Contents |
Why? Of all officers, why Belenko? Nowhere in the recorded
history of his life and career was an answer
discernible. None of the conventional causes that might
motivate a man to abandon homeland, family, comrades,
and privilege could be found. Belenko was not in trouble
of any kind. He never had associated with dissidents or
manifested the least ideological disaffection. Like all Soviet
pilots, he underwent weekly medical examinations,
and physicians repeatedly judged him exceptionally fit,
mentally and physically. He drank moderately, lived
within his means, was involved with no woman except
his wife, and had the reputation of being honest to the
point of fault.
In their initial consternation, the Russians did not believe,
indeed, could not bring themselves to believe, that
Belenko had vanished voluntarily. They preferred to think
that he had been lured by invisible forces beyond his control.
In a way they were correct, for Belenko was a driven
man. And in his flight from the Soviet Union, he was continuing
a quest that had motivated and dominated most of
his life, a quest that caused him also to ask why.
Belenko grew up as a child alone, left to chart his own
course according to destinations and bearings fixed by
[23] himself. He was born on February 15, 1947, in a mountain
village between the Black and Caspian seas, about a year
after his father's release from the Soviet Army. His father
had been conscripted in December 1941 at age seventeen,
eventually promoted to sergeant, trained as a saboteur and
assassin, then assigned to help lead partisan forces. Thereafter
he fought with partisans behind German lines, swimming
for his life across icy rivers, hiding in frozen forests,
and witnessing the slaughter of numberless comrades by
enemy patrols, which in combat with irregulars neither
gave nor received any quarter. Combat hardened him into
a physically powerful, blunt, strong-willed man concerned
with little other than survival and the pursuit of women.
When Viktor was two, his father divorced his mother,
took him away to Donbas, the great mining region of
southwestern Russia, and subsequently prohibited her from
seeing him. They shared a hut with another woman until
his father quit her, consigned him to the care of his own
mother and sister, and departed for a job 5,000 miles away
in a Siberian factory managed by a wartime friend.
The grandmother and aunt lived in one of some forty
mud and straw huts that constituted a village near Mine
No. 24. Coal dust darkened every structure of the village
and so permeated the atmosphere that after a storm temporarily
purified the air, food tasted strange. The women
occupied one room of the hut and built a bed for Viktor
in the other, where they cooked and ate. His aunt rose
daily at 5:00 A.M. to draw water from the communal well,
stoke the fire, and prepare soup and bread for breakfast
before she walked to the mine. There she worked from
7:30 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., sorting debris and alien particles
from coal passing on a conveyor belt. She had no gloves,
and often her hands were bruised or bleeding. His grandmother,
in her seventies, hobbled about with a stick during
the day, acting as a good Samaritan, visiting the sick and
elderly and attending to an invalid widow who received
no pension. Each evening she chanted long litanies before
an icon in the corner.
Winter confined Viktor to the hut because, until he was
six, he had no shoes. From the sleeves of an old jacket
his aunt sewed slippers useful for dashes to the outhouse
[24] but unsuitable for prolonged wear in snow. Incarcerated
alone, he could amuse himself only by the exercise of his
own imagination and curiosity.
A few days after his fourth birthday Viktor sat close by
the stove, a source of both warmth and mystery. What
made it yield such good warmth? To find out, he slid open
one of the portals, and a burning coal tumbled out onto
the straw covering the clay floor. As the hut filled with
smoke, he sought escape by crawling into his grandmother's
bed and burying himself under blankets. Smoke still billowed
from the hut when he regained consciousness outside,
lying in the snow and coughing under the watch of
the neighbors who had rescued him. That evening, after
they had scrubbed and straightened the hut, his grandmother
said, "Viktor, God is watching over you."
During warm weather Viktor wandered and explored,
unrestrained, with older boys. A favorite playground was
a forbidden area in the woods off the main road between
the village and the mines. Here retreating German troops
had made a determined stand, and although some nine
years had passed, the battlefield had not been entirely
cleared. Among trenches and revetments there could still
be found live rifle and machine-gun bullets, which the
boys used to make firecrackers to scare "witches" — that is,
women who scolded them — and small "bombs" for killing
and surfacing fish in the river.
Digging for bullets, they unearthed a large, flat, cylindrical
object that seemed to them an authentic treasure — one
that could be smelted down for thousands of slingshot pellets.
Building a bonfire, they gathered around to begin the
smelting. The fire waned, and Viktor, being the youngest,
was ordered to gather more wood. As he returned, the
land mine exploded, hurling him against a tree and causing
a severe concussion. Hours later he awakened in the arms
of his grandmother, who said with conviction, "You see,
Viktor, it is as I said. God is watching over you." The blast
had killed two of his friends and badly crippled a third.
That same spring Viktor heard commotion and what
sounded like wailing outside the hut. People were gathering
in the street, mostly women but some older men also, commiserating
with one another, weeping and sobbing, a few
[25] hysterically. "Our savior and protector is gone!" a woman
moaned. "Who will provide for us now?" The news of the
death of Joseph Stalin had just reached the village. Always
portrayed by every Soviet medium as a kind of deity, Stalin
was so perceived in the village — the military genius who
had won the war, the economic genius who had industrialized
a feudal society, the political genius who had liberated
the Soviet people from capitalist slavery, the just and
benign patriarch who had secured the welfare of all.
Accidents frequently took lives in the mines, so Viktor
was familiar with mourning and funerals. He had always
seen the villagers confront death with stoic restraint, and
their bravery added to his regard of the miners as heroic
men who risked their lives for the Mother Country. But
never had he experienced such unrestrained outpouring of
grief and despair as now. It alarmed him and made him
wonder, too, how life would proceed without the noble
Stalin.
A letter in the autumn saddened both his aunt and his
grandmother. His father was coming to take him to Siberia.
The grandmother sewed a kind of knapsack for him,
and they packed it with food, including some smoked
meat, to which they never treated themselves. Through a
thick December snowfall the women walked with him and
his father to the rail station and held each other, then
waved as the train pulled away. He never saw either again.
Authorities in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk had assured
his father that the room in the communal apartment for
which he had waited forty-two months would be available
by December. It was not, and Viktor was sent to stay on a
collective farm, or kolkhoz, to the south with relatives of
his father's friend, the factory manager. The family —
father, mother, and four children — were crowded into one
room, and his first evening Viktor stared in wide-eyed
wonderment as a cow was led into the hut for the night
so she would not freeze to death.
Despite the scarcity of space, the family welcomed him
as one of their own and, as had his aunt and grandmother,
shared with him unstintingly. He soon recognized, however,
that the kolkhozniks were far poorer than the miners of the
Donbas. The collective allocated each family grain for
[26] bread on the basis of the number of workdays credited to
the household, rather than according to the number of
members. The ration for families with very young children
or elderly relatives unable to work was thus short. The
small salary paid the kolkhozniks barely enabled them to
buy essential salt, soap, and kerosene. For purchase of
shoes, clothing, and other necessities, they depended on
proceeds from the sale of milk and produce grown on their
tiny private plots, which they tended fervently and carefully.
Throughout the winter their diet consisted of bread
and milk for breakfast, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and
bread for dinner and bread and milk for supper. After the
cow stopped giving milk, they drank water.
The winter of 1954 was especially severe in Siberia, so
cold that frozen birds littered the ground, and in February
the cow could not be allowed outside very long even in
daytime. The children amused themselves around the
wood-burning stove with games of their own design, and
Viktor devised the most popular. The hut was inhabited by
big reddish-brown cockroaches, which were accepted as
legal residents of all peasant homes and hence not necessarily
considered repellent. The intricacy of their bodily
composition and functioning fascinated Viktor, and he
studied them long and curiously. How did such complicates
creatures come to be? Why are they here? What
gives them life? Watching how quickly they skittered
about, he conceived the idea of harnessing the cockroaches
by attaching threads between them and toy carts carved
from wood. After many failed attempts and mangled insects,
he succeeded and began to stage races. The competition
became such a source of mirth for all that sometimes
after supper the father would say, "Well, Viktor, let us
have a race."
The spring thaws awakened and changed the kolkhoz.
The pure air turned pungent with the omnipresent stench
of ordure, but radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes appeared
in the garden, and they tasted delicious. Viktor worked in
the fields eleven to twelve hours a day alongside other children,
women, and older men, in their fifties or sixties, who
constituted most of the labor force. The few teenagers
among them malingered and caviled, cursing their barren
[27] life in general and the paucity of meat in particular. Once
Viktor heard an old woman snap at them: "During the
war, we were glad to eat grass and acorns and mice and
grasshoppers. You should be grateful that things are much
better now." It never occurred to him that the toil was
onerous. He liked the outdoors, the physical exertion, and
the discoveries of how soil, moisture, sun, and time transform
seed into wheat. For a boy of seven it was a pleasant
summer.
