrations.
You mean that in America you can just go out and
demonstrate and raise hell and tear up things if you don't
like something! Why, what would happen here if people
rioted to protest our sending soldiers to Czechoslovakia?
Well, we know what would happen.
To dramatize the poverty, hunger, and unemployment of
contemporary America, the political officers showed films
taken in the 1930s of Depression breadlines, current Soviet
television films of New York slums and of workers eating
sandwiches or hot dogs and drinking Coca-Cola for lunch.
The narrative, explaining that a sandwich or hot dog was
all the American could afford for "dinner," struck Belenko
because in the Soviet Union the noon meal is the main
one of the day.
If they are starving and can't find jobs and prefer communism,
why don't they come over here? We need workers,
millions of them, especially in Siberia, and we could
guarantee them all the bread they need and milk, too. But
wait a minute. Who owns all those cars I see?
In a spirit of logical inquiry, Belenko asked about the
cars visible everywhere in the films. The instructor commended
him for the prescience of his question and answered
it with relish. True, the Dark Forces permitted
many workers to have cars and homes as well; not only
that, they also had built highways all across the land. But
they charged the workers tolls to travel the highways, and
they made the worker mortgage his whole life for the car
and house. If he lost his job or got sick, he was ruined,
wiped out, impoverished for life; he was a slave to the
bankers and thus controlled by the Dark Forces.
That's very clever of the Dark Forces. But... if I had
to choose between having a car and a house now and maybe
being wiped out later or waiting maybe fifteen years for
an apartment, which would I choose?
[68] The West and especially the United States were depicted
as being in the throes of death. The forces of socialism, led
by "our Mother Country," were advancing everywhere —
in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Cuba
(referred to as "our aircraft carrier"). The Americans no
longer were all-powerful. To see their deterioration, one
had only to look at their internal strife and the irresolute
flaccidity they displayed in Vietnam.
Yet no week passed without warnings of the dreadful
threat posed by the encircling Dark Forces of the West and
then — plots "to kidnap our Mother Country." This ubiquitous
threat justified every sacrifice of material and human
resources necessary to build Soviet armed forces into the
mightiest in the world.
If they are so weak, why are they such a threat? What
is the truth?
In tactics, the cadets studied mostly the methods of the
Americans, the Main Enemy, whom they primarily were
being trained to confront. A professor who had flown
MiGs in Korea and served as an adviser to the North Vietnamese
was frank in his characterization of U.S. pilots.
They were professionally skilled and personally brave.
Even when ambushed by larger numbers of MiGs jumping
up at them from sanctuaries in China, they would stay
and fight rather than flee. They drove on toward their
targets no matter how many missiles, how muck flak was
fired at them. The Americans were quick and flexible in
adapting to new situations or weapons, and they were ingenious
in innovating surprises of their own. You never
could be sure of what to expect from them except they
always loved to fight.
The students asked a number of questions, as they were
encouraged to do, and one wanted to know why the Americans
were so good.
The professor explained that over the years they had
perfected an extremely effective training program. They
had developed psychological tests that enabled them to
identify candidates with the highest aptitudes for flying
and combat. Their recruits already had attended universities
and thus began training with a "strong theoretical
base." And virtually all their instructors had a great deal
[69] of actual combat experience because the Americans always
were fighting somewhere in the world.
Yes, but how can such a rotten and decadent society produce
pilots so brave?
A political officer supplied the answer. "Oh, they do it
for money. They are extraordinarily well paid. They will
do anything for money."
I wonder how much they pay them to make them willing
to die.
His analysis of the case of the My Lai massacre in
Vietnam probably disturbed Belenko most of all. Political
officers proclaimed the slaughter of more than a hundred
Vietnamese men, women, and children at the village of
My Lai the ultimate example of American inhumanity and
degeneracy. To demonstrate that the mass murder had
actually occurred, they quoted verbatim from numerous
American press accounts reporting the atrocity in macabre
detail. There could be no doubt about it. The Americans
themselves publicly had charged one of then: own officers
with the killing of 109 innocent civilians.
*
But why are the Dark Forces putting him in jail? If they
are pure and true Dark Forces, he did just what they
wanted. They should be giving him a medal. And why do
the Dark Forces allow their newspapers to tell about àll
this? Every society has its animals. I myself have seen
some of ours in Rubtsovsk. Our newspapers won't even report
one murder. But the Americans are shaming themselves
in front of the whole world by reporting the murder
of one hundred nine men, women and babies. Why?
His disquietude, however, receded before the prospect of
flight. Belenko and some ninety other cadets were transferred
to an air base eight miles outside Grozny near the
Caspian Sea. Grozny was an ancient city of nearly 400,000,
and undoubtedly it once had been lovely. The baroque
architecture, ornate buildings, and cable cars gliding
through narrow brick streets still made it somewhat attractive.
But it stood in a valley which captured and held
the smoke, pollutants, and stench discharged from
[70] surrounding oil refineries and chemical factories, and the river
running through the city was an open sewer of industrial
wastes.
At the base a KGB officer delivered an orientation
lecture. After cautioning against Western spies, he spoke at
length about the Chechens, one of some hundred ethnic
and racial minorities that constitute the Soviet population.
Native inhabitants of the eastern Caucasus, the Chechens
were fiercely independent Muslims, racially akin to Iranians,
who never had been satisfactorily subjugated by the
czars or communists. Fearing that out of their hatred for
Russians they would collaborate with the Germans, Stalin
had deported them en masse to Kazakhstan. Cast into cold
deserts and infertile mountains, they had suffered privation
and hunger and perished in vast numbers. Khrushchev had
allowed the survivors to go back to their native region
around Grozny. When they returned, they found their land,
homes, shops, and jobs had been appropriated by Russians.
Convinced of their righteousness, they commenced to kill
Russians indiscriminately and barbarically, usually with
knives. A young Russian sailor coming home from five
years at sea was slashed to death in the railway station
before his terror-stricken mother in 1959. Russian residents
thereupon formed vigilante groups armed with axes, took
out after the Chechens, then stormed government offices,
demanding intervention to protect them from the wild
Muslims. Troops, backed by tanks and armored cars, had to
be called in to restore civil order. The government warned
the Chechens that if they persisted in cutting up Russians,
they all would be "sent far north where the polar bears
live." The wholesale butchery largely subsided, but not
individual murders, and many Chechen youths still subscribed
to the credo that true manhood could not be attained
without the killing of at least one Russian.
"Most of all, you must guard yourself against the
Chechens," the KGB officer said. "The Chechens use knives
wantonly, and under stress they will butcher you. You
know how valuable you are to our country. It is your patriotic
duty to take care and ensure your own safety. Never
sleep on duty. Always stand watch with a long knife."
It sounds like hell around here! They will just butcher
[71] you for nothing! It sounds like we're in the darkest of
Africa in the last century, like an outpost among savages.
But this is 1969! The Soviet Union! And the Party says
we've solved the nationality problem.
Flight instructor Grigori Petrovich Litvinov, tall, thin,
and prematurely bald at thirty-one, looked and acted like
an ascetic, abstaining totally from alcohol, tobacco, and
profanity. He wore about him an air of perpetual calm
and, in Belenko's hearing, never raised his voice. Upon
being introduced, he insisted that they address each other
by first names and admonished Belenko not to fear asking
questions, however naive. "I will answer the same question
a hundred times, I will stay up all night with you if need
be, until you understand."
There was no need for such special attention. After
being familiarized with the L-29 jet trainer, Belenko managed
it more easily and surely than he had the old prop
plane in which he had learned. The wasteful, melancholy
waiting in Omsk, the submission to the straitjacket life of
a cadet were now repaid by his certainty that he had done
right. Alone in the cockpit, he was serenely free and unbound;
he was where he knew he belonged.
Toward the end of the six months of basic flight training
at Grozny, Litvinov and Belenko were changing clothes in
the locker room. As Litvinov picked up his flight suit to
hang it in the locker, a thick little book, small enough to
be hidden behind a man's palm, tumbled out of a front
flap pocket onto the floor. Belenko glanced down and saw
the title of the book: Holy Bible. Litvinov's eyes were
waiting to meet his when he looked up. They asked: Will
you inform? Belenko's answered: Never.
Neither said anything, nor was the incident ever mentioned
subsequently. Belenko thought about it, though. It's
his business what he reads. If the Bible is full of myths and
fairy tales, let everybody see that for himself. Everybody
knows that a lot of what the Party makes us read is full of
shit; we can see and prove that for ourselves. Why not let
everybody read anything he wants to? We know our system
is the best. Why be afraid of other ideas when we can
show they are not as good? Unless... unless, of course,
we're afraid that our ideas aren't the best.
[72] The schedule stipulated that the cadets would study the
MiG-17 for two months back at Armavir preparatory to
the final phrase of training. But the two months stretched
into four because an emergency had sprung up in the
countryside — another harvest was nearing. Each weekend
and sometimes two or three more days a week, officers
and men alike were packed into buses and trucks to join
the battle of the harvest. For Belenko, it was a pleasant
diversion. They mostly picked fruit and ate all they wanted.
Because the schools and colleges of Armavir had been closed
for the harvest, many pretty girls worked and flirted with
them in the orchards. The farmers were hospitable and
slipped them glasses of cider and wine. And at night they
went back to the barracks, a good meal, and a clean bunk.
