MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  Belenko and another lieutenant confronted the first Party representative they could find, a young political officer quartered in the same building. He was cynical, yet truthful. The building had not been inspected. The military builders sold substantial quantities of allotted materials on the black market, then bribed the chairman of the regimental acceptance commission and took the whole commission to dinner. There the acceptance papers were drunkenly signed without any commission member’s ever having been inside the building. What was done could not now be undone.

  During the day Belenko studied pedagogy, psychology, methodology of flight instruction, and political education in the course for instructors, and on weekends he visited Ludmilla in Armavir. At night he mastered the building trade. He relaid the floor, replastered the walls, calked the bathtub, repaired the toilet, replaced the faucets, and rewired the electrical sockets. He procured all the materials easily enough, not from stores, of course, but from the construction superintendent in exchange for vodka. By late February he had redone the whole interior rather handsomely.

  Then one night he was awakened by a loud boom followed by crunching noises. The building was splitting. A seam about a foot wide opened from the living room out into the world, and a much more gaping one exposed his bedroom to his neighbor’s living room. Huge cranes, trucks, and an army of workers were marshaled to save the building. They trussed and wrapped it in steel belts as if staving a barrel and inserted steel beams through the interior to keep it intact. The beam running through Belenko’s living room looked odd, but he found it useful for chinning and other exercises.

  The emergency measures proved effective for a while. But after three weeks or so the center of the building started to sag and kept sagging until the whole edifice assumed the configuration of a canoe.

  It’s an architectural marvel!

  Still, the ceilings in his apartment dropped only a foot or two, and it was home, a private, unshared home, and he was intent on furnishing it as commodiously as possible for Ludmilla before she joined him in the spring after her graduation. Living alone and dining at the base, he had few expenses, and by March he had accumulated about 1,500 rubles, counting the 600 given him at commissioning. He bought a television for 450, a refrigerator for 300, and, for 250, a sofa that converted into a bed. The rest he conserved for a delayed wedding trip to Leningrad in April and to enable Ludmilla to pick furnishings of her choice.

  One of the lieutenant colonels teaching the course for instructors was an irreverent cynic, marking time until his fortieth birthday and retirement, and he liked to regale the young lieutenants with caustic sayings about life in the Soviet military. Three of them were to recur often to Belenko.

  To succeed in the Soviet Army, you must learn from the dog. You must know when and where to bark and when and where to lick.

  A Soviet pilot without a pencil is like a man without a prick, for the mission of a Soviet pilot is to create paperwork. The more paper you have, the better to cover your ass.

  Two close boyhood friends met for the first time since their graduation from the military academy twenty years before. One was a captain; the other, a general. “Why are you a general and I only a captain?”

  “I will show you,” replied the general, picking up a rock, holding it to his ear, and then handing it to the captain. “Listen to the noise the rock makes.”

  The captain listened and threw the rock away. “No, it makes no noise at all.”

  “You see, that is why you are still a captain. A general told you a rock makes noise, and you said no to a general.”

  To protect himself, the lieutenant colonel always emphasized with mock seriousness that such sayings represented misconceptions. Belenko was to learn, though, that each originated in reality.

  After he commenced his duties as an instructor, the Party decided to expand and accelerate pilot training without, however, increasing the number of personnel and aircraft allocated for training. Previously one instructor had at his disposal two MiG-17s, two flight engineers, and four enlisted mechanics to teach three students. But with the same resources Belenko had to teach six students, and in good weather he flew incessantly, taking them up successively throughout the day. Flying still was fun, although not as much fun as when he flew alone. After the fortieth or fiftieth loop of the day, a loop was not so interesting.

  The serious problems all occurred on the ground. Belenko did not just supervise the twelve men under him. He was held personally accountable for their behavior twenty-four hours a day. He was supposed to regulate, record, and report their every action and, insofar as possible, their every thought, to know and watch every detail of their lives, including the most intimate and personal details. And he had to draft and be prepared to exhibit for inspection by political officers at any time a written program specifying precisely what he was doing daily to develop each of his subordinates into a New Communist Man.

  Having landed for the ninth time on a day that had begun at 4:00 A.M., Belenko was exhausted. Dusk was settling, and a light drizzle starting to fall, when a messenger — there were no telephones — delivered a summons from the political officer.