His father retrieved him in September and in effect appointed
him housekeeper of their room on the second floor
of a frame apartment building housing employees of the
Altai truck factory in Rubtsovsk. His duties included some
shopping, preparing a cold supper, cleaning the room,
keeping the coke fire burning, and hauling water twice
daily from a well about 150 yards down the street. Straining
with the pails of water, he remembered the kolkhoz
and in a few days built a yoke that enabled him to carry
two buckets simultaneously. After slipping on winter ice,
he constructed a crude, yet serviceable sled to transport
water and other cargo. He did not object to the chores
any more than he had minded the work on the farm.
Rather, from them he gained a sense of partnership and
worth, and he prided himself in their accomplishment.
His father went out often in the evening and on Sundays
to visit women, and they talked mostly during supper or
while playing chess (which, by unspoken agreement they
quit after Viktor started winning easily). Only once did his
father ever discuss his future with him. "You will find
your own way in life. I have no friends or relatives in the
Party who can help you. I cannot give you money to buy
your way out of Rubtsovsk. If you wish a life different
from mine, you can find the way only through education.
The war took away my opportunity for an education. You
still have a chance."
Viktor needed no encouragement. Schooling excited him
from the outset and offered, so he thought, the opportunity
to learn the answers to all questions about life. And it was
through school that he sought an answer to the first question
about Soviet life that ever seriously troubled him.
In wartime desperation, the Russians had quickly transfigured
[28] Rubtsovsk from a placid market town into a raw,
roaring industrial city by transferring factories threatened
by the Germans in the west. The forced industrialization
was effected mainly by prison labor, and a web of concentration
camps developed around the city. Although many
camps were closed after Stalin died, those around Rubtsovsk
remained, and their inmates were utilized in industrial
construction with something akin to wartime urgency.
Barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and lights were erected
around construction sites, and shifts of prisoners, or zeks,
as the Russians called them, were trucked in to keep the
work going twenty-four hours a day.
Viktor first sighted some zeks while leaning into a stinging
wind on the way to school. They were shivering and
huddled against one another for warmth inside wire cages
on the back of trucks, guarded by Central Asians clad in
heavy sheepskin coats and armed with submachine guns.
The thin cloth coats, painted with white numerals; the
canvas boots; the cloth caps partially covering their shaved
heads — all were ragged.
He had seen people in dirty, tattered clothes before.
Never had he seen eyes so vacant. There was no expression;
it was as if he were looking at men whose minds
and souls had died while their bodies continued to breathe.
The concept of political prisoners was unknown to him.
Criminals were criminals, and he was sure that each of
the gaunt trembling, hollow figures he saw must have done
something terrible. Yet he cried out to himself, Kill them!
Kill them or set them free! I would not treat a rat like
that. I would rather die than be in a cage.
His recurrent vision of the zeks subsequently caused him
to wonder: Why are they so rejected? What made them
that way? In tune, as schools taught him the verities of
Marxism-Leninism, he felt he understood. Man, political
instructors emphasized, is but the product of his social and
economic environment. Capitalism, although a necessary
stage in human evolution, created an inherently defective
socioeconomic environment based on selfishness, greed,
and exploitation of the many by the few. Given such a
defective environment, defective human behavior was inevitable.
The criminality, alcoholism, acquisitiveness, [29]
indolence, careerism, and other aberrant behavior that
admittedly persisted in the Soviet Union to some limited
extent were merely the malignant remnants of capitalism.
Viktor still pitied the zeks but now understood them for
what they were — unfortunate victims of the lingering influences
of decaying capitalism. Although the past could not
be altered, nor their plight remedied, the misery they personified
eventually would end with the advent of True
Communism.
Shortly before Viktor's tenth birthday his father married
a co-worker, the widow of a friend killed in an assemblyline
accident. They moved in with her, her mother, sixty-eight,
son, six, and daughter, three. She owned a house, a
real stucco house consisting of three rooms and a kitchen,
well built by her late husband and his relatives on a small
parcel of land her parents had been permitted to keep.
The outhouse was only a few paces away in the backyard,
and the well less than a minute's walk down the block.
The stepmother was a plump, shapeless woman of
thirty-five, slightly cross-eyed, and she wore her lusterless
hair swept straight back into a tight little bun, a style that
emphasized the plainness of her face. Formerly a teacher,
she managed both her accounting job at the factory and
the household well, for she was by nature efficient, industrious,
and, Viktor thought, conniving. He disliked her
instantly and, while treating her civilly, gave her no cause
to be fond of him.
Despite his father's admonitions, he addressed her formally
as Serafima Ivanovna, refusing ever to call her
Mother or even Serafima. One Sunday their soup contained
meat which he perpetually craved, but he said nothing
when his eye caught her deftly ladling out larger portions
of meat into the bowls of her own children. Always he had
asked his father for spending money to buy a hockey
stick, soccer ball, books, or whatever. Now his father required
that he ask Serafima Ivanovna, and usually she
declined, politely explaining that the family budget at the
moment could not accommodate any frivolities.
Looking for a pencil after school, he found some of her
papers and records, studied them, and made a discovery.
She was maintaining two bank accounts. Into one she put
[30] all of his father's salary and part of her own for general
family use; into the other she sequestered some of her
salary for the separate benefit of her children. That evening
Viktor confronted her with his findings, and during the
shouting, abusive argument that ensued, their mutual animosities
spilled out. In front of the family Viktor's father
took off his belt and flogged him furiously for three or
four minutes until his own exasperations were spent. Maybe
Viktor could have stopped it sooner, had he cried, but
he did not.
The next day he enlisted a schoolmate into a compact
to run away, south to the sunshine and orchards of Tashkent.
Eluding railway police, then an aged conductor, they
slipped aboard a train just as it started to roll out of the
Rubtsovsk station. The train, however, was headed north,
and they got off at a station some fifty miles away. As
they attempted to sneak onto a southbound train, police
grabbed them by their collars, dragged them into the station,
interrogated and beat them. Unable to verify their
false identities, authorities interned them in a detention
center for orphans and delinquents pending investigation.
The second night they escaped into the countryside by
scaling a barbed-wire fence and hid on a kolkhoz for a
few days before venturing back to the railroad station.
There the police again caught them, beat them, and
dragged them back to the center. Some three weeks later
Viktor's father arrived to bring him home. He was calm.
"I cannot stop you from running away. But if you do it
again, they will put you in reform school. That is like a
prison, and once you have been there, you will never be
the same. Think about it; you must decide."
Father is happy with Serafima Ivanovna, and they are
good for each other. I am a problem for them both. I do
not belong with them. Yet I am forbidden to leave. I cannot
change what is. So until I am older, I will stay away
as much as I can. Then, on the first day I can, I will leave.
The school maintained a superb library with a large
collection of politically approved classics. The room was
warm and quiet and it became a sanctuary into which
Viktor retreated in his withdrawal from home. Pupils were
not permitted to choose specific books; instead, the [31]
librarian selected for them after assessing their individual
interests and capacities.
Viktor wondered about the librarian because she was so
different from others. Although elderly, she walked erectly
and held her head high, as if looking for something in the
distance, and her bearing made him think of royalty. He
often saw her walking to or from school alone; he never
saw her fraternizing with the other teachers or, for that
matter, in the company of another adult. There were
stories about her. It was said that her husband had been a
zek and that many years ago she had come from Moscow,
hoping to find him in the camps. Some even said that she
herself had been a zek. Viktor never knew what the truth
was. But whatever her past or motives, the librarian
elected to invest heavily of herself in him.
Having questioned him for a while, she said, "Well, tell
me, young man, what interests you? History, geography,
science, adventure... ?"
"Adventure!" Viktor exclaimed.
She handed him a copy of The Call of the Wild, which
he brought back in the morning. "You disappoint me," she
said. "Why do you not want to read the book?"
"But I have read it."
"Really? Please, then, recite to me that which you read."
His accurate and detailed account of the novel by Jack
London evoked from her the slightest of smiles and a nod.
"Let us see if you can do as well with these," she said,
handing him copies of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. "However, do
not neglect your studies. You have time for many adventures."
Guided and stimulated by the librarian, Viktor became
an omnivorous reader, each book she fed him intensifying
his hunger for another. He developed the capability of
reading any time, any place light allowed, his concentration
unimpaired by conversation, noise, or disturbance around
him. And he fell into what was to be a lifelong habit of
almost reflexively starting to read whenever he found himself
with idle tune, whether a few minutes or a few hours.