Yet Belenko despaired at the acres and acres of apples,
tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of apples,
rotting because nobody had arranged for them to be picked
in time. He remembered how precious apples were in Siberia,
how once in Rubtsovsk he had paid a whole ruble
to buy one apple on the black market.
Why doesn't anything work? Why doesn't anything
change? It's barely ten years before 1980. But we're no
farther along toward True Communism than we were when
they first started talking about it. We're never going to
have True Communism. Everything is just as screwed up
as ever. Why?
In April 1970 Belenko was assigned to a MiG-17 training
regiment seventy-five miles northwest of Armavir near
Tikhoretsk, whose 40,000 residents worked mainly in canneries
and wineries. Although not accorded the privileges
of officers, the cadets now, by and large, were treated as
full-fledged pilots. They arose at 4:00 A.M. for a bountiful
breakfast, then flew two or three times, breaking for a
second breakfast around 9:30. The main meal at noon,
which always included meat and fruit, was followed by a
nap of an hour or so. They attended classes from early
afternoon until early evening — tactics, future trends in
aerodynamics, technology of advanced aircraft, military
leadership, political economics, science of communism,
history of the Party, Marxist/Leninist philosophy. Passes
[73] were issued on Saturday nights and Sundays, unless they
were called to clean factories or work in the fields on
weekends, requests which occurred roughly every other
week.
Fortune again gave Belenko a good flight instructor,
Lieutenant Nikolai Igoryevich Shvartzov, who was only
twenty-four. He longed to be a test pilot and was able
enough; but he had given up this ambition because he had
no influence in Moscow, and nobody, so it was believed,
could become a test pilot without influence. At the outset,
Shvartzov gave Belenko only two instructions: "Let's be
completely honest with each other about everything; that
way we can trust and help each other," and, "If a MiG-17
ever goes into a spin, eject at once. You can pull it out of a
spin, but it's hard. We can always build another plane. We
can't build another you." Throughout their relationship,
they were honest and got along well.
The MiG-17, light, swift, maneuverable, was fun to fly,
and Belenko had confidence in it. Vietnam had proven
that, if skillfully flown at lower altitudes, it could cope
with the American F-4 Phantom. Should he duel with an
American pilot in an F-4, the outcome would depend on
which of them was the braver and better pilot. It would
be a fair fight. That was all he asked.
Every four or five weeks the regiment received a secret
intelligence bulletin reporting developments in American
air power — characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, numbers
to be manufactured, where and for which purposes they
would be deployed. The bulletins were exceedingly factual
and objective, devoid of comment or opinion and dryly
written.
Reading quickly, as was his habit, Belenko scanned a
description of the new F-14 fighter planned for the U.S.
Navy and started another section before the import of
what he had read struck him. "What?" he exclaimed aloud.
"What did I read?" He reread the data about the F-14. It
would be equipped with radar that could detect aircraft
180 miles away, enable its fire-control system to lock onto
multiple targets 100 miles away, and simultaneously fire
six missiles that could hit six different aircraft eighty miles
[74] away — this even though the F-14 and hostile aircraft
might be closing upon each other at a speed up to four
times that of sound.
Our radar, when it works, has a range of fifty miles. Our
missiles, when they work, have a range of eighteen miles.
How will we fight the F-14? It will kill us before we ever
see it!
Belenko put the question frankly to an aerodynamics
professor the next afternoon. The professor stammered,
equivocated, evaded. Every aircraft has certain weaknesses.
It is only a question of uncovering them and learning how
to exploit them. It may be possible to attack the F-14
from close range with superior numbers.
Shit. That's ridiculous. Besides, if what our own intelligence
says is true, the F-14 still could outfty anything we
have even if we got close to it.
The professor who taught the technology of advanced
aircraft was respected for his intelligence and technical
background, so Belenko asked him openly in class. He
answered succinctly. We presently have nothing to equal
the F-14. We are experimenting with something that could
be the answer. It is designated Product 84.
Subsequently Belenko read details of the F-15 being built
as an air-superiority fighter for the U.S. Air Force, then
accounts of the planned B-l bomber, and they were still
more devastating to him. The F-15 would fly at nearly
three times the speed of sound and climb to altitudes above
60,000 feet faster than any plane in the world, and at very
low levels, where metallurgical problems restricted the
speed of Soviet fighters, it could hopelessly outdistance
anything the Russians had. The capabilities of the B-l
seemed other-worldly. A thousand miles away from the
Soviet Union, it could commence firing missiles armed
with decoys and devices to nullify radar and nuclear
weapons to shatter defenses. Then it could drop to tree-top
level, beneath the reach of radar and missiles, and, at
speeds making it impervious to pursuit, skim over the
target area. Having unleashed a barrage of nuclear bombs,
it could skyrocket away at extreme altitudes, at 1400
miles an hour.
[75] The professor of technology again was candid. He said
that presently there was no known defense, practical or
theoretical, against the B-l should it perform approximately
as designed. The history of warfare demonstrated
that for every offensive weapon, an effective defensive
weapon ultimately emerged, and doubtless, one would be
developed. The broader difficulty lay in Soviet technological
deficiencies. The Russians still could not develop an aircraft
engine that for the same weight generated the same
thrust as an American engine. They were behind in electronics,
transistors, and microcircuitry. And all technological
difficulties were compounded by the comparative
inadequacy of their computer technology. Cadets should
not be discouraged by these handicaps but rather consider
them a further stimulus to becoming better pilots
than the Americans.
But if our system is so much better than the Americans',
why is their technology so much better than ours?
Again, though, the thrill of flight, the excitement of personal
success diverted him from the concern and skepticism
such questions inspired. In July 1971 he passed his final
flight examinations, receiving both the highest grade of
five and a commendation. The 258 cadets remaining from
the original class of 360 were ordered back to Armavir
to study for the state examinations. But Belenko knew
these were meaningless. It was over. Having brought them
this far, the Party did not intend to lose any of them. He
had done it. For more than four years he had done all the
military, the Party, the Mother Country demanded. He had
done it on his own, despite the oppressions, brutalities,
risks, and stresses of cadet life, despite multiplying, heretical
doubts about the Party he was sworn to serve. He was
about to be what since boyhood he had aspired to be. And
he was proud of himself.
The professors now tacitly treated the cadets as officers,
and Belenko for the first time learned of all the benefits and
perquisites bestowed on a Soviet pilot. To him they were
breathtaking.
Whereas the average Soviet doctor or scientist was paid
120 to 130 rubles a month, and an educator only about
[76] 100, he would earn 300. The typical young Soviet couple
waited seven to eight years, and often much longer, for
an apartment, and the majority of Soviet dwellings still
were without indoor plumbing. As a pilot Belenko was
guaranteed an apartment with bath and kitchen, wherever
stationed. Food constituted the largest item in most Soviet
family budgets; meat and fresh vegetables frequently were
unavailable; shopping was arduous and time-consuming.
Pilots, wherever based, were entitled to four excellent free
meals a day seven days a week. Ordinary citizens were
allowed two weeks of vacation; pilots forty-five days. Additionally,
during vacation, pilots could fly anywhere in the
Soviet Union on Aeroflot for a nominal fee. Normally a
Soviet citizen did not retire before sixty-five; Belenko
could retire at forty, receiving two-thirds of his regular
salary for the rest of his life. There was more — the best
medical care, free uniforms and shoes, little preferential
privileges, and enormous prestige.
Belenko had known of some of these benefits. But their
full range was kept secret, never published or discussed.
No wonder! If people knew how much more we get, they
would detest us instead of liking us.
A political officer at Armavir spoke to them about marriage,
and though well intentioned, his advice was somewhat
contradictory. He explained that because of the
status and glamor of pilots, many girls were eager to
marry them. Quite a few enrolled in school or took jobs
in Armavir for that express purpose. While most were
wholesome, a few were prostitutes. No one should enter
into marriage quickly or lightly, because the effects of
marriage would endure throughout life.
At the same time, though, the political officer emphasized
the personal and professional advantages of marriage.
It represented a healthy and natural form of life. Married
pilots could awaken fresh in the morning, ready to fly,
whereas bachelors were likely to dissipate themselves by
prowling around bars, looking for women.
For reasons probably having little to do with the lectures,
most cadets did marry shortly before or after graduation,
and in late August Belenko attended one of the
weddings. At the party afterward the bride introduced
[77] him to a twenty-year-old nursing student, Ludmilla
Petrovna. She was blond, pretty, sensuous, and, to Belenko,
ideal. Their physical attraction to each other was instant
and mutual.
Their backgrounds, however, were dissimilar. Ludmilla
was the only child of wealthy parents living in Magadan in
the far northeast. Her father managed a large factory, her
mother ran a brewery, and both had high Party connections
in Moscow. She had never worked or wanted for
anything and was accustomed to restaurants, to theaters,
and to spending money as she pleased. Her parents had
lavished clothes and jewelry on her, often taken her to
Moscow and Leningrad and to special spas reserved for
the well-connected. She shared none of his interests in
literature, athletics, or the romance of flying. But the
sexual magnetism between them was powerful and delightful,
and even though they had seen each other only seven
or eight times, they married after he was commissioned
in October.