  “So, Comrade Lieutenant, we see that you do not know your men; you do not know how to educate them.”

  “I do not understand, Comrade.”

  “Read this, and you will understand.” The KGB had uncovered a letter written by one of Belenko’s mechanics, a twenty-year-old private, to his parents. The soldier recited his miseries — the sparse, repulsive rations, the congested barracks, the practice through which second-year soldiers extorted food from first-year soldiers by pouncing upon the recalcitrants during the night, covering them with blankets, and beating them mercilessly.

  “Do you see what a dark shadow such a letter throws over our Army?”

  “But, Comrade, look at the date. The letter was written ten months ago, long before I was here.”

  The point was unarguable, and the political officer was flustered, but not for long. “Let me see your program for this man.”

  Belenko handed over the notebook he always was required to keep with him. “Your failure is clear. There is not one mention here of the works of Leonid Ilyich [Brezhnev]. How can your mechanic develop politically without knowledge of the thoughts of the Party’s leader? You see, Comrade Lieutenant, you have not worked very productively today.”

  You pig, I ought to smash in your fat face. I flew my ass off today, flew all to hell and back. I did one hundred rolls, sixty dead loops, sixty Immelmanns. What do you know about work? I’d like to put you to work in an aircraft. You’d puke and fill your pants in one minute.

  “Comrade, I see my mistake. I will try to do better.”

  Belenko repeatedly was upbraided because of the behavior of one of his flight engineers, who was an alcoholic. He stole, drank, and sometimes sold the alcohol stored in copious quantities for the coolant and braking systems of the MiG-17. Now everybody in the regiment — the commander, the officers, the men, Belenko himself — at times drank this alcohol. Not only was it available and free, but became the alcohol was produced for aircraft, it was more purely distilled than the standard vodka produced for the people. In fact, the aircraft alcohol was so valued on the black market that in the regiment it was called white gold. The trouble was that the flight engineer drank so much and continuously that he staggered around all day, frequently making a spectacle of himself and, as Belenko’s superiors stressed, setting an “improper example.”

  Belenko talked several times to the engineer, who was sixteen years older than he and had been in the service twenty-two years. He reasoned, he pleaded, he threatened, he appealed, all to no avail, because the man in his condition could no more stop drinking than he could stop breathing.

  Finally, Belenko was rebuked for “leadership failure.” In response he wrote a formal letter recommending that the engineer either be provided with psychiatric treatment or be dismissed from the service. The next morning a deputy regimental commander
called Belenko in and told him that if he would withdraw the report, his reprimand would also be withdrawn, and the flight engineer transferred. Amazed, Belenko shrugged and complied.

  Training standards inevitably suffered under the intensified pressures to graduate more pilots. In his training Belenko had flown 300 hours — 100 in the L-29, 200 in the MiG-17 — and these had been “honest” hours — that is, they actually were flown. Now cadets were flying only 200 hours, and not all these were “honest.” There also was a slight slippage in the quality of pilot candidates, and although five of Belenko’s students were able, the sixth was beyond salvage. He simply lacked the native ability to fly. Belenko dared not allow him to solo in a MiG-17, and whenever he entrusted him with the controls, the results were frightening. Though he personally liked the cadet, Belenko formally recommended his dismissal. Another uproar and demand that he rescind the recommendation ensued. But this time Belenko in conscience could not accede. Aloft, the cadet was a menace to everybody and to himself. Even if he learned to take off and land, he never could do much else except fly in circles, and his every flight would be a potential disaster. Thus, the issue and Belenko ultimately were brought before the regimental commander, who also tried to induce retraction of the report. Failing, the commander announced that he himself would fly with the cadet and pronounce his own judgment. Most likely he intended to overrule Belenko, but he was sufficiently shaken upon landing to concur, reluctantly, that dismissal was the only option.

  Belenko spent the better part of a month completing the mountains of paperwork requisite to dismissal. In the process he finally comprehended why no one in his own class had been expelled, why second-year soldiers who preyed on neophytes were not prosecuted, why the flight engineer was not cashiered, why the cadet would not have been dismissed had he not been egregiously hopeless.