The authors he read became his true parents, their
characters his real teachers and, in some cases, his models.
[32] He saw in Spartacus, who had led Roman slaves in revolt,
the strengths and virtues he desired in himself. To him,
Spartacus was even more admirable than the forthcoming
New Communist Man because his worth originated from
within himself rather than from his external environment.
Then the works of the pioneering French aviator and author
Antoine de Saint-Exupery unveiled to him the brilliant
vistas of flight, and the pilots who braved the storms and
unknowns of the sky to discover and explore its beauties
were his heroes.
Discussing Saint-Exupery with the librarian, he said he
longed to fly.
"Why?"
"I think to fly would be the greatest of adventures. The
sky has no boundaries, no restrictions. There nothing is
forbidden."
"You know, Viktor Ivanovich, great adventure can be
found in poetry. Tell me, who is your favorite poet?"
"Lermontov. Absolutely. Lermontov." The great nineteenth-century
Russian poet was a dashing officer frequently
in official disfavor and sometimes in exile. Viktor
admired him both for his adventurous personal life, which
ended in a duel at age twenty-six, and for his art.
"Here is a collection of his works you might enjoy."
Leafing through it, Viktor noted the lightest of little
checkmarks penciled by a poem that began "An eagle cannot
be caged...."
Subconsciously or otherwise, Viktor tried to emulate the
exploits of fictional characters, and in school he behaved
like a Russian reincarnation of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. Learning in physics class how to create short
circuits, he put out the lights in the entire school on a dark
whiter afternoon and forced dismissal of class for the rest
of the day. In chemistry class he taught himself to make
firecrackers with timing devices. He thus was able to keep
a class popping with a succession of little surprise explosions
while he was innocently far away. Once he stole a
key, locked the social philosophy classroom from the inside,
and jumped out a second-floor window, preventing
the class from convening for three hours. He achieved perhaps
his best coup by letting loose fifteen lizards in the
[33] Russian literature class. Girls shrieked and ran, and the
equally hysterical female teacher took refuge from the
beasts by jumping atop her desk. Manfully Viktor volunteered
to save them all by rounding up the lizards, and
the grateful teacher reported his gallantry and good citizenship
to the school director.
After a hockey game in a park in February 1958, four
boys, considerably larger and three to four years older than
Viktor, now eleven, surrounded him and demanded his
money. Instinctively and irrationally he refused. Before
taking his few kopecks, they beat him about the face, ribs,
and kidneys with a brutality unnecessary to their purposes.
He lay on the frozen snow for five or ten minutes before
gathering strength to make his way home slowly to the
censure of Serafima Ivanovna, who remarked about the
disgrace of hooliganism.
He tended to his wounds as best he knew how and stayed
to himself for several days. He could conceal the pain in
his sides but not the bloated discoloration of his face, and
besides, he wanted to think. What would Spartacus do?
The librarian evinced neither curiosity nor surprise when
he asked if there were any books about boxing and physical
culture. She came back with a book about each and a
third book — about nutrition. Viktor filled a burlap bag
with sawdust, hung it from the tree in the backyard, and
began methodically, obsessively, to punch the bag according
to the books. He ran through the streets, chinned himself
on the tree, and, with loud grunts, did push-ups and
pull-ups until Serafima Ivanovna admonished him to cease
the racket. For once his father interceded in his behalf.
"What he is doing is not so bad. Let him go his way."
Emboldened by the unexpected endorsement, Viktor
asked Serafima Ivanovna if they could add more protein —
meat, fish, eggs, cheese (he had never tasted cheese) — to
their daily fare of bread, potatoes, and cabbage. According
to the nutrition book, protein was essential to the strength
and health of the body, especially growing bodies. "All you
ask is expensive and hard to buy," she replied. "We do the
best we can; I cannot promise more."
The witch is telling the truth. There is nothing she can
do. All right, I will find protein for myself.
[34] The hunt for protein led Belenko into the forest beyond
the river that curved along the eastern edge of Rubtsovsk.
They may have exaggerated, but old men claimed that the
Aley River before the war was so clean you could see
plentiful schools of big fish swimming five or six feet below
the surface and catch them almost effortlessly. But around
the city, continuous pollution from chemicals and factory
wastes had turned the river into an open sewer, and the
despoilment had eaten into the forest, shriveling flora and
leaving a belt of scrubland.
About a thousand yards past the scrubland, Viktor entered
heavy underbrush and, after pushing on for another
half mile or so, came into a dense primeval forest colored
and perfumed by wild flowers. He felt like Fabien, the
doomed pilot in Saint-Exupery's Night Flight, who, lost
and buffeted in a South American storm, suddenly was
lifted out of the blackness of the clouds into tranquil heavens
lit by stars. Uncontaminated, uninhabited, silent, and
serene, the endless forest imbued Viktor with the same
sense of space and freedom he was sure awaited him in the
sky. And after school recessed for the summer, he virtually
lived in the forest.
With a slingshot he killed birds — mostly sparrows, crows,
and quail — that abounded in the forest and roasted them
on a spit. He learned to detect birds' nests which often
yielded eggs. And he gathered wild blackberries, strawberries,
cranberries, and tart little green apples. Some days
he came alone and, after gorging himself until he could
eat no more, settled in a patch of light and read until darkness.
More often he invited friends, most of whom were
veritable waifs like him, and just as hungry. They constructed
a log lean-to, and from this base ranged out in
all directions to hunt and explore; their explorations were
rewarded by discovery of a clear stream populated by
plump trout.
Between May and September Viktor gained thirteen
pounds, and with the resumption of school, he looked forward
to presenting himself to the librarian. He expected
that she would acclaim him for his growth just as she did
for his reading. But she was not there. The new librarian
would say only that she had retired and "moved away." To
[35] where? None of the other teachers knew, or if they did,
they would not say. Why would she go away without saying
good-bye to me? What happened to her? He never did
find out.
Viktor continued to pound the punching bag, to exercise
and run, and by December he felt ready to stalk the four
assailants who had jumped him the preceding February.
He encountered one in the same park where they had
beaten him. "I have come to pay you back," he announced.
"I am going to fight you. Are you ready?"
The boy tried to shove him away, as if not deigning to
take him seriously. With a short, quick left jab, Viktor hit
him squarely in the face, and he himself was surprised by
the force of the blow. It is working! He dazed the boy
with a left to the jaw, then a right to the ribs. The teenager
tried to fight back, but the blow to the ribs had hurt him.
Viktor hit him in the jaw with another left and then, with
a right, knocked him down. He got up, and Viktor
promptly knocked him down once more, this time with a
left hook. "Have you had enough?" Viktor shouted.
"All right, let's stop," said the boy, who was breathing
heavily on the ground. He slowly got to his feet, whereupon
Viktor, without warning, hit him with all his might
in the right eye and felled him a third time.
"I did that so you will understand," Viktor said. "The
next time I will kill you."
He caught two of the other three and battered them
just as badly. His inability to find the fourth did not matter.
He had avenged himself, and the fights, the third of
which was witnessed by fifty to sixty students after school,
established his reputation as someone who had best be left
alone.
It also gained him an invitation to an adolescent party
on New Year's Eve, 1958. Everyone was gulping homemade
vodka, which smelled like a combination of kerosene
and acetone. Although Viktor had never drunk alcohol
before, he joined in, partially out of curiosity, partially
because he thought drinking was expected of him. After
about an hour he staggered outside, unnoticed, and collapsed
in the snow. He awakened caked in his own vomit.
His head throbbed with both pain and fright born of the
[36] realization that, had he lain there another couple of hours,
he surely would have frozen to death. In his sickness and
disgust he made a vow: Never will I do this to myself
again. Never will alcohol get a hold on me.
Later he came to enjoy alcohol, particularly wine and
beer. But he drank it in circumstances and amounts of his
own choosing. The ability to control alcohol, or abstain
from it entirely, gave him an advantage over many of his
peers at each successive stage in his life, if only by granting
him more time and energy than they had for productive
pursuits.
On a wintry Sunday afternoon a light aircraft crashed
near the truck factory. The wreckage was still smoldering
and ambulance attendants were taking away the body of
the pilot, wrapped in a sheet, when Viktor arrived. The
scene transfixed him, and he stayed long after everyone
else had gone. Like a magnet, the wreckage kept drawing
him back day after day, and he contemplated it by the
hour.