Belenko never had thought of himself as other than a
fighter pilot. He expected to join a MiG-17 squadron, from
which he hoped to graduate to MiG-23s or even MiG-25s,
which continued to be cited as the most promising counter
to the new generation of American fighters being deployed
in the 1970s. When the Party commission released the
assignments of the new officers, he ran to the office of the
commandant to protest and appeal. He had been appointed
a MiG-17 instructor — to him, the worst duty conceivable.
He would be doing, albeit in a reverse role, the same thing
he had been doing for the past two years. There would be
no opportunity to improve professionally by flying more
advanced aircraft, no excitement, no adventure.
"You have been honored, and you should feel honored,"
the commandant said. "The Party commission chose the
best to be instructors."
"But I do not want to be an instructor."
"What kind of bordello would we have around here if
everybody did only what he wants to do? You must serve
where the Party decides you are needed, and I assure you
we need instructors."
The December night was black, cold, and drenched with
[78] pelting rain, and when Belenko stepped on the train at
8:00 P.M., his mood matched the weather. He had been
there before, twice, actually: on the train that had taken
him from the Donbas to Rubtsovsk in 1953, and the train
that had brought him from Omsk to Armavir in 1967.
Everything was the same — the close, putrid air, the high
wooden seats, the reeking toilet, the lack of beer or any
amenities, the foul, unrelenting stink. His first duty station,
Salsk, a city of 60,000, was only 100 or so miles away,
but the train stopped frequently and did not arrive until
2:00 A.M.
The rain was still falling hard as he waded and slogged
through muddy streets to the city's only hotel. It was full
and locked for the night, and at that hour there was no
transportation to the base five miles away, so he waded
back to the station. All benches and virtually every square
inch of the station floor were occupied by human bodies —
kolkhozniks who had come to buy bread, salt, and soap;
vagabonds and beggars in rags; dirty children, some with
ugly red sores, others with pocked faces, resembling old
potatoes — all trying to sleep on newspapers, using their
canvas boots or little shoes as pillows. The odor was almost
as bad as on the train. There being no place to sit, he
nudged out enough space to stand through the night,
leaning against a post.
I wish they could see this, smell it, all of them, the whole
Politburo, all those lying bastards who tell us every day and
make us say every day how wonderful our progress is, how
well-off and happy we are, how perfect everything will be
by 1980. Look at these New Communist Men our society
has produced! I would make them sit near the toilet so
they could smell what is creeping out under the door. I
would make them hold those children in their arms and
look at those sores and then make speeches about the
science of communism. Liars! Filthy liars!
At daylight a policeman halted a six-wheel truck able to
negotiate the mud and induced the driver to deliver Lieutenant
Belenko to his first post. His new uniform and boots
were soiled and splattered with mud. In his thoughts, much
more was indelibly soiled.
Nevertheless, Belenko shared the elation of all the other
[79] newly arrived officers when they were handed keys to their
apartments in a building that had been completed and certified
for occupancy only a month before. To be promised
an apartment was one thing; to be given an apartment as
promised, quite another. Eagerly and expectantly Belenko
unlocked the door and smelled dampness. The floor, built
with green lumber, already was warped and wavy. Plaster
was peeling off the walls. The windowpane in the kitchen
was broken, and no water poured from the faucet. The
bathtub leaked; the toilet did not flush. None of the electrical
outlets worked.
Already gathered in the halls were other officers, who
had found comparable conditions in their apartments.
Together they marched forth to collar the construction
superintendent responsible for building the apartments.
Unmoved by their recitation of ills, he told them that the
building had been inspected and approved by an acceptance
commission from their regiment. Any deficiencies
that might have developed subsequently were none of
his concern.
This is outrageous. The Party must know. The Party
must correct this.
Belenko and another lieutenant confronted the first Party
representative they could find, a young political officer
quartered in the same building. He was cynical, yet truthful.
The building had not been inspected. The military
builders sold substantial quantities of allotted materials on
the black market, then bribed the chairman of the regimental
acceptance commission and took the whole commission
to dinner. There the acceptance papers were
drunkenly signed without any commission member's ever
having been inside the building. What was done could not
now be undone.
During the day Belenko studied pedagogy, psychology,
methodology of flight instruction, and political education
in the course for instructors, and on weekends he visited
Ludmilla in Armavir. At night he mastered the building
trade. He relaid the floor, replastered the walls, calked the
bathtub, repaired the toilet, replaced the faucets, and rewired
the electrical sockets. He procured all the materials
easily enough, not from stores, of course, but from the
[80] construction superintendent in exchange for vodka. By late
February he had redone the whole interior rather handsomely.
Then one night he was awakened by a loud boom followed
by crunching noises. The building was splitting. A
seam about a foot wide opened from the living room out
into the world, and a much more gaping one exposed his
bedroom to his neighbor's living room. Huge cranes,
trucks, and an army of workers were marshaled to save
the building. They trussed and wrapped it in steel belts as
if staving a barrel and inserted steel beams through the
interior to keep it intact. The beam running through Belenko's
living room looked odd, but he found it useful for
chinning and other exercises.
The emergency measures proved effective for a while.
But after three weeks or so the center of the building
started to sag and kept sagging until the whole edifice assumed
the configuration of a canoe.
It's an architectural marvel!
Still, the ceilings in his apartment dropped only a foot or
two, and it was home, a private, unshared home, and he
was intent on furnishing it as commodiously as possible for
Ludmilla before she joined him in the spring after her
graduation. Living alone and dining at the base, he had
few expenses, and by March he had accumulated about
1,500 rubles, counting the 600 given him at commissioning.
He bought a television for 450, a refrigerator for 300, and,
for 250, a sofa that converted into a bed. The rest he conserved
for a delayed wedding trip to Leningrad in April
and to enable Ludmilla to pick furnishings of her choice.
One of the lieutenant colonels teaching the course for
instructors was an irreverent cynic, marking time until his
fortieth birthday and retirement, and he liked to regale the
young lieutenants with caustic sayings about life in the
Soviet military. Three of them were to recur often to
Belenko.
To succeed in the Soviet Army, you must learn from the
dog. You must know when and where to bark and when
and where to lick.
A Soviet pilot without a pencil is like a man without a
prick, for the mission of a Soviet pilot is to create [81]
paperwork. The more paper you have, the better to cover your
ass.
Two close boyhood friends met for the first time since
their graduation from the military academy twenty years
before. One was a captain; the other, a general. "Why are
you a general and I only a captain?"
"I will show you," replied the general, picking up a
rock, holding it to his ear, and then handing it to the
captain. "Listen to the noise the rock makes."
The captain listened and threw the rock away. "No, it
makes no noise at all."
"You see, that is why you are still a captain. A general
told you a rock makes noise, and you said no to a general."
To protect himself, the lieutenant colonel always emphasized
with mock seriousness that such sayings represented
misconceptions. Belenko was to learn, though, that
each originated in reality.
After he commenced his duties as an instructor, the Party
decided to expand and accelerate pilot training without,
however, increasing the number of personnel and aircraft
allocated for training. Previously one instructor had at his
disposal two MiG-17s, two flight engineers, and four enlisted
mechanics to teach three students. But with the same
resources Belenko had to teach six students, and in good
weather he flew incessantly, taking them up successively
throughout the day. Flying still was fun, although not as
much fun as when he flew alone. After the fortieth or
fiftieth loop of the day, a loop was not so interesting.
The serious problems all occurred on the ground. Belenko
did not just supervise the twelve men under him. He was
held personally accountable for their behavior twenty-four
hours a day. He was supposed to regulate, record, and report
their every action and, insofar as possible, their every
thought, to know and watch every detail of their lives, including
the most intimate and personal details. And he
had to draft and be prepared to exhibit for inspection by
political officers at any time a written program specifying
precisely what he was doing daily to develop each of his
subordinates into a New Communist Man.
Having landed for the ninth time on a day that had begun
at 4:00 A.M., Belenko was exhausted. Dusk was
[82] settling, and a light drizzle starting to fall, when a messenger —
there were no telephones — delivered a summons from the
political officer.
"So, Comrade Lieutenant, we see that you do not know
your men; you do not know how to educate them."
"I do not understand, Comrade."
"Read this, and you will understand." The KGB had uncovered
a letter written by one of Belenko's mechanics, a
twenty-year-old private, to his parents. The soldier recited
his miseries — the sparse, repulsive rations, the congested
barracks, the practice through which second-year soldiers
extorted food from first-year soldiers by pouncing upon
the recalcitrants during the night, covering them with
blankets, and beating them mercilessly.
"Do you see what a dark shadow such a letter throws
over our Army?"
"But, Comrade, look at the date. The letter was written
ten months ago, long before I was here."
The point was unarguable, and the political officer was
flustered, but not for long. "Let me see your program for
this man."
Belenko handed over the notebook he always was required
to keep with him. "Your failure is clear. There is
not one mention here of the works of Leonid Ilyich
[Brezhnev]. How can your mechanic develop politically
without knowledge of the thoughts of the Party's leader?
You see, Comrade Lieutenant, you have not worked very
productively today."
You pig, I ought to smash in your fat face. I flew my
ass off today, flew all to hell and back. I did one hundred
rolls, sixty dead loops, sixty Immelmanns. What do you
know about work? I'd like to put you to work in an aircraft.
You'd puke and fill your pants in one minute.
"Comrade, I see my mistake. I will try to do better."
Belenko repeatedly was upbraided because of the behavior
of one of his flight engineers, who was an alcoholic.
