MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

CHAPTER II Viktor’s Quest

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”

“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.

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 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 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.