Why did he die? Why did I not die in the fire when the
mine exploded? Is there a God who decides who will die
and when? They say that God is only the product of superstition
and that the whole world happened by chance. Is
that so? Do the trees and berries grow, do the cockroaches
scoot, does the snow fall, do we breathe and think — all
because of chance? If so, what caused chance in the first
place?
No, there must be some Being, some purpose in life
higher than man. But I do not understand. Maybe that is
the purpose in life — to try to understand. The pilot must
have tried in the sky. What he must have seen! Someday I
will take his place and see for myself. Some way I will give
my life meaning. I would rather that my life be like a
candle that burns brightly and beautifully, if only briefly,
than live a long life without meaning.
This embryonic ethos foreordained Viktor to conflict.
He wanted to find meaning, to dedicate himself to some
higher purpose, to be all the Party asked. Yet he could no
more give himself unquestioningly to the Party on the
basis of its pronouncements than he could give himself to
his grandmother's God on the basis of her chanted litanies.
[37] He had to see and comprehend for himself. As he
searched and tried to understand, his reasoning exposed
troublesome contradictions between what he saw and what
he was told.
His inner conflict probably had begun with the announcement
in school that First Party Secretary Nikita
Sergeyevich Khrushchev had delivered a momentous and
courageous address to the Twentieth Party Congress. The
political instructor who gravely reported the essence of
the speech suddenly turned Viktor's basic concept of contemporary
Soviet history upside down. Stalin, the father of
the Soviet people, the modern Lenin, Stalin, whose benign
countenance still looked at him from the first page of
each of his textbooks, now was revealed to have been a
depraved monster. Everything he had heard and read
about Stalin throughout his life was a lie. For the leader
of the Party himself — and who could know better? — had
shown that Stalin had been a tyrant who had imprisoned
and inflicted death upon countless innocent people, including
loyal Party members and great generals. Far from having
won the war, Stalin had been a megalomaniac who
had very nearly lost the war.
The revelations so overwhelmed and deadened the mind
that for a while he did not think about their implications.
But as the teachers elaborated upon the Khrushchev
speech and rewrote history, questions arose. It must be
true; else they would not say it. But how could Stalin fool
everybody for so long? Khrushchev worked with Stalin
for years. Why did it take him so long to find out? Why
did he take so long to tell us? If everything the Party
said before was untrue, is it possible that what it is saying
now is also untrue?
Khrushchev returned from his 1959 visit to the United
States persuaded that corn represented a panacea for Soviet
agricultural problems. In Iowa he had stood in seas
of green corn rising above his head and seen how the
Americans supplied themselves with a superabundance of
meat by feeding corn to cattle and pigs. The American
practice, he decreed, would be duplicated throughout the
Soviet Union, and corn would be grown, as the radio declared,
"from ocean to ocean." Accordingly, corn was
[38] sown on huge tracts of heretofore-uncultivated land —
uncultivated in some areas because soil or climate were
such that nothing would grow in it.
But the most stupid kolkhoznik knows you can't grow
corn in Siberia. I have seen it with my own eyes. It is not
even a foot high, a joke. How can the Party allow something
so ridiculous?
The effort to amend the laws of nature by decree, combined
with adverse weather, resulted not in a plethora of
corn but rather in a dearth of all grain, which forced the
slaughter of livestock. Serious shortages of meat, milk,
butter, and even bread inevitably followed. Nevertheless,
the radio continued to blare forth statistics demonstrating
how under the visionary leadership of the gifted agronomist
Khrushchev, Soviet agriculture was overcoming the errors
of Stalin and producing ever-larger quantities of meat,
milk, butter, bread, and other foodstuffs.
If we have so much bread, why am I standing in line at
four A.M., hoping I can buy some before it runs out? And
milk! There has been no milk in all Rubtsovsk for five
days and no meat for two weeks. Well, as they say, if you
want milk, just take your pail to the radio. But why does
the radio keep announcing something which anybody with
eyes knows is not true?
The population of Rubtsovsk included an abnormally
high percentage of former convicts because most inmates of
the surrounding concentration camps were confined to the
city for life upon completing their sentences. Many were
irredeemable criminals habituated to assault, robbery, rape,
and murder. Armed with knives or lead taped to the palms
of their hands, they killed people for no more than the
gold in their teeth and robbed men and women of the
clothes off their backs in broad daylight. Innocent citizens
lost their lives in theaters or on buses simply because
criminals in card games sometimes used as their stakes a
pledge to kill somebody, anybody.
One Saturday night Viktor rode homeward from a skating
rink on a bus with passengers so jammed together that
it was hard to breathe deeply, and he had room to stand
on only one foot. At a stop the front and back doors
swung open, people poured out as if a dam had burst, and
[39] Belenko was swept outside with them. From within the
bus he heard a heart-rending scream. "They have cut her
up. Police! Ambulance!" Lying lifeless on a seat was a
young woman, a large, wet crimson splotch on her thin
pink coat. There were no public telephones on the streets,
and calls for help had to be relayed by word of mouth or
runners. The police arrived about an hour later. They
could do nothing except haul away the body.
Viktor examined the newspapers the next day. They did
not mention the murder, as he was almost certain they
would not, for crimes of violence in Rubtsovsk never were
reported. They did report the rising crime rate in Chicago
along with the rising production of Soviet industry and
agriculture.
Of course, I know there are many criminals in Chicago
and everywhere else in capitalist countries. How could it
be otherwise? They always are having one crisis on top of
another. The people are exploited and poor and hungry
and plagued by all the other ulcers of capitalism. We don't
need the newspaper to tell us that. We need to know what's
going on here.
Why do we have so many criminals, so many people who
don't want to live openly and honestly? They say the criminals
are the remnants of capitalism. But the Revolution
was in 1917. That was nearly half a century ago. All these
criminals grew up under communism, not capitalism. Why
has our system brought them up so poorly?
Having fractured his wrist in a soccer match, Viktor
took a bus to the dispensary for treatment. Although his
wrist hurt, he recognized that his condition did not constitute
an emergency, and he thought nothing of waiting.
Ahead of him in the line, though, was a middle-aged
woman crying with pain that periodically became so acute
she bent over double and screamed. Her apprehensive
husband held her and assured her that a doctor would see
her soon. Viktor had been there about an hour when a
well-dressed man and a woman appeared. A nurse immediately
ushered them past the line and into the doctor's
office. The husband of the sick woman shouted, "This is
not just! Can't you see? My wife needs help now!"
"Shut up and wait your turn," said the nurse.
[40] If we are all equal, if ours is a classless society, how can
this happen? And why do some people get apartments
right away, while everybody else waits years? And look at
Khokhlov [son of a local Party secretary]. He's a real murderer
and robber; everybody knows that, and everybody is
afraid of him. But every time he's arrested, they let him
go. Why does the Party pretend everybody is equal when
everybody knows we are not?
One of Viktor's political instructors, the teacher of social
philosophy, genuinely idolized Khrushchev as a visionary
statesman whose earthy idiosyncrasies reflected
his humanitarian nature and his origins as a man of the
people. Khrushchev had freed the people of the benighting
inequities bequeathed by the tyrannical Stalin, and by
his multifaceted genius was leading the people in all directions
toward a halcyon era of plenty. On the occasion
of Khrushchev's seventieth birthday the instructor read
to the class the paeans published by Pravda. Everyone
could be sure that despite advancing years, the Party leader
retained his extraordinary mental acumen and robust
physical vigor. We are lucky to have such a man as our
leader.
Some months later the same instructor, as if mentioning
a minor modification in a Five-Year Plan, casually announced
that Khrushchev had requested retirement "due
to old age." For a while nothing was said in school about
the great Khrushchev or his successors. Then it began.
Past appearances had been misleading. Fresh findings resulted
from scientific review by the Party disclosed that
Khrushchev actually was an ineffectual bumbler who had
made a mess of the economy while dangerously relaxing
the vigilance of the Motherland against the ubiquitous
threats from the "Dark Forces of the West." Under Brezhnev,
the nation at last was blessed with wise and strong
leadership.
This is incredible! What can you believe? Why do they
keep changing the truth? Why is what I see so different from
what they say?
Recoiling from the quackery of social studies, Viktor
veered toward the sciences — mathematics, chemistry,
physics, and especially biology. Here logic, order, and [41]
consistency prevailed. The laws of Euclid or Newton were not
periodically repealed, and you did not have to take anybody's
word for anything. You could test and verify for
yourself.
He shifted his reading to popular science magazines and
technical journals, to books and articles about biology and
medicine, aviation and mechanics. At the time, Soviet students
were required to study vocational as well as academic
subjects, and those who excelled could participate in an extracurricular
club the members of which build equipment
and machinery. Viktor designed a radio-controlled tractor
which was selected for a Moscow exhibition displaying
technical achievements of students throughout the Soviet
Union. As a prize, he received a two-week trip to the
capital.