He stole, drank, and sometimes sold the alcohol stored in
copious quantities for the coolant and braking systems of
the MiG-17. Now everybody in the regiment — the commander,
the officers, the men, Belenko himself — at times
drank this alcohol. Not only was it available and free, but
[83] became the alcohol was produced for aircraft, it was more
purely distilled than the standard vodka produced for the
people. In fact, the aircraft alcohol was so valued on the
black market that in the regiment it was called white gold.
The trouble was that the flight engineer drank so much
and continuously that he staggered around all day, frequently
making a spectacle of himself and, as Belenko's
superiors stressed, setting an "improper example."
Belenko talked several times to the engineer, who was
sixteen years older than he and had been in the service
twenty-two years. He reasoned, he pleaded, he threatened,
he appealed, all to no avail, because the man in his condition
could no more stop drinking than he could stop
breathing.
Finally, Belenko was rebuked for "leadership failure." In
response he wrote a formal letter recommending that the
engineer either be provided with psychiatric treatment or
be dismissed from the service. The next morning a deputy
regimental commander called Belenko in and told him that
if he would withdraw the report, his reprimand would
also be withdrawn, and the flight engineer transferred.
Amazed, Belenko shrugged and complied.
Training standards inevitably suffered under the intensified
pressures to graduate more pilots. In his training
Belenko had flown 300 hours — 100 in the L-29, 200 in the
MiG-17 — and these had been "honest" hours — that is, they
actually were flown. Now cadets were flying only 200
hours, and not all these were "honest." There also was a
slight slippage in the quality of pilot candidates, and although
five of Belenko's students were able, the sixth was
beyond salvage. He simply lacked the native ability to fly.
Belenko dared not allow him to solo in a MiG-17, and
whenever he entrusted him with the controls, the results
were frightening. Though he personally liked the cadet,
Belenko formally recommended his dismissal. Another uproar
and demand that he rescind the recommendation
ensued. But this time Belenko in conscience could not
accede. Aloft, the cadet was a menace to everybody and to
himself. Even if he learned to take off and land, he never
could do much else except fly in circles, and his every
flight would be a potential disaster. Thus, the issue and
[84] Belenko ultimately were brought before the regimental
commander, who also tried to induce retraction of the
report. Failing, the commander announced that he himself
would fly with the cadet and pronounce his own judgment.
Most likely he intended to overrule Belenko, but he
was sufficiently shaken upon landing to concur, reluctantly,
that dismissal was the only option.
Belenko spent the better part of a month completing the
mountains of paperwork requisite to dismissal. In the
process he finally comprehended why no one in his own
class had been expelled, why second-year soldiers who
preyed on neophytes were not prosecuted, why the flight
engineer was not cashiered, why the cadet would not have
been dismissed had he not been egregiously hopeless.
Party had decreed that a certain number of qualified
pilots would be trained in a given time. The Party had decreed
that pilots, officers, soldiers, all would be transformed
into New Communist Men. That was the plan. A commander
who publicly disciplined a subordinate or dismissed
a student risked the wrath and punishment of the Party by
convicting himself, ipso facto, of incompetence, of undermining
the plan.
The consequent fear created a system in which problems
were masked and perpetuated, rather than eliminated, and
it spawned corruption or a psychological environment in
which corruption flourished. Prior to an inspection by
senior officers of the Air Defense Command, Belenko was
scheduled to perform a complicated one-hour exercise in
which he and a student in another MiG would intercept
and down a third MiG. The exercise would be recorded
on the films of gun cameras and chronometer tapes for
examination by the inspectors. But the morning of the
planned exercise, the sky was filled with thunder and
lightning.
Nevertheless, a deputy regimental commander ordered
them to fly. "What! That's impossible."
"Listen to me. Just tell your student to climb up to five
hundred meters. You make a quick intercept, and both of
you come right back down. It won't take five minutes. I'll
show you how to fix it when you get back."
[85] For the next three days Belenko and the deputy commander
juggled films and tapes to fabricate a record of an
elaborate and successful exercise. When they finished, one
obstacle remained. What about the fuel? They had flown
six minutes. The records showed the exercise had lasted
sixty minutes. How to explain the leftover fuel? Dump it.
So thousands of gallons of jet fuel were dumped on the
ground.
On a typical flying day, Belenko arose at 3:30 A.M. to
catch the bus that left at 4:00 for the base, where he had
breakfast, underwent a medical examination, and briefed
his students prior to the first takeoff at 7:00. He flew with
them until 1:00 P.M., when the main meal of the day was
served. From 2:00 to 3:00 P.M. he and his fellow instructors
customarily were berated by the training squadron
commander and a political officer for the failures, on and
off duty, of their students and subordinates. Unable to
articulate or manifest his anger at the daily censure, he
attended to paperwork and counseled students until supper
at 6:00 P.M. Unless paperwork or political conferences
detained him, he usually arrived home by bus around
7:30 P.M. To be fresh and alert by 3:00 the next day, he
needed to go to sleep as quickly as possible.
On Sunday, his lone day off, he wanted and needed to
rest. Ludmilla, who worked at a hospital six days a week,
wanted to go out, to do something, and they argued about
how the day should be spent. Ludmilla complained about
much else.
She abhorred Salsk and the life of a military wife, and
Belenko understood her feelings. Salsk, a place where "undesirables"
had been sent in Czarist times, was a drab,
dingy, poor city set on treeless flatlands over which stinging
winds howled. Dust intruded everywhere except when
rain turned it to mud. The two motion-picture theaters
were small, and you rarely could enter without waiting
more than an hour. Service in the city's few restaurants
also meant more than an hour's wait and the fare was not
worth the delay. There was no officers' club at the base,
nor any other facility that wives might enjoy. Unable to
change these circumstances or his working hours, which
[86] she also resented, Belenko could only sympathize and ask
that she bear up in hope of eventual transfer to a more
pleasant duty station.
Money was another and more disruptive source of conflict.
Ludmilla earned 65 rubles a month as a nurse, and
their combined income of 365 rubles was princely by Soviet
standards. Unless he were to become a KGB officer
or Party official, and either possibility was unthinkable,
there was no pursuit that would pay him as much. But she
nagged him for not earning more, and they often were
short because she spent so capriciously and made costly
trips to Magadan. At first he tried to indulge her.
Let life teach her. She is young and will grow.
On the chance that they could duplicate the happiness of
their wedding trip, he proposed that during his next leave
they vacation in Leningrad. About a week before they were
to depart, he discovered that she had bought a ring for
140 rubles, spending most of the money he had saved for
the trip. He vented his rage, and she announced her intention
of divorcing him and returning to her parents.
He dissuaded her by reasoning that they simply were experiencing
the kind of crisis that besets all young married
couples, and soon she was pregnant. A child, he thought,
would reunite them emotionally by giving them a new,
shared interest. And for a while after the birth of their
healthy son, Dmitri, in January 1973, they did share parental
joy. But working twelve to fourteen hours daily six
days a week, Belenko seldom could be with the child. The
necessity of caring for him confined Ludmilla and thereby
intensified her disdain of their mode of life. Instead of
lessening their tensions, the baby exacerbated them. Their
marriage deteriorated into sullen hostility, and disagreements
over trivial issues erupted into acrimonious quarrels.
In their continuing efforts to inculcate pilots with the
conviction that the United States symbolized the quintessence
of degeneracy, political officers dwelt on the unfolding
Watergate scandals. The details confused Belenko, and
by now he was skeptical of anything the political officers
said. But what he did understand at the culmination of the
scandals heightened his skepticism. The President of the
United States had been compelled to resign in disgrace,
[87] and other ranking figures of the American government
faced prosecution and probable imprisonment, all because,
so far as he could determine, they had lied.
You mean they can throw out their leader and put his
men in jail just because they lied! Why, if we did that here,
the whole Politburo and every Party official in the country
would be in jail! Why, here, if you know somebody in the
Party, you can do anything you want, you can kill a man,
and you won't go to jail. I've seen that for myself.
And where are the Dark Forces? If the Dark Forces control
everything in America and put their own men in
power, why would they let their men be thrown out? The
truth must be that the Dark Forces can't control everything.
But if they don't control everything, then the Party
is lying again. What does the Party tell the truth about?
Belenko seldom had cause or time to venture into downtown
Salsk at night, but bachelor pilots did, and though
they often were assaulted by robbers who knew they had
money, they were under the strictest of orders never to
engage in violence lest they injure themselves. The attacks
proliferated, and one evening a gang of sadistic thugs killed
an officer, blinded a second with sulfuric acid, and partially
blinded a third as they emerged from a restaurant.
Thereafter pilots were forbidden to enter Salsk after dark.
Sometimes Belenko did go into the city to shop for
Ludmilla at the bazaar where on Sundays kolkhozniks sold
poultry and produce from their plots. Beggars congregated
at the open-air market, and some brought along emaciated
children to heighten public pity; tramps crawled around
the stalls like scavengers searching the ground for scraps
of vegetables. Generally there was much to buy at the
bazaar, but everything was expensive. A kilogram of potatoes
or tomatoes cost one ruble; a small chicken, ten; a
duck, twelve; a turkey, forty — one-third the monthly
salary of the average doctor. In winter prices were much
higher.
