CHAPTER III



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 s