The broad boulevards of Moscow, paved and lighted;
subway trams speeding through tiled and muraled passages;
theaters, restaurants, and museums; ornate old Russian architecture;
department stores and markets selling fresh
fruits, vegetables, and flowers; traffic and official black
limousines — all represented wondrous new sights. Collectively
they elated him while they inspired pride in his
country and hopeful questions.
Is not the Party right after all? Does not what I have
seen prove that we are making progress? Will not all cities
someday be like Moscow?
The final morning he joined a long line of men and
women waiting four abreast outside the Kremlin to view
the perpetually refurbished body of Lenin. The Kremlin,
with its thick red walls, stately spires, and turrets, connoted
to him majesty and might, and upon finally reaching
the bier, he felt himself in the presence of history and
greatness. He wanted to linger, but a guard motioned him
onward. Leaving reverently, he asked the guard where the
tomb of Stalin was. The answer astonished him. They had
evicted Stalin from the Lenin mausoleum. Why, they've
thrown him away like a dog!
While telling his classmates back in Rubtsovsk about
Moscow, Viktor heard disturbing news. The KGB had arrested
the older brother of a friend for economic crimes.
He remembered how admiring all had been the year [42]
before when the youth had bribed a Party functionary to
secure employment in the meat-packing plant. There, as
everybody knew, a clever person could wax rich by stealing
meat for sale on the black market, and procurement
of the job had seemed like a triumph of entrepreneurship.
He will be imprisoned. He will be one of them in the
trucks. He will be a zek.
The specter shocked Viktor into recognition of a frightening
pattern in the behavior of many of his peers. Some
had taken to waylaying and robbing drunks outside factories
in the evening of paydays. Others had stolen and
disassembled cars and machinery, to sell the parts on the
black market. A few, sent to reform school for little more
than malicious mischief or habitual truancy, had emerged
as trained gangsters, who were graduating from petty
thievery to burglary and armed robbery.
They are becoming real criminals. They never will be
New Communist Men. Nothing is going to fix them. How
did our communist society do this to them? I do not understand.
But if it can make them that way, it could make
me that way. That I will not allow. It is as Father said. I
must make my own way. I must start now before it is
too late.
Always Viktor had received good marks in school without
especially exerting himself. He attended to his homework
dutifully but quickly so he could devote himself to
his own pursuits. Frequently in class, particularly during
political lectures, he read novels concealed behind textbooks.
Now he resolved to strive during the remainder of
school to earn the highest honors attainable, to obey all
rules and laws, to try to mold himself into a New Communist
Man. Through distinction, he would find his way out
of Rubtsovsk and into the sky.
Faithful to his vows, he disassociated himself from most
of his friends, studied hard, and parroted the political
polemics, even when he believed them absurd. As part of
the final examinations in the spring of 1965, he artfully
wrote three papers entitled "Progress of the Soviet System,"
"Crisis of the Western World," and "Principles of
the New Communist Man." They faithfully regurgitated
the dogma of the day and were brightened by a few original
[43] flourishes of his own. The teacher, who read portions
of "Progress of the Soviet System" aloud, commended his
selection of the tank as the best exemplification of the
supremacy of Soviet technology. Although Viktor achieved
his goal in social philosophy, a perfect grade of five, he
was not entirely proud because he suspected that not all
he wrote was true.
Certainly, his assessment of the crisis of the Western
world was valid. The grip of the Dark Forces which controlled
governments, policies, events, and the people of
Western societies was weakening. The Dark Forces, that
shadowy cabal, comprised of the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency, the American military, the Mafia, Wall Street,
corporate conglomerates and their foreign lackeys, clearly
themselves were in retreat and disarray. Everywhere in the
West, signs of decay and impending collapse were apparent.
*
However, he was not so sure that the progress
of Soviet society was as real and fated as his paper asserted.
And he personally doubted the perfectibility of the
New Communist Man, whose evolution and character he
delineated in detail.
Maybe it was guilt that caused him to speak out to his
detriment. His Russian literature teacher, in some casual
comment, said that light is matter. "Of course it isn't,"
Viktor interjected. "That's basic physics."
What began as a polite discussion degenerated into an
angry argument, and Viktor embarrassed the teacher before
her class by opening his physics book to a page that
stated light is not matter. She ordered him to report to
her at the end of the day.
His excellent work, she noted, ordinarily would entitle
him to a grade of five. But literature taught, among other
things, proper manners. She could not in good conscience
award a perfect mark to a student so unmannerly. The
difficulty could be eliminated were he to acknowledge his
error, recant before the class, and apologize for his impertinence.
[44] No! Why should I say I am wrong when I am right? In
science, at least, you must be honest. I will not be dishonest.
The teacher gave him a grade of four, and as a consequence,
he was graduated with a silver medal instead of a
gold. Still, he had his academic degree, a diploma certifying
him as a Grade 3 Mechanic (Grade 6 being the
highest), and a letter from school attesting to his good
character and ideological soundness. He also had a plan.
The Soviet Union maintains a military auxiliary, the
Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force
and Navy, which is known by its Russian acronym
DOSAAF. Among other functions, DOSAAF provides
young volunteers with technical military instruction preparatory
to their entry into the armed services. Viktor
learned that the branch in the city of Omsk, 380 miles
away, offered flight training. By finding a job in Omsk to
support himself, he reasoned, he could learn to fly through
DOSAAF.
His farewell to his father and stepmother was awkward,
for all pretended to regret that he was leaving home, while
each knew that everyone was relieved. His father gave him
a note to a cousin living in Omsk and, shaking hands,
pressed twenty rubles into his palm. He did not know
whether his father wished to conceal the gift from Serafima
or whether he simply was too embarrassed to make it
openly. He did realize that his father could ill afford the
gift, which equaled roughly a sixth of his monthly takehome
pay.
Omsk, larger, busier, and colder than Rubtsovsk, was an
important center of armament production, a major waystop
on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and a hub of air
traffic between Siberia and the rest of the country. When
Viktor arrived in June 1965, the factories manufacturing
tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, aircraft engines, and
other military hardware were running full blast day and
night seven days a week, and they continued to operate at
the same forced pace as long as he was there. Jobs were
plentiful; the problem was finding a place to live. Therefore,
his father's cousin steered Viktor to the repair garage
of Omsk Airport, which maintained a dormitory and cafeteria
for its employees, gave them substantial discounts on
[45] airline tickets, and issued them warm work clothing, including
heavy jackets and comfortable boots lined with
dog fur.
The garage, a cavernous brick hall with an arched tin
roof that rattled loudly in the rain, was cold and dark. A
dozen mechanics were under the supervision of senior
mechanic Igor Andronovich Yakov. He was a big, husky
man with thick white hair, a red nose, deep voice, and
huge hands calloused by forty years of labor on the roads
and in the garages of Siberia. For some three decades he
had driven heavy trucks until, after repeated arrests for
drunken driving, he finally lost his license. The airport
nonetheless was glad to have him as a Grade 6 mechanic
because, drunk or sober, he could fix vehicles. He shared
his skills with anyone who asked his help, and he could
not resist lending money, no matter how many times the
borrower had previously defaulted. He was the undisputed
and popular boss. And his standing and kindness possibly
saved Viktor's life on his first day at work.
About 11:30 A.M. the master welder shoved some money
at Viktor and in a patronizing tone said, "Kid, go buy
some juice."
"I don't want anything to drink."
"I didn't ask what you want. I told you to go buy
vodka."
"No! I won't."
Brandishing a wrench, the welder approached Viktor.
By not retreating, he created a confrontation which neither
man could back out of except through humiliating surrender.
He will swing from the right. I should duck under to
the left. No. If I fail, the wrench will kill me or cripple me.
Viktor jumped at the welder and with a succession of
rapid jabs knocked him against the wall and twisted the
wrench out of his hand.
He turned and saw three other mechanics coming at him
with wrenches. Stepping left, then right, then backward, he
tried to prevent any of them from getting behind him, but
they succeeded in maneuvering him toward a corner.
"Enough!" Yakov shouted. "All of you!"
Wielding a wrench of his own, Yakov grabbed Viktor
[46] by the arm and, jerking him away, announced, "The young
man and I will buy the vodka."
They walked four or five minutes before Yakov spoke.
"You realize they would have killed you."
"Maybe I would have killed some of them first."
"And in your grave, would you have been proud?
