by John Barron
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.
CHAPTER III
The First Escape
An overpowering, unrelenting stench saturated the unventilated coach, emanating from its filthy toilet, from the vomit of drunks, from bodies and clothes too long unwashed. The windows, grimy and flyspecked, could not be opened. And the unupholstered wooden benches of the coach, with their high, straight backs, made any posture miserable. Yet the very squalor of the train sustained him by reminding him that he was journeying away from squalor.
On the fifth morning he awakened from a half sleep and saw that during the night the train had entered the rich plains surrounding Armavir. Under the yellow sunshine they were moving through fields of green wheat, then past blooming orchards and vineyards. Bounding from the train as if springing out of a cage, he delighted in the comparative cleanliness, warmth, and gaiety of Armavir. It was an old city with cobblestoned streets, trees, flowers, and a number of colorful prerevolutionary buildings that had withstood war and social change. Among the 200,000 inhabitants were substantial numbers of indomitable Armenians and Georgians and an abnormal proportion of pretty girls, many of whom attended a nursing school or teachers’ college.