Each fall Belenko had to organize his twelve subordinates
into a labor squad and sortie forth into the annual
battle of the harvest. Treading through the dust or mud and
manure of the kolkhoz, they reaped grain, tinkered with
neglected machinery, and tried to toil usefully alongside
[88] the women, children, students, and old men. The sight of
Air Force pilots, engineers, and mechanics so deployed
made him alternately curse and laugh.
They brag all the time of our progress — in the newspaper,
on radio, and television. Where is the progress? It's
all the same: the crime, the poverty, the stupidity. We're
never going to have a New Communist Man; we're never
going to have True Communism.
Each squadron at the base had a Lenin Room, where
pilots could watch Brezhnev's televised speeches and read
Pravda, as they were required to do, and occasionally chat.
After a Brezhnev speech, someone referred sarcastically to
an exchange of letters between a worker and Brezhnev,
published in Pravda. "Let's write him a letter about our
shitty aircraft and ask him for some nice F-15s." Nobody
talked that way except Lieutenant Nikolai Ivanovich
Krotkov. There was no doubt that Krotkov was brilliant.
He had graduated from flight school with a gold medal,
played guitar and sang superbly, and could recite forbidden
poetry verbatim by the hour. This was perilous. He had
already been warned about singing the forbidden songs of
Aleksandr Galich, the famous Russian satirist who was
expelled because of his ideological irreverence.
Shortly before supper three or four days later, Belenko
and other instructors saw Krotkov acting as if he had gone
mad. Furiously cursing, he was smashing his guitar to bits
against a tree. When quieted, he told them he had just come
from a confrontation with the KGB.
You have a big mouth, the KGB officer told him. If you
keep opening it, we are going to kick you out of the service.
Despite your gold medal, you will find no job; nobody will
touch you. So, unless you want to starve, you had better
stop singing duty songs and reciting dirty poems. You had
better zip up your mouth for good.
Belenko recalled a stanza from a patriotic Soviet
march — "Where can man breathe so freely...." What
kind of freedom do we have when we are afraid of a song
or a poem?
About the time of the Khotkov incident Belenko — who
had been made an instructor for the SU-15 high-performance
interceptor — heard a rumor. Supposedly a
[89] pilot had stolen an AN-2 transport and attempted to fly to
Turkey. MiGs overtook and shot him down over the
Black Sea.
If I were in an SU-15 and had enough fuel, nobody
would ever catch me.
The thought was terrible, obscene; instantly and in
shame he banished it, daring not entertain it a millisecond
more. But the thought had occurred.
In the autumn of 1975 Belenko decided to request officially
a transfer to a combat unit, preferably a MiG-25
squadron. The squadron commander, deputy regimental
commander, and regimental commander all tried by a
combination of cajolery and ridicule to dissuade him from
"forsaking duty" or "acting like a test pilot." But the
transfer request was submitted precisely as military regulations
authorized, and each had no legal choice except to
forward it until the matter reached the school commandant,
Major General Dmitri Vasilyevich Golodnikov.
The general, a portly, bald man in his late fifties, sat
behind a polished desk in his large office furnished with a
long conference table covered by red velvet, a dozen
chairs, red curtains, wall maps, and a magnificent Oriental
rug. Belenko, who had never met a general, was surprised
that he spoke so affably.
He understood, even admired Belenko's motives. He himself
would prefer to be with combat forces in Germany or
the Far East, where one might "see some action." But
the overriding desire of every officer must be to serve the
Party, and the Party needed him here. In a combat squadron
he would provide the Party with one pilot; as an instructor
he was providing the Party with many. Therefore,
Golodnikov asked that Belenko withdraw his request, take
some leave, and resume his duties with fresh dedication.
If he had any problems, with his apartment or anything
else, they could be worked out.
Belenko thanked the general but said that having been
an instructor almost four years, he believed he could best
serve the Party by becoming a more accomplished pilot,
and that he could not do unless he learned to fly more
sophisticated combat aircraft.
"Belenko, let's be frank with each other. You are an
[90] excellent instructor and a fine officer. Both your record and
your superiors tell me that. You know as well as I that
many of the young instructors they are sending us are not
ready to be instructors; they barely can fly themselves.
That is why we cannot afford to lose experienced instructors.
I am not proposing that you spend the rest of
your career as an instructor. I will be retiring in a couple
of years, and I have friends. When I leave, I shall see that
they help you."
Belenko understood the invitation to accept initiation
into the system, to sell himself to the system. Yet it only
reinforced his determination. When he said no a second
time, Golodnikov abruptly dropped the mask of reason and
affability.
"You are defying me!"
"No, sir, Comrade General. I am making a request in
accordance with the regulations of the Soviet Army."
"Your request is denied."
"But, Comrade General, the regulations say that my request
must be forwarded."
"That matter is closed."
"You will not forward my request?"
"You are dismissed. You may leave."
Belenko stood up and stared straight into the eyes of the
general. "I have something to say."
"What?"
"I will stay in this school. I will work harder to follow
every rule and regulation, to teach the students to fly, to
enforce discipline in our regiment and school, to combat
drunkenness, the theft of alcohol, the forgeries, embezzlement,
and corruption that exist everywhere in our school.
To do that, it wffl be necessary to dismiss from the Army
certain officers and commanders who are aiding and abetting
these practices. And to do that, it will be necessary
for me to write a letter to the Minister of Defense, in accordance
with the Soviet Army Manual of Discipline, proving
what is going on in our school."
"You may not do that."
"Why not? It's strictly in accordance with regulations.
Let me tell you some of the things I will say. I will talk
first about the death of Lieutenant Lubach and his student.
[91] The investigating commission said it was an accident. It
was murder. You said that many of our young instructors
are not qualified. But why do you certify them as qualified?
Why did you send Lieutenant Lubach's records to a
combat squadron and have them returned so it would look
as if he had experience in a combat squadron when you
knew he couldn't fly? Why did you let him take that
student up and kill himself and the student?"
The general's face flushed. "That is none of your business."
Belenko cited a colonel, one of the general's deputies,
who, while piously haranguing officers to curb alcoholism,
supervised the wholesale theft of aircraft alcohol, even
using military trucks to transport it into Salsk for sale.
"All right. We know about that. That is being taken
care of."
Next, Belenko detailed how officers forged records and
reported more flight time than had been flown so as to obtain
excesses of alcohol and how huge quantities of aviation
fuel were being dumped to keep the records consistent.
"All right. What next? Go on."
Belenko recalled how during a recent practice alert another
of Golodnikov's aides, a lieutenant colonel, had
staggered among students on the flight line, raving incoherently,
provoking laughter, and causing one student to
say aloud, "To hell with all this. Let's go have a drink."
"That officer has been punished."
But Belenko sensed that his blows were telling, and he
went on, reconstructing a suppressed scandal involving a
colonel in charge of housing. The colonel kept a second
apartment that was supposed to be allocated to an officer,
and there employed prostitutes to entertain visiting dignitaries.
A general from Moscow was so taken by one of
these young ladies that he locked her in the apartment for
three days and nights. It happened that the girl was, or at
least the KGB believed her to be, a Western agent, and
during one of those three nights she was scheduled to
meet her clandestine supervisor, in whom the KGB was
most interested. When she failed to appear, the other agent
became alarmed and escaped. The KGB ascertained some
of the truth, but Golodnikov or others concealed enough
[92] to allow the colonel to retire quietly without being punished
and without calling down upon themselves the righteous
vindictiveness of State Security.
Golodnikov, who had avoided Belenko's stare, now
stared back at him with sheer hatred.
"There is more...."
"Enough! Nothing you have said has anything to do with
your duties as an instructor. This is pure blackmail."
Golodnikov pressed a buzzer, and an aide appeared. "Tell
the chief of the hospital to report to me immediately. Immediately!
No matter what he is doing."
Belenko saluted and started to leave. "No, Belenko. You
stay. You had your chance. Now it is top late for you."
Shortly, Colonel Malenkov, a trim, dignified figure who
always looked composed in an immaculate uniform, appeared.
"This lieutenant urgently needs a complete examination."
"Dmitri Vasilyevich, only two weeks ago I myself gave
Lieutenant Belenko a complete physical examination."
"This will be a psychiatric examination. It is clear to me
that this officer is insane. I am sure that is what the examination
will find."
Belenko, clad in a ragged robe, was locked alone in a
hospital room. Nobody, not even the orderlies who brought
the repugnant rations which must have come from the soldiers'
mess, spoke to him. Probably the solitary confinement
was meant to intimidate him, but it afforded him sufficient
respite to realize that he must say or do nothing which
might give anybody grounds for labeling him insane.
On the third morning he was led to Malenkov's office,
and the doctor shut the door behind him. The pilots liked
Malenkov because they felt he appreciated both their mentality
and frustrations. He had been a combat infantryman
in World War II, then trained as a physician, not because
he wanted to be a physician — he yearned to be an architect
— but because the Party needed doctors. He had served
the Party as a military doctor for a quarter of a century.
Asked what had happened, Belenko explained, and they
talked nearly an hour.
"Viktor Ivanovich, I know you are all right. I know that
[93] what you say is true; at least, I have knowledge of some of
the incidents you describe. But why try to piss into the
wind? If you want to live in shit the rest of your life, go
ahead and express your feelings. If you want to sleep on
clean sheets and eat white bread with butter, you must
learn to repress your feelings and pay lip service.
"Golodnikov is not a bad fellow; he's a friend of mine.
