MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  The clime was balmy and benign, and wanting to exercise, Belenko jogged to the camp for applicants eight miles outside the city. A spirit of high expectancy and camaraderie pervaded the throngs of young men he joined there. They had traveled from all reaches of the Soviet Union, more than 4,000 of them, lured and united by the hope that they would be chosen to fly. No one told them that the slightest physiological flaw, no matter how irrelevant to health or flying, would disqualify them. No one told them that survivors of the physical scrutiny would have to score almost perfectly on the written tests to have a chance. No one told them that out of the thousands, only 360 would be selected. Consequently, they talked of imminent glories and rewards in the sky, never acknowledging that they might be among the rejected, condemned to two years of harsh servitude as common soldiers. Few complained about the drudging tasks assigned them while they waited their turn to be examined — unloading bricks, digging ditches, laying concrete slabs for runways, weeding fields. This was a small price.

  Physicians inspected, probed, pressed, X-rayed, tested, interrogated, and listened to Belenko for five days; then one stamped his medical records “Fit for Flight Training Without Restrictions.” For him, the written examinations assessing basic knowledge of the sciences and Party theory were easy, and he did well. When the names of the first 180 successful candidates were posted in alphabetical order the last week of June, his was there.

  The morning Belenko was formally sworn into the Soviet armed forces, a squat sergeant, the right side of his face jaggedly scarred almost from ear to chin, lined him and nineteen other cadets into a squad. Pacing the line, he put his face close to that of every second or third cadet, glowered, and sniffed like a dog. Belenko thought he was either slightly daft or trying to be funny. Suddenly the sergeant stepped back and commenced to revile them, obscenely and furiously. “So, you dripping chickens, you’re in the Soviet Army, and I’m going to tell you something about our Army. They say that life in the Soviet Army is like life in a chicken coop. You know you’re going to get screwed; you just don’t know when, how, and by whom. Well, I’ll tell you when — whenever you do anything different from what I say. You obey me absolutely, day and night, or I’ll have your head as well as your ass. We have another saying. The chicken began to think and wound up in the soup, shit soup. From now on, I think for you. You will think, you will behave, you will look just as I say. Look at your miserable selves; you look just like the scum you are. The next time I see you, I want you to look like Soviet soldiers. I want your boots to be as shiny as the balls of a cat….” In ever more curdling language the abasement and intimidation continued until Belenko concluded the man was serious, that all this was real.

  Well, millions of others have been in the same situation. It’s bound to be better when we start flying.

  They would not fly, however, for a long while. After completing basic military training, the standard Course for Young Warriors administered to all recruits, the cadets were transferred to an air base on the other side of Armavir. There they began fifteen months of academic studies: science of communism, history of the Party, Marxist/ Leninist philosophy, mathematics, physics, electronics, tactics, navigation, topography, military regulations, and aerodynamics. Classes started at 7:30 A.M., after breakfast and inspection, and continued until 7:30 P.M. six days a week. On Sunday morning they swabbed, swept, or dusted all crannies of the barracks; then a political officer treated them to a two-hour dissertation about current world events.

  A television crew preparing a special program about flight training at Armavir filmed the cadets as they took state examinations in September. A couple of days afterward Belenko was summoned to the office of the commandant and informed that because of his handsome appearance and because he ranked first on the exams, he had been designated to appear on the program. A commentator interviewed him before the cameras, and he became something of a celebrity after the program was shown on Armavir television.

  The cadets received their first leave in September and vouchers enabling them to fly via Aeroflot anywhere in the Soviet Union for a few rubles. Various friends invited Belenko to stay with their families in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kirov. But a feeling of obligation or the yearning for a sense of family he never had had or a vague hope that things might be different impelled him to visit Rubtsovsk. He appeared in a new blue uniform with the gold, black, and blue shoulder boards of a cadet, emblems denoting that he was, as he looked, a special soldier picked and destined by his country to be much more. The pride he thought he saw in his father’s face momentarily made him proud, and his stepmother fawned over him. They were impressed, and wanting their acquaintances to be impressed, they gave a party ostensibly in his honor. His father’s wartime friend, the truck factory manager, a Party underling assigned to the factory, and a couple of others from the plant were invited. Belenko realized that all were people who might help the family in the future, that the party really was not for him. He did not blame them. He felt only embarrassment at the irreducible emotional distance apparent between him and his father and stepmother whenever they were alone. They had nothing meaningful to say to each other. They did not know each other; they never had and never would. Politely lying about his schedule, he moved out on the third day and looked up friends from high school.

  One of his schoolmates had been killed in an automobile accident, and another imprisoned for black marketeering. Two had escaped to Moscow, one was in medical school, and another studying engineering. Most were working in factories, mainly the truck factory. The approbation his uniform and status evoked saddened, rather than heartened, him as he contrasted the richness of his future with the desolation of theirs.

  In Omsk, Belenko sought out his best DOSAAF friend, Yuri Nikolayevich Sukhanov, who had grown up pretty much like him, largely forsaken by divorced parents. He remembered him as a tall, broad-shouldered boxer good enough to try out for the 1968 Olympics team, a freespirited hell raiser, and one of the most promising flight students.