Listen to me, young one; I know. In a socialist society do
not be a white crow among black crows; else you will be
pecked to death. If you want to be a different kind of bird,
never let the others see your true colors."
At Yakov's insistence, Viktor attempted an apology to
the welder; it was hard, but he offered his hand, which
the welder refused. After they drank awhile, though, he
slapped Viktor on the back and shook hands.
Viktor had violated both a daily ritual and a longstanding
custom requiring the most junior man to fetch the
vodka.
Typically, about 11:30 A.M. Yakov signaled the effective
end of the workday. "Well, enough of that business. We can
do that anytime. Let's talk real business. I have eighty
kopecks. Let's organize something and send the kid. He'll
bring us gas."
The ensuing exchanges seldom varied. "I have a ruble."
"I'll support you with seventy kopecks."
"I can't. I have no money today."
"Well, I'll lend you fifty kopecks."
"All right, kid. Take the money, and do your job."
Viktor jogged or ran, which he liked to do anyway, to a
store a quarter of a mile away to arrive before the noon
crowd formed. His duty was to bring back the maximum
amount of alcohol purchasable with the money collected,
after he had set aside enough for bread and canned fish.
The cheapest vodka cost three rubles sixty-two kopecks a
half-liter, and a bottle of Algerian red wine one ruble
twenty kopecks; a kilogram of good Russian bread could
be bought for sixteen kopecks, and a can of foul-tasting
fish for forty kopecks.
Yakov entertained his colleagues by lining up the glasses,
shutting his eyes, and, measuring by sound, pouring almost
exactly the same amount of vodka or wine into each glass.
Glasses filled, the party began and lasted until there was no
[47] more to drink. The men then settled by the coal stove to
play dominoes, smoke, and tell jokes, allowing only an
emergency to intrude on their leisure. The garage manager
did not bother them; they accomplished in half a day
all that was demanded, his superiors were happy, and by
keeping in their graces, he could count on the mechanics
if serious need arose.
Viktor in turn empathized with them; he understood that
the garage was their prison and that they had given up
even dreaming of parole. He realized, too, the meaning of
the words that followed Yakov's first swig of vodka. "Ah,
this puts a little pink in the day." For him the garage became
a comfortable haven from which he could pursue his
overriding goal of flight.
Having survived scrutiny of his ideological stability,
study of his education, and a rigorous physical examination,
Viktor was one of forty young men selected for DOSAAF
preflight training. Five nights weekly he hurried from work
to the cafeteria, then took a bus across town to DOSAAF
offices located in a prerevolutionary bank building. The
subjects — aerodynamics, navigation, design and construction
of aircraft, radio and electronics, meteorology, and
rules of flight — were not inordinately difficult. Many
cadets, though, could not manage both the volume of
study required and a daily job, and by the end of the first
month fully a fourth had dropped out.
Viktor never had been so happy as in DOSAAF classes.
They were devoid of cant, pretense, hypocrisy. Defying
regulations, the chief instructor omitted the teaching of
political theory. Careers and lives might hinge on how
much and how well they learned, and there was no time
for trivia. The instructors were retired Air Force pilots,
and in Viktor's eyes they stood as real men who had
braved and survived the skies. They treated the cadets as
both subordinates and comrades, as future partners from
whom nothing should be hidden. Direct questions to them
elicited unequivocal, comprehensible answers, and for any
question concerning flight, they had an answer. The closer
they led him to flight, the more its challenge engrossed him.
The first parachute jump was scheduled in December,
and a parachutist, an Air Force major, readied them for
[48] it. He said that although he had jumped more than a thousand
times, he still was afraid before jumping. "Do not
fear your own fear," he told them. "It is natural." The
temperature was forty degrees below zero as Viktor and
eight other cadets climbed into the small AN-2 transport
at an airfield thirty miles from Omsk. He was not afraid;
he was terrified. He felt only like an automaton irreversibly
programmed to proceed to its own doom. When the parachutist
swung open the door and freezing air rushed and
whistled into the cabin, he had to reach into his deepest
reserves of strength and will to make himself stand up and
take his place, third in line. Will it open? Will I remember?
Am I now to die?
The parachutist slapped his shoulder, and he plunged
headlong into the void. Remember! Count! Now! Pull! A
tremendous jerk shook his body, and he yelled in exultation.
He was suspended, adrift in endless, pure beautiful
space; he was free, free from the earth, unfettered to any
of its squalor, confusion, pettiness, meanness. He laughed
and sang and shouted. I am being foolish. But what does it
matter? No one can hear me. No one can see me. I am free.
Absorbed in the rhapsodies of the sky, Viktor returned
to earth ingloriously, landing squarely on the back of a cow.
Under the impact, the startled cow involuntarily relieved
herself and bounded away, dumping him in the manure.
He only laughed at himself, for nothing could detract from
his joy. He wanted to go back up immediately and jump
again. Before, he had longed, hoped, imagined. Now he
knew. His future was clear. As long as he lived, he would
live to be in the sky.
After written examinations in mid-April, the students
met their future flight instructors. Viktor was mortified
upon being introduced to his. He had counted on being
taught by a real fighter pilot, perhaps one who had flown
against the Americans in Korea or Vietnam. Instead, he
was assigned to a woman, Nadezhda Alekseyevna, who was
about thirty-five. She still had the figure of a gymnast, and
despite a rather rough complexion and bobbed hair, she
was pretty. It almost would have been better had she been
ugly.
The sullenness with which he etched a hollow outline
[49] of his background betrayed to her his disappointment. She
recognized all the cues of male resentment, for she was one
of the few female pilots in DOSAAF, if not the sole one.
She had earned her wings and place only through prodigious
determination. At age eighteen, she had joined a
parachutist club open to women and subsequently finagled
her way into a glider club. Through influence in Moscow,
she had graduated from gliders to DOSAAF flight training
and so excelled that she won grudging acceptance as an instructor.
For the past eight years she had taught, always
having to be better to be equal, always having to prove
herself anew, always having to tolerate the lack of any
separate facilities for women at air bases.
"Do you really want to fly?" she asked Viktor.
"Very much."
"All right, we will work on it together. I am proud of
many of my students. Some now are fighter pilots. I hope
you will make me proud of you."
By law, the garage had to grant Viktor leave of absence
with three-fourths pay during his flight training at an airfield
north of Omsk. The field had long ago been abandoned
by the Air Force to DOSAAF, and it was closed
except during late spring and summer. They had to open
the mess hall and World War II barracks and keep wood
fires burning around the clock because even in early May
the temperature was below freezing. Instructors, cadets,
Air Force administrators, mechanics, cooks, and guards all
joined in clearing the runways of snow and making the
base serviceable.
On their first training flight in the YAK-18U, an old,
yet excellent trainer easy to handle, Nadezhda Alekseyevna
told him, "Place your hand lightly on the stick and throttle
and your feet on the rudders. Do not exert any pressure.
Just follow my movements." She climbed leisurely to
about 5,000 feet. Suddenly she threw the plane into violent
maneuvers — dives, an inside loop, an outside loop,
barrel rolls, a stall, then a spin. The whole earth was
rushing up into Viktor's face to smash him. He did not
know what was happening, only that the end was imminent.
Persuaded that she had scared him enough, Nadezhda
Alekseyevna deftly pulled out, circled, and landed.
[50] Viktor stood uneasily, still adjusting to the ground. "Do
you still want to fly?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Do you think I can teach you?"
"I know you can."
"All right, from now on, let's work together like adults."
On their fourth flight, she instructed, "Make a ninety-degree
turn to the left." He banked and, pulling out a
little late, altered course about 100 degrees but otherwise
executed flawlessly. "Okay, ninety degrees to the right".
This time he watched the compass carefully and straightened
out on a heading exactly ninety degrees from the
previous course. "I'm going to put us into a spin and let
you try to rescue us." She arched the plane upward and
throttled back the power until it stalled, then nosed over
into a dizzying spin. "Now it's up to you!"
Easily Viktor pushed the stick forward, stepped on the
rudder, halted the spin, and pulled back out of the dive.
"Very good! Try a loop."
Viktor dived, then lifted the plane upward and over and
backward into a loop. At the height of the loop, when
they were upside down, he snapped the plane into a half
roll and righted it, effecting an Immelmann turn, a much
more difficult maneuver than could be expected of him.
"Impudent! But good!"
Without instructions, he did a full loop, then a series of
quick rolls.
"All right! All right! Let's see if you can land."
Unharnessing their parachutes, Nadezhda, who heretofore
had addressed Viktor formally as Viktor Ivanovich,
said, "Viktor, you can do it. You have the talent. You can
be a great flier."