You drove him into a corner, and you have to let him out.
If I tell him you were temporarily fatigued from overwork,
that you recognize your mistake, that you regret it, that
you will pursue this no further, I'm reasonably sure it all
will be forgotten. Why don't we do that?"
If I do that, I always will know that I am a coward. For
what purpose do I live? To grovel and lie so I may eat
white bread? What would Spartacus do?
"I will not do that. I will tell the truth."
Malenkov sighed. "Oh, Viktor Ivanovich. Now you drive
me into a corner. What can I do? I will have to tell the
truth, too, and try to help you. But we still have to go
through with the psychiatric examination."
Although Malenkov could have chosen a local psychiatrist
or a military psychiatrist, he instead drove Belenko to
the medical institute in Stavropol, one hundred miles away.
There he had a personal friend, an eminent psychiatrist
whose name Belenko never caught. As they entered, he
said, "All you have to do is relax and tell the truth."
The psychiatrist and Malenkov talked alone some twenty
minutes before calling in Belenko. "Well, well, what do we
have here?" he asked Belenko, who as factually as he knew
how reported his confrontation with Golodnikov. "Why, we
have an open rebellion! Nothing less," exclaimed the psychiatrist.
"You must be very distraught or very brave."
For an hour and then, after a brief pause, another two
hours the psychiatrist questioned Belenko about all aspects
of his life, from early childhood to the present. Neither his
mannerisms nor wording disclosed anything to Belenko
about his reactions to the answers, and until the last few
seconds Belenko did not know whether he had "passed"
the examination.
"So, Lieutenant, tell me. Just what is it that you want?"
[94] "I want to be a fighter pilot I want to grow professionally.
Most of all, I want to get away from all this
lying, corruption, and hypocrisy."
"Well, that seems to me like a healthy, progressive ambition.
We shall see. You may go now."
Escorting Belenko to the door, the psychiatrist extended
his hand and gripped Belenko's very hard. In a half whisper
he said, "Good luck, Lieutenant. Don't worry."
Four days later Belenko learned the results of the examination
entirely by chance from an Armavir classmate
who was visiting the base with an inspection team. An ear
problem had forced him to quit flying, and he worked in
the personnel center of the Air Defense Command. When
he offered congratulations, Belenko asked what he meant.
"Haven't you been told? You're going to a MiG-25
squadron in the Far East. The general here gave you a
fantastic recommendation. Said you're such an outstanding
pilot you belong in our most modern aircraft. You
must have been licking his ass every day the past four
years."
Belenko did not ask whether the records mentioned the
psychiatric examination. Obviously they did not. Doubtless
Malenkov and/or the psychiatrist had convinced
Golodnikov that in the interests of his self-preservation he
had better give Belenko what he asked and ship him as far
away as possible as soon as possible.
Belenko was thankful for the transfer but unmollified
and unforgiving, and in the days preceding his departure,
his bitterness swelled. While he was away, word had spread
or had been spread that he was insane. Krotkov, the guitar
player, and a couple of other instructors welcomed him.
Everybody else avoided him; they feared to be seen near
him. He thought of scenes in The Call of the Wild. If a
husky in a dogsled team was helplessly wounded, accidentally
or in a fight, the other huskies, along whose side
it had toiled, would turn on it as one and devour it.
I knew them as individual human beings. Now they act
like a pack of animals. Our system makes them that way.
There is nothing I say say to them. There is no way I
can defend myself, against them or our system. There is
[95] no way anybody can defend himself. If it hadn't been for
Malenkov, I'd be in a lunatic asylum right now. If our
system can do that to me, it can do it to anybody.
He was not conscious of it at the time. But within him
the dam that contained the poisonous doubts, the disastrous
conclusions, the recurrent rage had burst, and nothing
could repair it. In a sense different from that in which they
were spoken, the words of Golodnikov did apply. For
Belenko it indeed was now too late.
Ludmilla cried every day their first week or so in
Chuguyevka, 120 miles northeast of Vladivostok, almost a
continent away from Salsk. By comparison with this village
of 2,000 souls, isolated in forests not far from Korea to
the south and Manchuria to the west, Salsk, which she so
despised, seemed glittering and glamorous. The streets
were unlighted and unpaved, the frame houses were unpainted,
the outhouses and open garbage pits in their yards
buzzed with flies and crawled with worms, and the whole
place stank as bad as the poorest kolkhoz on the hottest
summer day. The social center of the village was Cafe No.
2, popular because it sold beef which local entrepreneurs
imported from Vladivostok. The patrons laced the beer
with vodka, and because of the effects of overindulgence,
the cafe also reeked. Sausage and meat were unavailable in
the three stores, and fruit and vegetables also were scarce
except at the bazaar on Sunday.
A sawmill was the main employer of the village. A few
citizens, among them a number of Ukrainians exiled to
the Far East for life, worked as supervisors at a kolkhoz
a couple of miles away or at the chemical factory on the
outskirts. Electrified barbed-wire fences guarded the
chemical factory, the labor force of which was composed
of zeks. They were marched in each morning in a column,
their shaved heads bowed, their hands clasped behind
their backs, watched by dogs and guards with machine
guns. Their rags, their canvas boots, their forlorn, empty
eyes were the same as those Belenko remembered seeing
twenty years before in Rubtsovsk.
A few days after Belenko reported to the base seven
miles from the village, the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel
[96] Yevgeny Ivanovich Shevsov, and the chief political officer
convened all pilots and officers in a secret meeting. To
Belenko, their candor bespoke desperation.
"Drunkenness induced by aircraft alcohol is constant
and widespread," they said. "The soldiers are running
away from the base and taking girls from the villages away
into the forests for days. Several times the soldiers have
refused to eat their food. We have had strikes here! We
have brawls among the soldiers, and to our shame, some
officers have been involved in them. Soldiers are writing
letters to their parents about what a horrible situation we
have here, and the Organs of State Security have been
investigating. At any time we could have an inspection. If
there is an inspection, it will show that this regiment is
not combat-ready. Our planes often cannot fly because
everybody is so drunk or people have run away.
"Each of you is responsible. You must concentrate your
attention on the soldiers. Explain to them that our difficulties
are temporary and will be eliminated eventually.
Tell them that our country is not yet rich enough to build
planes and barracks at the same time. Emphasize that the
Dark Forces of the West have enlisted the Chinese and
Japanese in their plot to kidnap our Mother Country."
How many times, thousands of times, have I heard that
the Dark Forces want to kidnap our Mother Country? Do
they want our food? That is very funny. They are starving,
but they sell us wheat to keep us from starving. Our system
is the best, but we want to learn to grow corn and fly
and do everything else just as they do. Do we have anything
that they want? That anybody wants?
The collapse of morale and discipline and the resultant
chaos were outgrowths of a massive and urgent military
buildup progressing throughout the Soviet Far East. At
Chuguyevka three squadrons of MiG-25s (thirty-six combat
aircraft plus four or five modified with twin seats as
trainers) were replacing three MiG-17 squadrons. A far
more complex aircraft, one MiG-25 required four to five
times more support personnel — engineers, mechanics, electronics,
and armament specialists — than a MiG-17. Within
the previous two months the number of officers and men
at Chuguyevka had quadrupled, and more were arriving
[97] weekly. But no provision whatsoever had been made to
expand housing, dining, or any other facilities to accommodate
the enormous influx of people.
Belenko and Ludmilla were comparatively lucky in that
they shared a two-room apartment with only one family, a
flight engineer, his wife, and two children. Other apartments
were packed with three or four families of officers,
and despite the best of will, conflicts over use of the bathroom
and kitchen inevitably arose, afflicting everyone with
strain and tension. Ludmilla was able to work part time as
a nurse at the base dispensary, but for most other wives,
some of whom were teachers or engineers, employment
opportunities were nil.
Each pilot periodically stood watch as duty officer for
twenty-four hours, during which he supervised the enlisted
personnel, inspected the barracks and mess hall, and generally
tried to enforce discipline. What Belenko saw on his
first watch appalled him.
Between 180 and 200 men were jammed into barracks
marginally adequate for 40. Bunks stood in tiers nearly
against each other, and the congestion was such that it was
difficult to move without stumbling into somebody. There
were two water faucets in each barracks, the toilet was outside,
and sometimes during the night men relieved themselves
in their neighbor's boots. They were given a change
of underwear once a week and allowed to go into the village
for a steam bath once every ten days, there being no
bathhouse on the base.
Comparable congestion in the mess hall made cleanliness
impossible, and the place smelled like a garbage pit. While
one section of forty men ate, another forty stood behind
them waiting to take places and plates. If they chose, they
then could wait in line to dip the plate in a pan of cold
water containing no soap. Usually they elected to simply
brush the plate off with their hands. For breakfast the men
received 150 grams of bread, 10 grams of butter, 20 grams
of sugar, barley mush cooked with water, and a mug of tea.
Dinner consisted of thin soup, sometimes thickened with
cereal, buckwheat groats, perhaps a piece or two of fatback,
and a mug of kissel, a kind of starchy gelatin. Supper
was the same as breakfast.
[98] Except for a television set, no recreational facilities of
any kind were available to the enlisted men (or the officers,
for that matter), and there was little they could do. There
was much they were forbidden to do. They were forbidden
to listen to a transistor radio, to draw pictures of women,
to listen to records, to read fiction, to write letters about
their life in the service, to lie or sit on their bunks during
their free time (there was no place else to sit), to watch
television except when political or patriotic programs were
shown, and to drink. But drink they did, in staggering
quantities, for alcohol was the one commodity available
in limitless amounts.