  Now the sight of him appalled Belenko. He had gained twenty-five pounds, looked fifteen years older, and seemed sapped of all his characteristic vibrance. Nevertheless, he insisted that Belenko share a bottle of vodka in his room, and the entreaties were so earnest Belenko had to accede.

  An injury Sukhanov sustained in boxing had permanently impaired his vision, precluding him from passing Air Force physicals and from fighting anymore. He had married a wonderful girl, a secretary at the electronics plant where he worked, and had tried to study electronic engineering at night school. But with the birth of their baby, the combined pressures of work, study, and family overwhelmed him, and he dropped out of school. They could find time for little other than what daily subsistence required. Sometimes food shopping alone, which they could undertake only before or after work, consumed two to three hours because they had to line up at different stores for bread, vegetables, staples, and meat.

  Sukhanov’s wife, Irina, was sitting on the bed nursing the baby when they entered. Belenko judged the room was about nine yards long and three yards wide. The bed, a crib, a small desk, one chair, and the cupboard and refrigerator took up most of the space. There was a small communal kitchen at the end of the hall; the toilet was in an outhouse. Irina welcomed Belenko as graciously as the circumstances allowed, putting the baby in the crib and setting out bread and canned fish on the desk, which also served as a dining table. Half-consciously, Belenko, in recounting life in flight school, tried to emphasize the negative — the petty tyrannies, hardships and restrictions and seeming stupidities of military life. Sukhanov finally stopped him. “Thank you, Viktor. But I would give anything to be in your place.”

  Raucous shouts greeted Belenko at Factory 13, and a crowd of workers formed around him. “Send out for juice!” But Belenko produced the vodka, making himself all the more of a hero. He questioned them, hunting for evidence of change, of some improvement. There was none. It was the same except that in his eyes the swamp now was more fearful than
ever. For once, he drank with them without restraint and for the same reason, but no amount of alcohol could blur or alter what he saw.

  There was alarm at Armavir when Belenko returned from leave. A cholera epidemic had spread from the shores of the Black Sea through the region, and all military personnel were being quarantined indefinitely on their bases. A military physician briefed the cadets about the nature and dangers of cholera, noting that one good antidote was “vodka with garlic.” Belenko was astounded, for from his own reading, he already knew about cholera.

  Cholera! If we have the best medicine in the world, why should we have cholera? Cholera is a disease of the yellows and blacks. It is a disease of filth. Well, of course. There is shit and filth and garbage everywhere: on the beaches, in the outhouse and garbage pit of every house, every apartment building. People can’t bathe or even wash their dishes properly. What can you expect? How many toilets could we build for the price of one spaceship?

  The cholera epidemic was followed by an outbreak of a virulent and infectious respiratory ailment, then by an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease. In consequence, the cadets were locked on base throughout the autumn and winter. The knowledge that he could not look forward to even a few hours of freedom had a claustrophobic effect on Belenko and may have contributed to his brooding. Regardless, he experienced a resurgence of intellectual conflict and corrosive doubts. The political officers, to make their points intelligible, had to disclose some facts, and Belenko’s analysis of these facts plunged him into ever-deepening spiritual trouble.

  To demonstrate the inherent injustice and totalitarian nature of American society, a political officer declared that the Communist Party was terribly persecuted in the United States. Wait a minute! You mean they have a Communist Party in the United States; they allow it? Why, that would be like our allowing a Capitalist Party in the Soviet Union!

  To illustrate the persecution of the Communist Party, political instructors dwelt on the case of Angela Davis, a black and an avowed communist, once dismissed from the faculty of the University of California on grounds of incompetence. She was subsequently arrested but ultimately acquitted of murder — conspiracy charges arising from the killing of a California judge abducted in the midst of a trial. You mean the Americans allow communists to teach in their universities? Why did the Dark Forces let her go? Why didn’t they just kill her?

  To prove that the American masses were basically sympathetic to communism and opposed to the imperialistic policies of the Dark Forces that held them underfoot, the political officers showed films of some of the great antiwar demonstrations.

  You mean that in America you can just go out and demonstrate and raise hell and tear up things if you don’t like something! Why, what would happen here if people rioted to protest our sending soldiers to Czechoslovakia? Well, we know what would happen.

  To dramatize the poverty, hunger, and unemployment of contemporary America, the political officers showed films taken in the 1930s of Depression breadlines, current Soviet television films of New York slums and of workers eating sandwiches or hot dogs and drinking Coca-Cola for lunch. The narrative, explaining that a sandwich or hot dog was all the American could afford for “dinner,” struck Belenko because in the Soviet Union the noon meal is the main one of the day.

  If they are starving and can’t find jobs and prefer communism, why don’t they come over here? We need workers, millions of them, especially in Siberia, and we could guarantee them all the bread they need and milk, too. But wait a minute. Who owns all those cars I see?

