MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  Each pilot periodically stood watch as duty officer for twenty-four hours, during which he supervised the enlisted personnel, inspected the barracks and mess hall, and generally tried to enforce discipline. What Belenko saw on his first watch appalled him.

  Between 180 and 200 men were jammed into barracks marginally adequate for 40. Bunks stood in tiers nearly against each other, and the congestion was such that it was difficult to move without stumbling into somebody. There were two water faucets in each barracks, the toilet was outside, and sometimes during the night men relieved themselves in their neighbor’s boots. They were given a change of underwear once a week and allowed to go into the village for a steam bath once every ten days, there being no bathhouse on the base.

  Comparable congestion in the mess hall made cleanliness impossible, and the place smelled like a garbage pit. While one section of forty men ate, another forty stood behind them waiting to take places and plates. If they chose, they then could wait in line to dip the plate in a pan of cold water containing no soap. Usually they elected to simply brush the plate off with their hands. For breakfast the men received 150 grams of bread, 10 grams of butter, 20 grams of sugar, barley mush cooked with water, and a mug of tea. Dinner consisted of thin soup, sometimes thickened with cereal, buckwheat groats, perhaps a piece or two of fatback, and a mug of kissel, a kind of starchy gelatin. Supper was the same as breakfast.

  Except for a television set, no recreational facilities of any kind were available to the enlisted men (or the officers, for that matter), and there was little they could do. There was much they were forbidden to do. They were forbidden to listen to a transistor radio, to draw pictures of women, to listen to records, to read fiction, to write letters about their life in the service, to lie or sit on their bunks during their free time (there was no place else to sit), to watch television except when political or patriotic programs were shown, and to drink. But drink they did, in staggering quantities, for alcohol was the one commodity available in limitless amounts.

  To fly seventy minutes, the maximum time it can stay aloft without refueling, a MiG-25 needs fourteen tons of jet fuel and one-half ton of alcohol for braking and electronic systems. So wherever MiG-25s were based, huge quantities of alcohol were stored, and in the Soviet Air Force the plane was popularly known as the Flying Restaurant. And officers from surrounding bases — Air Force, Army, political officers — seized on any pretext to visit Chuguyevka and fill their bottles.

  According to a story circulated at Chuguyevka, a group of Air Force wives, distraught over their husbands’ habitual drunkenness, staked a protest at a design bureau in Moscow, appealing to it to design aircraft that would not use alcohol. Supposedly a representative of the bureau told the ladies, “Go screw yourselves. If we want, we will fuel our planes with cognac.”

  In April 1976 Belenko’s squadron commander asked him to take a truck and pick up a shipment of office supplies from a railroad freight terminal thirty miles north of Vladivostok, paper and office supplies being essential to the functioning of the squadron. It was a task that should have been performed by the deputy squadron commander, but he never stayed sober enough to be trusted with the truck.

  The morning was bright, the dirt road empty and not yet dusty, and forests through which he drove were awesome in their natural, unspoiled beauty. They reminded him of man’s capacity to despoil nature and himself and of delicious hours in other forests.

  Starting back, Belenko saw a frail, ragged figure walking along the road, and the man looked so forlorn he decided to give him a lift. The hitchhiker, who had few teeth, gaunt eyes, sparse hair, and a sallow, unhealthy complexion, looked to be in his sixties. He explained that he worked at the freight terminal and walked or hitchhiked daily to and from his hut eight miles down the road.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost twenty-five years. After the war I spent ten years in the camps, and ever since, I’ve worked around here, doing whatever I could find. I am not allowed to go back to the Ukraine, although I miss my home very much. I have relatives, but it is too expensive for them to visit me. You know how life is. The first years were very hard for me because it is so cold here. The Ukraine is warm and sunny, you know, and there are flowers and fruit. I wish I could see it once more before I die. But I guess I won’t, I have no passport.”*

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Oh, yes. She spent eight years in the camps. She’s also from the Ukraine. Her relatives were exiled. They’ve all died now, and there’s just the two of us. We thought about children, but we were afraid we couldn’t take care of them. It’s not easy to get a good job if you’re an exile. You know how life is.”

  “What did you do? Did you kill someone?”

  “No, I gave bread to the men from the forest.”**

  What can he do, that poor man, to our country? Look at him. He hardly has any teeth; he won’t live much longer. What kind of enemy is he? What kind of criminal? Whatever he did, ten years are punishment enough. Why not let him go back to his home and die? Why be so hateful? What kind of freedom do we have here?

  Belenko was sent to a training center near Moscow for a few weeks’ intensive study of the MiG-25, and when he returned in Mid-June, a state of emergency existed in Chuguyevka. A dysentery epidemic had disabled fully 40 percent of the regiment, two soldiers had committed suicide, at least twenty had deserted, there had been more hunger strikes, and the enlisted men now were verging on open mutiny. Fuel shortages had prevented pilots from flying as much as they needed to master their new aircraft. American reconnaissance planes, SR-71s, were prowling off the coast, staying just outside Soviet airspace but photographing terrain hundreds of miles inland with side-angle cameras. They taunted and toyed with the MiG-25s sent up to intercept them, scooping up to altitudes the Soviet planes could not reach, and circling leisurely above them or dashing off at speeds the Russians could not match. Moscow was incensed, and Commandant Shevsov lived in terror of an investigation. Already they had been notified that the regional political officer was flying in next week to lecture all officers of the regiment.