Everyone else saw it, too. Viktor could fly, as naturally
as a fish swims. And to him the sky had become as water
is to a fish. Before his first solo flight, he was cocky and,
afterward, still cockier. When he landed after his final
flight test, the lieutenant colonel who flew in the back seat
shook his hand. "Young man, outstanding. I hope we see
you in the Air Force."
The instructors and cadets gathered in the mess hall on
a Friday night, their last before returning to Omsk, for a
[51] great party. Even before vodka began to evaporate inhibitions,
Nadezhda abandoned her role as a superior and
confided that his performance had won her a commendation.
"You have made me proud, Viktor."
In the morning melancholy replaced euphoria as Viktor
canvassed his immediate future. It was too late to apply
this year for Air Force cadet training. He could continue
the nightly DOSAAF classes, but now the theory of flight
seemed a pallid substitute for the reality of flight. He
would have to subsist during the next months in the dark
void of the garage without adventure or meaning. What a
miserable fix. Well, whining won't help you. That is the
way it is. Do something about it.
Returning to Omsk in August, Viktor heard that because
the military anticipated need for many more doctors, there
would be an unusual number of openings in the fall classes
at the local medical school. Out of a whim to test his
capacities, he took the entrance examinations. Toward
the end of the month the medical school notified him that
he ranked near the top of all applicants and advised him to
report for enrollment. Why not? If you could be a doctor
as well as a flier, think of all the adventures you could
have! One of the cosmonauts is a doctor. If he could do it,
why can't you?
Just three days after medical-school classes convened,
they abruptly and unexpectedly were suspended so students
could participate in the harvest. Legions of young people
from factories, the universities, the Army were being
trucked into the countryside. The manufacture of goods,
the education of physicians, the training of the nation's
guardians must wait. All available manpower had to be
mobilized for the frantic, desperate battle of the harvest.
Why are we so unprepared? The harvest is not something
that happens only once every twenty or thirty years. It is
known that each fall crops must be harvested. Why do we
have to tend to the business of the kolkhozniks?
Viktor and some of his classmates were deposited on a
kolkhoz outside Omsk, hundreds of miles away from the
collective where he had stayed as a child in 1954. The
years had brought some improvements. The kolkhoz manager
traveled about in a little car instead of a horse-drawn
[52] buggy. Some of the kolkhozniks had transistor radios, and
once a week they were shown a movie on portable screens.
But Viktor could identify no other substantive changes.
The huts, the muddy streets, the stink were the same.
The bedraggled work force was composed mainly of the
elderly, women, children, half-wits, or men too dull to escape
into more prestigious and less onerous jobs at the
tractor station or dairy. Abused and neglected, machinery
still broke down and rusted. And nobody gave a damn
about anything except his small private plot of land that
he was allowed to cultivate.
It's all the same. Everything's still messed up. Why,
we've made no progress at all. Something is wrong here.
Having been told they would be paid the same wages as
the kolkhozniks, Viktor expected that since he had spent
none of his salary, a nice sum awaited him. However, after
deductions for food and lodging in the hut of a widow,
his pay for fifty-eight consecutive days of labor, sunup to
sundown, totaled thirty-nine rubles forty kopecks. Exploitation!
Why, the kolkhozniks are exploited as badly as
capitalist workers!
Relieved as an inmate released from a labor camp,
Viktor eagerly immersed himself in his premed courses.
All the academic subjects, especially anatomy and biology,
fascinated and challenged him. Like teachers everywhere,
the professors were stimulated by, and in turn stimulated,
the strongest minds, and they favored him with extra
attention.
There were problems, however. Political courses of one
form or another robbed him of about a third of his academic
time. He had heard it all before, ever since the first
grade, in fact. All right! Capitalism is horrible; communism
is wonderful. Let us try to make it better by studying. Let
us learn how to be doctors. Don't waste our time with all
this crap.
By January 1967 the savings he had accumulated from
the unspent salary paid him by the garage during DOSAAF
training were nearly depleted, and he obviously could not
survive on the monthly stipend of thirty rubles granted
medical students. There being no room in the dormitory, his
[53] father's cousin generously took him into his small apartment.
But his presence added such a conspicuous burden
to the overcrowded family that he was ashamed to impose
on them much longer.
To afford the family privacy, Viktor usually skated in
the park on Sunday afternoons. The pond was crowded, a
light snow falling, and he did not recognize the heavily
bundled figure waving at him until they were almost upon
each other. "Nadezhda!"
"Cadet Belenko! Join me for a cup of tea?"
They went to a state teahouse near the park. Shorn of
her wraps, her cheeks pinkened by the cold, Nadezhda
looked radiant. She had been in the Caucasus, qualifying
herself to fly the Czech L-29 jet trainer. "You haven't
flown until you've flown a jet. Everything is different and
better: the sound, the feel, what you can do. Why don't
you come back to class and learn about jets? If you do, I'll
be one of your teachers."
Viktor quit medical school in the morning, registered for
DOSAAF classes, and began looking for a job, any job that
carried with it a dormitory room. Factory No. 13 had
dormitories close by its sprawling facilities, and it was so
hungry for people that he was hired on the spot and immediately
trundled off, with four other men and two
women, for orientation. A young KGB officer solemnly
discoursed about the momentous import and honor of the
duties they were beginning. Factory 13 was an important
defense installation, and all that transpired inside was
strictly secret. "If anyone asks what you make, you are to
say cookware, toys, and assorted other household hardware."
This is ridiculous. Is every official in the whole Soviet
Union not only a liar but a stupid liar?
Everyone in Omsk who cared to know knew what came
out of Factory 13, one of the largest plants in the city —
tanks and only tanks. How could they not know? More
than 30,000 people worked there. When the freight trains
failed to come on tune and output backed up, you could
see the tanks, sleek, low-slung, with thick high-tensile steel
armor and a 122-millimeter gun protruding like a lethal
[54] snout, parked all over the place. And even after they were
loaded on flatcars and covered with canvas, their silhouettes
revealed them to be, unmistakably, tanks.
Stepping into the building where wheels and treads were
made, Viktor reflexively clamped his hands over his ears.
Clanging, banging, strident, jarring noise assailed him from
all around, from up and down. It came from the assembly
line, from the lathes, and, most of all, from the mighty
steam press, forged by Krupp in the 1930s, confiscated
from Germany, and transplanted to Siberia. He felt as if
he were locked in a huge steel barrel being pounded on the
outside with sledgehammers wielded by mad giants. He
soon began to perspire because the heat from the machinery,
all powered by steam, was almost as overwhelming
as the noise.
His section employed approximately 1,000 people in
three shifts, and the sheer number of personnel, together
with the incessant noise, precluded the kind of easygoing
intimacy he had known at the airport garage. There were,
however, some distinct similarities.
The dominant subject of conversation among the men
was when, where, and how to drink. In the aftermath of
accidents and failed quotas, alcohol had been banned from
the premises, but workers regularly smuggled in bottles so
they could "take the cure" in the morning after a night of
heavy imbibing. And with the ban on alcohol, a "factory
kitchen" had been opened just outside the plant gate,
ostensibly to sell snacks for the convenience of the employees.
It actually was a full-fledged, rip-roaring saloon,
where, beginning at noon, workers belted down as much
vodka as they could afford. If drinking continued inside
the plant in the afternoon, custom and prudence necessitated
setting aside a hefty portion for the supervisors, who,
having become co-felons, retired to their offices for a nap.
On payday little work was attempted as excitement at the
imminent prospect of limitless drinking mounted, and
workers prematurely quit their posts to line up for their
money. Quarrels, accompanied by curses, screams, or
tears, erupted as wives endeavored to intercept husbands
and some money before the drinking began.
His own budget enabled Viktor to appreciate the [55]
desperation of the women. Like virtually all other workers at
the tank factory, he earned 135 rubles a month, about 15
percent more than the standard industrial wage then prevailing
in the Soviet Union.
*
Some 15 rubles were withheld
for taxes, dues, and room rent; his minimum monthly bus
fares amounted to 10 rubles; by eating at the cheapest
factory cafeterias and often making sandwiches in his
room, he could keep the cost of meals down to 90 rubles.
So he had about 20 rubles left for clothing, personal necessities,
and recreation. He could manage, but he did not
understand how a man with a wife and children managed,
especially if he drank vodka every day.
Viktor came to feel that even were the prohibition
against alcohol effectively enforced, it would not materially
increase production or efficiency. For the attitudes, habits,
and work patterns of the men were, as they said, "cast in
iron." Most were quite competent at their craft. They
worked well and diligently in the morning and, unless
machinery broke down, usually fulfilled their quota by
noon. But once a quota was met, they ensured it was not
exceeded. They would stop the furnace to extract a 200-kilogram
mold "which was stuck" or change the stuffing
box in the press cylinder because "the steam pressure is too
low" or intentionally make something defective so that it
would have to be remade.