  In a spirit of logical inquiry, Belenko asked about the cars visible everywhere in the films. The instructor commended him for the prescience of his question and answered it with relish. True, the Dark Forces permitted many workers to have cars and homes as well; not only that, they also had built highways all across the land. But they charged the workers tolls to travel the highways, and they made the worker mortgage his whole life for the car and house. If he lost his job or got sick, he was ruined, wiped out, impoverished for life; he was a slave to the bankers and thus controlled by the Dark Forces.

  That’s very clever of the Dark Forces. But… if I had to choose between having a car and a house now and maybe being wiped out later or waiting maybe fifteen years for an apartment, which would I choose?

  The West and especially the United States were depicted as being in the throes of death. The forces of socialism, led by “our Mother Country,” were advancing everywhere — in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Cuba (referred to as “our aircraft carrier"). The Americans no longer were all-powerful. To see their deterioration, one had only to look at their internal strife and the irresolute flaccidity they displayed in Vietnam.

  Yet no week passed without warnings of the dreadful threat posed by the encircling Dark Forces of the West and then — plots “to kidnap our Mother Country.” This ubiquitous threat justified every sacrifice of material and human resources necessary to build Soviet armed forces into the mightiest in the world.

  If they are so weak, why are they such a threat? What is the truth?

  In tactics, the cadets studied mostly the methods of the Americans, the Main Enemy, whom they primarily were being trained to confront. A professor who had flown MiGs in Korea and served as an adviser to the North Vietnamese was frank in his characterization of U.S. pilots. They were professionally skilled and personally brave. Even when ambushed by larger numbers of MiGs jumping up at them from sanctuaries in China, they would stay and fight rather than flee. They drove on toward their targets no matter how many missiles, how muck flak was fired at them. The Americans were quick and flexible in adapting to new situations or weapons, and they were ingenious in innovating surprises of their own. You never could be sure of what to expect from them except they always loved to fight.

  The students asked a number of questions, as they were encouraged to do, and one wanted to know why the Americans were so good.

  The professor explained that over the years they had perfected an extremely effective training program. They had developed psychological tests that enabled them to identify candidates with the highest aptitudes for flying and combat. Their recruits already had attended universities and thus began training with a “strong theoretical base.” And virtually all their instructors had a great deal of actual combat experience because the Americans always were fighting somewhere in the world.

  Yes, but how can such a rotten and decadent society produce pilots so brave?

  A political officer supplied the answer. “Oh, they do it for money. They are extraordinarily well paid. They will do anything for money.”

  I wonder how much they pay them to make them willing to die.

  His analysis of the case of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam probably disturbed Belenko most of all. Political officers proclaimed the slaughter of more than a hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children at the village of My Lai the ultimate example of American inhumanity and degeneracy. To demonstrate that the mass murder had actually occurred, they quoted verbatim from numerous American press accounts reporting the atrocity in macabre detail. There could be no doubt about it. The Americans themselves publicly had charged one of then: own officers with the killing of 109 innocent civilians.*

  But why are the Dark Forces putting him in jail? If they are pure and true Dark Forces, he did just what they wanted. They should be giving him a medal. And why do the Dark Forces allow their newspapers to tell about аll this? Every society has its animals. I myself have seen some of ours in Rubtsovsk. Our newspapers won’t even report one murder. But the Americans are shaming themselves in front of the whole world by reporting the murder of one hundred nine men, women and babies. Why?

  His disquietude, however, receded before the prospect of flight. Belenko and some ninety other cadets were transferred to an air base eight miles outside Grozny near the Caspian Sea. Grozny was an ancient city of nearly 400,000, and undoubtedly it once had been lovely. The baroque architecture, ornate buildings
, and cable cars gliding through narrow brick streets still made it somewhat attractive. But it stood in a valley which captured and held the smoke, pollutants, and stench discharged from surrounding oil refineries and chemical factories, and the river running through the city was an open sewer of industrial wastes.

  At the base a KGB officer delivered an orientation lecture. After cautioning against Western spies, he spoke at length about the Chechens, one of some hundred ethnic and racial minorities that constitute the Soviet population. Native inhabitants of the eastern Caucasus, the Chechens were fiercely independent Muslims, racially akin to Iranians, who never had been satisfactorily subjugated by the czars or communists. Fearing that out of their hatred for Russians they would collaborate with the Germans, Stalin had deported them en masse to Kazakhstan. Cast into cold deserts and infertile mountains, they had suffered privation and hunger and perished in vast numbers. Khrushchev had allowed the survivors to go back to their native region around Grozny. When they returned, they found their land, homes, shops, and jobs had been appropriated by Russians. Convinced of their righteousness, they commenced to kill Russians indiscriminately and barbarically, usually with knives. A young Russian sailor coming home from five years at sea was slashed to death in the railway station before his terror-stricken mother in 1959. Russian residents thereupon formed vigilante groups armed with axes, took out after the Chechens, then stormed government offices, demanding intervention to protect them from the wild Muslims. Troops, backed by tanks and armored cars, had to be called in to restore civil order. The government warned the Chechens that if they persisted in cutting up Russians, they all would be “sent far north where the polar bears live.” The wholesale butchery largely subsided, but not individual murders, and many Chechen youths still subscribed to the credo that true manhood could not be attained without the killing of at least one Russian.