To fly seventy minutes, the maximum time it can stay
aloft without refueling, a MiG-25 needs fourteen tons of
jet fuel and one-half ton of alcohol for braking and electronic
systems. So wherever MiG-25s were based, huge
quantities of alcohol were stored, and in the Soviet Air
Force the plane was popularly known as the Flying Restaurant.
And officers from surrounding bases — Air Force,
Army, political officers — seized on any pretext to visit
Chuguyevka and fill their bottles.
According to a story circulated at Chuguyevka, a group
of Air Force wives, distraught over their husbands' habitual
drunkenness, staked a protest at a design bureau in
Moscow, appealing to it to design aircraft that would not
use alcohol. Supposedly a representative of the bureau
told the ladies, "Go screw yourselves. If we want, we will
fuel our planes with cognac."
In April 1976 Belenko's squadron commander asked him
to take a truck and pick up a shipment of office supplies
from a railroad freight terminal thirty miles north of
Vladivostok, paper and office supplies being essential to
the functioning of the squadron. It was a task that should
have been performed by the deputy squadron commander,
but he never stayed sober enough to be trusted with the
truck.
The morning was bright, the dirt road empty and not
yet dusty, and forests through which he drove were awesome
in their natural, unspoiled beauty. They reminded
him of man's capacity to despoil nature and himself and
of delicious hours in other forests.
[99] Starting back, Belenko saw a frail, ragged figure walking
along the road, and the man looked so forlorn he decided
to give him a lift. The hitchhiker, who had few teeth,
gaunt eyes, sparse hair, and a sallow, unhealthy complexion,
looked to be in his sixties. He explained that he
worked at the freight terminal and walked or hitchhiked
daily to and from his hut eight miles down the road.
"How long have you been here?"
"Almost twenty-five years. After the war I spent ten
years in the camps, and ever since, I've worked around
here, doing whatever I could find. I am not allowed to go
back to the Ukraine, although I miss my home very much.
I have relatives, but it is too expensive for them to visit me.
You know how life is. The first years were very hard for
me because it is so cold here. The Ukraine is warm and
sunny, you know, and there are flowers and fruit. I wish
I could see it once more before I die. But I guess I won't,
I have no passport."
*
"How old are you?"
"Forty-seven."
"Are you married?"
"Oh, yes. She spent eight years in the camps. She's also
from the Ukraine. Her relatives were exiled. They've all
died now, and there's just the two of us. We thought about
children, but we were afraid we couldn't take care of
them. It's not easy to get a good job if you're an exile. You
know how life is."
"What did you do? Did you kill someone?"
"No, I gave bread to the men from the forest."
**
What can he do, that poor man, to our country? Look
[100] at him. He hardly has any teeth; he won't live much
longer. What kind of enemy is he? What kind of criminal?
Whatever he did, ten years are punishment enough. Why
not let him go back to his home and die? Why be so hateful?
What kind of freedom do we have here?
Belenko was sent to a training center near Moscow for a
few weeks' intensive study of the MiG-25, and when he returned
in Mid-June, a state of emergency existed in
Chuguyevka. A dysentery epidemic had disabled fully 40
percent of the regiment, two soldiers had committed suicide,
at least twenty had deserted, there had been more
hunger strikes, and the enlisted men now were verging on
open mutiny. Fuel shortages had prevented pilots from flying
as much as they needed to master their new aircraft.
American reconnaissance planes, SR-71s, were prowling off
the coast, staying just outside Soviet airspace but photographing
terrain hundreds of miles inland with side-angle
cameras. They taunted and toyed with the MiG-25s sent
up to intercept them, scooping up to altitudes the Soviet
planes could not reach, and circling leisurely above them or
dashing off at speeds the Russians could not match. Moscow
was incensed, and Commandant Shevsov lived in terror
of an investigation. Already they had been notified that
the regional political officer was flying in next week to
lecture all officers of the regiment.
Shevsov announced that a pilot from each squadron
would have to speak at the scheduled assembly, present an
assessment of the regiment's problems, and propose solutions.
He instructed his political officer to pick those likely
to create the most favorable impression. The regimental
political officer was not from the political directorate of the
armed forces; rather, he was a pilot who in the frenzied
formation of the regiment just happened to be saddled with
the job. He thought as a pilot, and he was the only popular
political officer Belenko ever knew. When asked, Belenko
told him bluntly and in detail what he thought was wrong
and what should be done.
"Well, I agree. You will speak for your squadron. If you
say just what you said to me, maybe it will shock them into
letting us do something."
The regional political officer, a corpulent, perfumed man
[101] with bags under his eyes, appeared in a resplendent uniform
bedecked wtih medals that made the pilots smile at
each other because they knew that no political officer had
ever participated in battle, except perhaps at a bar.
"Comrade Officers, your regiment is in a serious situation,
a desperate situation.
"Around us the SR-71 is flying, spying on us, watching
us in the day and in the night.
"The Chinese are a day's walk away from us. We should
not let the Chinese frighten us. We can massacre them anytime
we want. They have a few nuclear bombs, but they
can deliver them only by donkey. Their planes are so old
we can wipe them out of the sky. But we cannot underestimate
the Chinese because there are so many of them,
and they are fanatical, mad. If we kill a million of them
a day, we still will have three years of work ahead of us.
"So the Party requires that you increase your vigilance,
your readiness, your discipline in order to defend our
Mother Country. You have been given our country's best
interceptor. It has the highest speed and the highest altitude
of any plane we have. It is a very good weapon. Yet
your regiment is in such disgraceful condition that you
cannot use this weapon properly. Your soldiers and, yes,
some officers, too, are drinking the alcohol for the planes,
and your regiment is too drunk to defend our Mother
Country."
We know all that. We've heard all that. It's as if they
sent us a recording instead of a man.
Belenko was the fifth member of the regiment to speak,
following Shevsov, the deputy regimental commander, and
two other pilots.
"We must consider our problems in light of the principles
of Marxism/Leninism and the science of communism,"
he began. "These principles teach us that man is a
product of his environment. If we examine the environment
in which we have placed our men, we can see the
origins of our problems and perhaps, in the origins some
solutions.
"On the kolkhoz I have seen livestock housed better than
our men are housed. I have seen pigs fed better than our
men are fed. There is no place for our men to wash
[102] themselves. That and the filthy mess hall are why we have so
much dysentery. There is no place for our men to play, and
they are forbidden to do almost anything that a normal
young man would want to do. We have created for them
an environment from which any normal person would want
to escape, so they try to escape through alcohol.
"We must change that environment. First of all, we must
build decent barracks, a decent mess hall, a decent latrine,
and a bathhouse with fire for hot water. There are nearly
eight hundred of us here. If we all went to work, officers,
sergeants, soldiers, we could do that in a month. If there
is not enough money, let us go into the forest and cut the
logs ourselves. If every officer would contribute 30 rubles
from his salary, we would have more than six thousand
rubles to buy other materials.
"We should organize social parties at the base and invite
students so that our men can meet nice girls in a normal
way. It is unnatural and unhealthy to try to keep our men
from seeing girls.
"The forests and streams are full of deer, elk, rabbits,
ducks, geese, quail, and fish. We should take our men to
hunt and fish. It would be enjoyable for them, and the game
would enrich their diet. We should start our own garden
and plant our own potatoes right here on the base.
"Each weekend officers should be appointed to take
groups of men on the train into Vladivostok and let them
just walk around the city. We can ride the tram free, and
we can sleep in the station, and we can take up a collection
among the officers to buy them some sausage and
beer instead of vodka. It will give them something to look
forward to. It will show that we care about them.
"When we can, we should build a football field and a
library so the men can improve their professional skills and
education. And if they want to read detective stories, why
not let them? That's better than having them drink alcohol.
"If we demonstrate to our men that we are loyal to them,
that we respect them, then they will be loyal and respect us
and obey us. If we given them alternatives to alcohol, most
will take those alternatives.
"Comrade Colonel, I have spoken frankly in the hope
[103] that my views will be of use to our regiment and our
Mother Country."
As Belenko sat down, the officers clapped their hands,
whistled, stomped their feet, pounded the table until
Shevsov stood and silenced them.
The visiting political officer, who had been taking notes,
rose, his face fixed with a waxen smile.
"Comrade Officers, this has been a productive gathering.
I find some merit in what each of you has said. I find that
underneath, this regiment is imbued with determination to
eliminate drunkenness, to enforce discipline, and to serve
our Mother Country. That is what I shall report.
"But to you, Comrade Belenko, I must say a few words
frankly, just as you spoke frankly. You do not ask, 'What
may I give to the Party?' You ask the Party to give, give,
give; give me Utopia, now. You show that you lack the
imagination to grasp the magnitude of the problem, much
less the difficulty of solving it. You do not understand that
our country cannot build complex aircraft, modern airfields,
and barracks all at the same tune, and your priorities
are exactly the reverse of what they should be. You
spoke of the principles of Marxism/Leninism. I urge you
to restudy these principles until you understand that the
Party and the people are one and that, therefore, the needs
of the Party always must be first. We will do everything
in time, step by step, and the Party wisely has decided
which steps must be taken first, threatened as we are by the
Chinese and the Dark Forces of the West."