  Shevsov announced that a pilot from each squadron would have to speak at the scheduled assembly, present an assessment of the regiment’s problems, and propose solutions. He instructed his political officer to pick those likely to create the most favorable impression. The regimental political officer was not from the political directorate of the armed forces; rather, he was a pilot who in the frenzied formation of the regiment just happened to be saddled with the job. He thought as a pilot, and he was the only popular political officer Belenko ever knew. When asked, Belenko told him bluntly and in detail what he thought was wrong and what should be done.

  “Well, I agree. You will speak for your squadron. If you say just what you said to me, maybe it will shock them into letting us do something.”

  The regional political officer, a corpulent, perfumed man with bags under his eyes, appeared in a resplendent uniform bedecked wtih medals that made the pilots smile at each other because they knew that no political officer had ever participated in battle, except perhaps at a bar.

  “Comrade Officers, your regiment is in a serious situation, a desperate situation.

  “Around us the SR-71 is flying, spying on us, watching us in the day and in the night.

  “The Chinese are a day’s walk away from us. We should not let the Chinese frighten us. We can massacre them anytime we want. They have a few nuclear bombs, but they can deliver them only by donkey. Their planes are so old we can wipe them out of the sky. But we cannot underestimate the Chinese because there are so many of them, and they are fanatical, mad. If we kill a million of them a day, we still will have three years of work ahead of us.

  “So the Party requires that you increase your vigilance, your readiness, your discipline in order to defend our Mother Country. You have been given our country’s best interceptor. It has the
highest speed and the highest altitude of any plane we have. It is a very good weapon. Yet your regiment is in such disgraceful condition that you cannot use this weapon properly. Your soldiers and, yes, some officers, too, are drinking the alcohol for the planes, and your regiment is too drunk to defend our Mother Country.”

  We know all that. We’ve heard all that. It’s as if they sent us a recording instead of a man.

  Belenko was the fifth member of the regiment to speak, following Shevsov, the deputy regimental commander, and two other pilots.

  “We must consider our problems in light of the principles of Marxism/Leninism and the science of communism,” he began. “These principles teach us that man is a product of his environment. If we examine the environment in which we have placed our men, we can see the origins of our problems and perhaps, in the origins some solutions.

  “On the kolkhoz I have seen livestock housed better than our men are housed. I have seen pigs fed better than our men are fed. There is no place for our men to wash themselves. That and the filthy mess hall are why we have so much dysentery. There is no place for our men to play, and they are forbidden to do almost anything that a normal young man would want to do. We have created for them an environment from which any normal person would want to escape, so they try to escape through alcohol.

  “We must change that environment. First of all, we must build decent barracks, a decent mess hall, a decent latrine, and a bathhouse with fire for hot water. There are nearly eight hundred of us here. If we all went to work, officers, sergeants, soldiers, we could do that in a month. If there is not enough money, let us go into the forest and cut the logs ourselves. If every officer would contribute 30 rubles from his salary, we would have more than six thousand rubles to buy other materials.

  “We should organize social parties at the base and invite students so that our men can meet nice girls in a normal way. It is unnatural and unhealthy to try to keep our men from seeing girls.

  “The forests and streams are full of deer, elk, rabbits, ducks, geese, quail, and fish. We should take our men to hunt and fish. It would be enjoyable for them, and the game would enrich their diet. We should start our own garden and plant our own potatoes right here on the base.

  “Each weekend officers should be appointed to take groups of men on the train into Vladivostok and let them just walk around the city. We can ride the tram free, and we can sleep in the station, and we can take up a collection among the officers to buy them some sausage and beer instead of vodka. It will give them something to look forward to. It will show that we care about them.

  “When we can, we should build a football field and a library so the men can improve their professional skills and education. And if they want to read detective stories, why not let them? That’s better than having them drink alcohol.

  “If we demonstrate to our men that we are loyal to them, that we respect them, then they will be loyal and respect us and obey us. If we given them alternatives to alcohol, most will take those alternatives.

  “Comrade Colonel, I have spoken frankly in the hope that my views will be of use to our regiment and our Mother Country.”

  As Belenko sat down, the officers clapped their hands, whistled, stomped their feet, pounded the table until Shevsov stood and silenced them.

  The visiting political officer, who had been taking notes, rose, his face fixed with a waxen smile.

  “Comrade Officers, this has been a productive gathering. I find some merit in what each of you has said. I find that underneath, this regiment is imbued with determination to eliminate drunkenness, to enforce discipline, and to serve our Mother Country. That is what I shall report.