An ironsmith in Viktor's section was a veritable genius
at his work and ordinarily discharged his assigned duties
in an hour or so, then loafed the remainder of the day,
smoking, strolling about, and chatting with friends. Out of
[56] curiosity rather than censure, Viktor frankly asked why he
did not make a hero of himself by surpassing his quota, as
the Party constantly exhorted everybody to do. "You
know nothing of life, young fellow," he replied. "If I
chose, I could do ten times as much work. But what would
that bring me? Only a quota ten times as high. And I
must think of my fellows. If I exceed my quota, they will
be expected to exceed theirs."
The Educational Section of the Cultural Division of the
tank factory employed ten or eleven artists full time to
paint posters intended to correct such attitudes and inspire
the workers. Some of the posters Viktor saw were labeled
"Be a New Communist Man," "Marching Toward True
Communism," "Building a New Base for Communism,"
"I Will Exceed My Quota 100 Percent," "Be a Hero of
the Party," "The Party and People Are One." The posters
and the weekly political lectures by Party representatives
did provide conversation pieces, and a favorite topic they
raised was the Utopian life True Communism would introduce.
The Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961 had proclaimed
that the Soviet Union would largely realize True
Communism by 1980. True Communism, by definition,
would inundate the land with such a bounty of goods and
services, food and housing, transport and medicine, recreational,
cultural, and educational opportunities that each
citizen could partake of as much of the common wealth
as he or she wished. And all would be free! Born of an
environment that fully and continuously gratified all material
needs, a new breed of man would emerge — the New
Communist Man — unselfish, compassionate, enlightened,
strong, brave, diligent, brotherly, altruistic. He would be
unflawed by any of the imperfections that had afflicted
man through ages past. There would be no reason for
anybody to be otherwise.
But on the oil-soaked floors of the factory, the assemblyline
workers took their indoctrination sessions with more
than a great deal of skepticism:
"Since everybody can have as much of everything as he
wants and everything will be free, we can stay drunk all
the time."
[57] "No, I'm going to stay sober on Mondays because every
Monday I will fly to a different resort."
"I will stay sober on Sundays; half sober anyway. On
Sundays I will drive my car and my wife will drive her
car to the restaurant for free caviar."
"And we won't have to work. The tanks will produce
themselves."
"Hey, this New Communist Man, does he ever have to
go to the toilet?"
The irreverent mockery of the promised future usually
was accompanied by obscene complaints about the real
present. Someone's mother still was not being paid the pension
to which she indisputably was entitled. The facade of
the apartment building had fallen off, and wind was blowing
through the exposed cracks. Somebody had been informed
he would have to wait another year for the
apartment that was supposed to have been his two years
ago and for which he already had waited five years. Some
son of a bitch had stuffed up the garbage chute again, and
the whole building was beginning to stink like a cesspool.
Half the meat somebody's wife had stood in line three
hours for turned out to be spoiled when unwrapped.
The slogans, exhortations, theories, and promises of the
Party were as irrelevant to their lives, to the daily, precarious
struggle just to exist, as the baying of some forlorn
wolf on the faraway steppes. To the extent they took note,
it was to laugh, to jeer at the patent absurdities and hypocrisies.
Yet in the tank factory, as on the kolkhoz and
in the garage, everyone appeared to accept the circumstances
against which he inveighed as a chronic and natural
condition of life. Never did he hear anyone suggest that
the fault might lie within communism itself or insinuate
that the system should be changed. And no such thought
occurred to Viktor.
At the time, he had never heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Andrei Sakharov, or any other dissidents. He had
never read a samizdat publication or any other illicit writings,
nor had he ever heard a foreign radio broadcast. He
was unaware that anyone in the entire Soviet Union opposed
the system itself, except, of course, the traitors
traduced by the Dark Forces.
[58] For all the unconcealable defects, the admitted mistakes
of the past, the conspicuous inefficiencies, there was empirical
evidence that the system, after a fashion, did work.
The harvest, after all, had been gathered. Workers after
some years did get apartments. Before holidays, meat and
even toilet paper could be bought in the stores. Tanks
were manufactured, and as he himself had written, they
were the best tanks in the world, and the Soviet Union had
thousands of them. Besides, things were worse in the West,
where capitalism inexorably was disintegrating in accordance
with the laws of history.
There remained in his mind, however, corrosive thoughts
that he could not extirpate, contradictions that multiplied
doubts while sapping faith. You can't be sure of anything
the Party says. It was wrong about Stalin; it was wrong
about Khrushchev. Little that I see is like what it says. We
are not equal. Each of us is different, and nothing will
ever make everybody the same. There never will be a perfect
man. Why, that's ridiculous. The workers know that;
everybody knows that. And this new base for True Communism;
at the rate we're going, we won't build that for
a hundred years, two hundred years. Something's wrong
here. I just don't know what.
Although Viktor did not try to be "a white crow among
the black crows" at the factory, he did attract the attention
of management. Noticing his mechanical aptitude and how
quickly he learned, a supervisor made him a kind of utility
man who substituted for absentees, and he became adept at
a variety of jobs. Solely because he preferred to do something,
anything, rather than lounge about idly, he always
was willing to work. Sometimes on Saturday, when there
was no DOSAAF class, he did contribute to the purchase
of vodka and share a glass or two with his colleagues.
Otherwise, he did not drink on the job, and he never
showed up incapacitated with a hangover.
One morning in April his supervisor told him to report
to the office of the factory manager. Also present were a
Party representative, who was part of management, and
the deputy personnel director, who probably was a KGB
officer. The manager, an earnest man, stated that the
factory required engineers combining the talents and [59]
personal qualities he exemplified. Therefore, the factory was
willing to send him to a university to study industrial engineering
for five years. It would pay him three-fourths of
his present salary, plus an allowance for food, lodging, and
travel. Because the factory was a vital defense installation
and in light of his DOSAAF training, he would be exempt
from military service. In return, he would have to commit
himself to work at the factory for at least two years after
his graduation. The manager said he realized that the offer
was a surprise and that he wanted him to ponder his answer
carefully. He would need an answer by June.
The honor and opportunity were enormous, and to almost
any young man of his status, the offer would have
been irresistible, as it was intended to be. Out of politeness,
Viktor thanked the manager and promised to deliberate
in the coming weeks. To himself, he instantly answered
no. This is a swamp, and it will trap you, and you
never will escape. I would live a little better than the
workers, but for what purpose would I live? Here there is
no meaning, no hope, nothing to look forward to.
Outside the factory Viktor did have something to look
forward to — the possibility of entering the Air Force in the
fall and, every week or so, a few hours with Nadezhda.
From her manner in class no one would have discerned
that they knew each other personally. But on Sundays,
when they skated, attended a hockey match or the theater,
to which she once invited him, or merely walked in the
park and drank tea, neither disguised their liking for the
other.
Toward the end of the month she called him aside before
classes began. "Pay close attention tonight. This may be
your chance."
There was a special speaker, a colonel who had come to
solicit applications for the Soviet Air Defense Command
flight-training program conducted at Armavir in the Caucasus.
The colonel was candid and businesslike in his
briefing. Khrushchev believed that rockets alone could
defend against aircraft, and consequently, he had cashiered
thousands of fighter pilots who now were dispersed in
civilian life, their skills rusted by disuse. The performance
and tactics of American aircraft in Vietnam increasingly
[60] proved that Khrushchev was wrong. Valuable as missiles
were, aircraft also were essential to combat aircraft. The
Mother Country required a new generation of fighter pilots
to rebuild its interceptor forces. Only the best would be
chosen; their training would be long and arduous. But for
those who succeeded, the career opportunities, material
rewards, and honor of joining the elite of the Soviet armed
forces would be great. Selected applicants would report
to Armavir in June for the examinations that would determine
whether they were admitted to the program.
The colonel in charge of DOSAAF helped Viktor prepare
an application the next evening and forwarded it with
an ardent endorsement. Two weeks later the colonel informed
him he had been accepted for the examinations.
Viktor took three bottles of vodka with him to say
good-bye to the men with whom he had worked at Factory
13. They congratulated and toasted him; sincerely, he was
sure. After two bottles were gone, they sent for more
vodka, and as he left, the celebration was growing more
boisterous.
In a few hours, their happiness will evaporate, and they will be lost again in the swamp. Their lives are over. Something is wrong; I don't know what.