The faintest of hopes, the tinest flicker of light sparked
by Belenko's speech evaporated. Nothing would be done.
They filed out silently, Shevsov among them and for once
one of them.
Pig! No, that is an insult to a pig. In the order of the universe,
a pig serves some useful purpose. You and all you
stand for are to the universe like cancer.
I wish I could put you for one night in those barracks
and see how you feel when someone shits in your boot. I
wish I could march you into that mess hall where a maggot
would retch. Oh, there you would learn the science of
communism.
[104] Well, go back to your fresh fruits and meat and perfume
and lying while our men lie disabled by dysentery, cholera,
and alcohol, while the Americans look down and laugh at
us from the skies. But you leave me alone.
All my life I have tried to understand, tried to believe
you. I understand now. Our system is rotten, hopelessly,
incurably rotten. Everything that is wrong is not the result
of mistakes by bureaucrats in this town or that; it is the
results of our system. I don't understand what is wrong;
but it is wrong. It produced you. You, not the Dark Forces,
have kidnapped our Mother Country.
Soon after this climactic and decisive intellectual rebellion,
Ludmilla announced that she was leaving. They had
tried as best two people could; they had failed; it was
pointless to try anew. Her parents were overjoyed by the
prospect of having her and Dmitri with them in Magadan,
and they could guarantee Dmitri's future and hers. She
would stay until October, when her commitment to the
dispensary expired. But after she left it would be best for
all if he never saw her or Dmitri, who would only be confused
by his reappearance.
Her statement was so dispassionate and consistent with
previous demands for divorce that Belenko could find
neither energy nor desire to try anew to dissuade her. Besides,
she was right about Dmitri.
Conditions at Chuguyevka were not atypical of those
throughout the Far East. Reports of desertions, suicides,
disease, and rampant alcoholism were said to be flooding
into Moscow from bases all over. In late June, Shevsov
convened the officers in an Absolutely Secret meeting to
convey grave news. At an Army base only thirty-five miles
to the southwest, two soldiers had killed two other soldiers
and an officer, confiscated machine guns and provisions,
and struck out through the forest toward the coast, intending
to steal a boat and sail to Japan. They dodged and
fought pursuing patrols several days until they were killed,
and on their bodies were found diaries containing vile
slanders of the Soviet Army and the grossest misrepresentations
of the life of a soldier. These diaries atop all the reports
of trouble had caused such concern in Moscow that
[105] the Minister of Defense himself was coming to the Far East
and to Chuguyevka.
The career of every officer would depend on his impressions,
and to make a good impression, it would be necessary
to build a paved road from the base to the helicopter pad
where the Minister would land, about four miles away. The
entire regiment would begin work on the road tomorrow.
It never was clear just where in the chain of command
the order originated; certainly Shevsov had no authority to
initiate such a costly undertaking. In any case, the Dark
Forces, the SR-71s, the Chinese, the desirability of maintaining
flying proficiency — all were forgotten now. Pilots,
engineers, technicians, mechanics, cooks, everybody turned
to road building — digging a base, laying gravel, pouring
concrete, and covering it with macadam.
It's unbelievable. For this we could have built everything,
barracks, mess hall, everything. We could have built a
palace!
But the crowning order was yet to come. Within a radius
of about a mile, the land around the base had been cleared
of trees to facilitate takeoffs and landings. The Minister, it
was said, was a devotee of nature and its verdancy. He
would want to see green trees as he rode to the base. Therefore,
trees would have to be transplanted to line the mile
or so of road.
You can't transplant trees here in the middle of the summer!
Everybody knows that!
But transplanted they were, hundreds of them, pines,
spruces, poplars, dug up from the forest, hauled by truck
and placed every fifteen yards along the road. By the first
week in July they were dead, shriveling and yellowing.
Dig them up and replace them. So they did, with the
same results.
Do it again. He may be here anytime now.
So again saplings and some fairly tall trees were imported
by the hundreds from the forests. Again they all
died. Finally acknowledging that nature would not change
its ways for them, someone had had an idea. Leave them
there, and just before he arrives, we'll spray them all with
green paint. We'll drive fast, and he won't know the
difference.
[106] It all was to no avail. In early August they were advised
that illness had forced cancellation of the Minister's inspection.
He wasn't coming after all. It was time to fly again.
To fly well and safely, a pilot must practice regularly. His
skills, like muscles, grow flabby and can even atrophy
through disuse. Because of fuel shortages and preoccupation
with the road, they had flown little since May.
The second day they resumed, a pilot suffered vertigo as
he descended through clouds preparatory to landing. In
his disorientation he panicked and ejected himself. Scrub
one MiG-25 and the millions of rubles it cost.
Subsequently a MiG-25 malfunctioned at takeoff. The
runway was conspicuously marked by a line and guideposts.
If a plane was not airborne upon reaching this line,
the pilot was supposed to abort the takeoff, deploy his drag
chute immediately, brake the aircraft; if he did, he could
stop in time. But on this morning the pilot neglected to
abort soon enough, and the MiG-25 plunged headlong off
the runway. By terrible misfortune a civilian bus was
passing, and like a great steel knife, the wing of the MiG
sheared off the top third of the bus, decapitating or dismembering
five children, three women, and two men and
badly injuring other passengers. When Belenko went to
help, he saw three soldiers from the rescue party lying on
the ground, having fainted at the horror of the sight.
The crashes might have occurred in any circumstances,
even if the pilots had been flying regularly, even if they
were not fatigued from working twelve hours a day seven
days a week on the road. But Belenko did not think so.
It was murder.
That night he knew it was futile to try to sleep, futile to
try to postpone a decision any longer. A fever of the spirit
possessed him, and only by a decision could he attain relief.
He told Ludmilla that he had to return to the base, and
through the night he wandered beneath the moonlight in
the forests.
For hours, thoughts, recollections, apprehensions — half-formed,
disjointed, uncongealed, contradictory, disorderly
— tumbled chaotically through his mind until he realized
that, as in other crises, he must gather sufficient strength,
courage, and poise to think logically.
[107] I cannot live under this system. For me there can be no
purpose or meaning to life under this system. I cannot
change this system. I cannot overthrow it. I might escape
it. If I escape it, I might hurt it.
Why should I not try? I will have no family. Mother I
have not heard from in twenty-five years. Father I have not
seen for eight years. They are not like father and mother
to me anyway. Ludmilla does not want to see me again.
Dmitri, maybe I could see him a few times in my life, but
we would be strangers. Privilege, yes, I have privilege; I
could retire in 1987. But was I born to think only about
whether I eat meat and white bread? No, I was born to
find my way, to understand; to understand, you must be
free.
Is there freedom in the West, in America? What would
it be like there? I don't know. I know they have lied about
everything else, so maybe they have lied about the West,
about the Dark Forces. I know that however bad it is in
the West, it cannot be worse than here. If the Dark Forces
are the way they say, I can always kill myself; if they are
as bad as they say, there is no hope for the world or mankind.
All right. I will try. And I will try to hurt this system as
badly as I can. I will try to give the Dark Forces what this
system most wants to keep secret from them. I will give
them my plane and all its secrets.
The fever had broken, replaced by a serenity, a purposefulness
exceeding any he ever had known.
On a navigation map Belenko drew from Chuguyecka an
arc representing the maximum range he estimated he could
expect to attain, considering the evasive maneuvers and
altitudes he would have to fly. Within the arc he discerned
only one potentially hospitable airfield large enough to
accommodate a MiG-25, the military field at Chitose on the
Japanese island of Hokkaido. All right. It has to be Chitose.
He could not attempt the flight until two conditions obtained
simultaneously: The planes had to be fully fueled,
and the weather very good. Because a MiG-25 cannot land
safely with much fuel aboard, they were not loaded to
capacity unless they were going to try to intercept the
SR-71s or engage in an important exercise such as the
[108] firing of missiles. To prevent MiG-25 pilots from talking
with foreign pilots, the radios were restricted to a very
narrow frequency band that permitted communications
only with other MiGs and Ground Control. Thus, he
would be unable to tell the Japanese of his intentions or to
ask their guidance. He could only hope that Japanese interceptors
would force him down or that he could locate the
field himself. In either case, clear weather was essential.
Any commander had the right at any time to ask a pilot
the most recondite technical questions about his aircraft,
tactics, production, or any other professional matter. To
prepare himself for these quizzes, Belenko kept notes in a
thick tablet which he carried in a flap pocket of his flight
suit. Now he began methodically and cryptically recording
in the tablet every Soviet military secret he had ever heard,
every thought, and all data that might be beneficial to the
United States.
There was one more thing to do. It was imperative that
as soon as he landed, the Japanese take all measures necessary
to protect the MiG-25 and prevent its recovery by the
Russians. He wanted to tell them that, but he could speak
not a word of Japanese or English. So he decided that he
must write a message in English to hand to the first Japanese
official he met. He drafted the message first in Russian:
"Immediately contact a representative of the American
intelligence service. Conceal and guard the aircraft at
once. Do not allow anyone near it." Laboriously, with the
aid of a little Russian-English dictionary, he translated as
best he could the message into English.
That done, he could do nothing more except wait for the day, not knowing when it might come. He knew that when it came, the chances would be very much against him. But he was at peace with himself. For the moment he had found a purpose.