  “But to you, Comrade Belenko, I must say a few words frankly, just as you spoke frankly. You do not ask, ‘What may I give to the Party?’ You ask the Party to give, give, give; give me Utopia, now. You show that you lack the imagination to grasp the magnitude of the problem, much less the difficulty of solving it. You do not understand that our country cannot build complex aircraft, modern airfields, and barracks all at the same tune, and your priorities are exactly the reverse of what they should be. You spoke of the principles of Marxism/Leninism. I urge you to restudy these principles until you understand that the Party and the people are one and that, therefore, the needs of the Party always must be first. We will do everything in time, step by step, and the Party wisely has decided which steps must be taken first, threatened as we are by the Chinese and the Dark Forces of the West.”

  The faintest of hopes, the tinest flicker of light sparked by Belenko’s speech evaporated. Nothing would be done. They filed out silently, Shevsov among them and for once one of them.

  Pig! No, that is an insult to a pig. In the order of the universe, a pig serves some useful purpose. You and all you stand for are to the universe like cancer.

  I wish I could put you for one night in those barracks and see how you feel when someone shits in your boot. I wish I could march you into that mess hall where a maggot would retch. Oh, there you would learn the science of communism.

  Well, go back to your fresh fruits and meat and perfume and lying while our men lie disabled by dysentery, cholera, and alcohol, while the Americans look down and laugh at us from the skies. But you leave me alone.

  All my life I have tried to understand, tried to believe you. I understand now. Our system is rotten, hopelessly, incurably rotten. Everything that is wrong is not the result of mistakes by bureaucrats in this town or that; it is the results of our system. I don’t understand what is wrong; but it is wrong. It produced you. You, not the Dark Forces, have kidnapped our Mother Country.

  Soon after this climactic and decisive intellectual rebellion, Ludmilla announced that she was leaving. They had tried as best two people could; they had failed; it was pointless to try anew. Her parents were overjoyed by the prospect of having her and Dmitri with them in Magadan, and they could guarantee Dmitri’s future and hers. She would stay until October, when her commitment to the dispensary expired. But after she left it would be best for all if he never saw her or Dmitri, who would only be confused by his reappearance.

  Her statement was so dispassionate and consistent with previous demands for divorce that Belenko could find neither energy nor desire to try anew to dissuade her. Besides, she was right about Dmitri.

  Conditions at Chuguyevka were not atypical of those throughout the Far East. Reports of desertions, suicides, disease, and rampant alcoholism were said to be flooding into Moscow from bases all over. In late June, Shevsov convened the officers in an Absolutely Secret meeting to convey grave news. At an Army base only thirty-five miles to the southwest, two soldiers had killed two other soldiers and an officer, confiscated machine guns and provisions, and struck out through the forest toward the coast, intending to steal a boat and sail to Japan. They dodged and fought pursuing patrols several days until they were killed, and on their bodies were found diaries containing vile slanders of the Soviet Army and the grossest misrepresentations of the life of a soldier. These diaries atop all the reports of trouble had caused such concern in Moscow that the Minister of Defense himself was coming to the Far East and to Chuguyevka.

  The career of every officer would depend on his impressions, and to make a good impression, it would be necessary to build a paved road from the base to the helicopter pad where the Minister would land, about four miles away. The entire regiment would begin work on the road tomorrow.

  It never was clear just where in the chain of command the order originated; certainly Shevsov had no authority to initiate such a costly undertaking. In any case, the Dark Forces, the SR-71s, the Chinese, the desirability of maintaining flying proficiency — all were forgotten now. Pilots, engineers, technicians, mechanics, cooks, everybody turned to road building — digging a base, laying gravel, pouring concrete, and covering it with macadam.

  It’s unbelievable. For this we could have built everything, barracks, mess hall, everything. We could have built a palace!

  But
the crowning order was yet to come. Within a radius of about a mile, the land around the base had been cleared of trees to facilitate takeoffs and landings. The Minister, it was said, was a devotee of nature and its verdancy. He would want to see green trees as he rode to the base. Therefore, trees would have to be transplanted to line the mile or so of road.

  You can’t transplant trees here in the middle of the summer! Everybody knows that!

  But transplanted they were, hundreds of them, pines, spruces, poplars, dug up from the forest, hauled by truck and placed every fifteen yards along the road. By the first week in July they were dead, shriveling and yellowing.

  Dig them up and replace them. So they did, with the same results.

  Do it again. He may be here anytime now.

  So again saplings and some fairly tall trees were imported by the hundreds from the forests. Again they all died. Finally acknowledging that nature would not change its ways for them, someone had had an idea. Leave them there, and just before he arrives, we’ll spray them all with green paint. We’ll drive fast, and he won’t know the difference.

  It all was to no avail. In early August they were advised that illness had forced cancellation of the Minister’s inspection. He wasn’t coming after all. It was time to fly again.

  To fly well and safely, a pilot must practice regularly. His skills, like muscles, grow flabby and can even atrophy through disuse. Because of fuel shortages and preoccupation with the road, they had flown little since May.

  The second day they resumed, a pilot suffered vertigo as he descended through clouds preparatory to landing. In his disorientation he panicked and ejected himself. Scrub one MiG-25 and the millions of rubles it cost.