  Party had decreed that a certain number of qualified pilots would be trained in a given time. The Party had decreed that pilots, officers, soldiers, all would be transformed into New Communist Men. That was the plan. A commander who publicly disciplined a subordinate or dismissed a student risked the wrath and punishment of the Party by convicting himself, ipso facto, of incompetence, of undermining the plan.

  The consequent fear created a system in which problems were masked and perpetuated, rather than eliminated, and it spawned corruption or a psychological environment in which corruption flourished. Prior to an inspection by senior officers of the Air Defense Command, Belenko was scheduled to perform a complicated one-hour exercise in which he and a student in another MiG would intercept and down a third MiG. The exercise would be recorded on the films of gun cameras and chronometer tapes for examination by the inspectors. But the morning of the planned exercise, the sky was filled with thunder and lightning.

  Nevertheless, a deputy regimental commander ordered them to fly. “What! That’s impossible.”

  “Listen to me. Just tell your student to climb up to five hundred meters. You make a quick intercept, and both of you come right back down. It won’t take five minutes. I’ll show you how to fix it when you get back.”

  For the next three days Belenko and the deputy commander juggled films and tapes to fabricate a record of an elaborate and successful exercise. When they finished, one obstacle remained. What about the fuel? They had flown six minutes. The records showed the exercise had lasted sixty minutes. How to explain the leftover fuel? Dump it. So thousands of gallons of jet fuel were dumped on the ground.

  On a typical flying day, Belenko arose at 3:30 A.M. to catch the bus that left at 4:00 for the base, where he had breakfast, underwent a medical examination, and briefed his students prior to the first takeoff at 7:00. He flew with them until 1:00 P.M., when the main meal of the day was served. From 2:00 to 3:00 P.M. he and his fellow instructors customarily were berated by the training squadron commander and a political officer for the failures, on and off duty, of their students and subordinates. Unable to articulate or manifest his anger at the daily censure, he attended to paperwork and counseled students until supper at 6:00 P.M. Unless paperwork or political conferences detained him, he usually arrived home by bus around 7:30 P.M. To be fresh and alert by 3:00 the next day, he needed to go to sleep as quickly as possible.

  On Sunday, his lone day off, he wanted and needed to rest. Ludmilla, who worked at a hospital six days a week, wanted to go out, to do something, and they argued about how the day should be spent. Ludmilla complained about much else.

  She abhorred Salsk and the life of a military wife, and Belenko understood her feelings. Salsk, a place where “undesirables” had been sent in Czarist times, was a drab, dingy, poor city set on treeless flatlands over which stinging winds howled. Dust intruded everywhere except when rain turned it to mud. The two motion-picture theaters were small, and you rarely could enter without waiting more than an hour. Service in the city’s few restaurants also meant more than an hour’s wait and the fare was not worth the delay. There was no officers’ club at the base, nor any other facility that wives might enjoy. Unable to change these circumstances or his working hours, which she also resented, Belenko could only sympathize and ask that she bear up in hope of eventual transfer to a more pleasant duty station.

  Money was another and more disruptive source of conflict. Ludmilla earned 65 rubles a month as a nurse, and their combined income of 365 rubles was princely by Soviet standards. Unless he were to become a KGB officer or Party official, and either possibility was unthinkable, there was no pursuit that would pay him as much. But she nagged him for not earning more, and they often were short because she spent so capriciously and made costly trips to Magadan. At first he tried to indulge her.

  Let life teach her. She is young and will grow.

  On the chance that they could duplicate the happiness of their wedding trip, he proposed that during his next leave they vacation in Leningrad. About a week before they were to depart, he discovered that she had bought a ring for 140 rubles, spending most of the money he had saved for the trip. He vented his rage, and she announced her intention of divorcing him and returning to her parents.

  He dissuaded her by reasoning that they simply were experiencing the kind of crisis that besets all young married couples, and soon she was pregnant. A child, he thought, would reunite them emotionally by giving them a new, shared interest. And for a while after the birth of their healthy son, Dmitri, in January 1973, they did share parental joy. But working twelve to fourteen hours daily six days a week, Belenko seldom could be with the child. The necessity of caring for him confined Ludmilla and thereby intensified her disdain of their mode of life. Instead of lessening their tensions, the baby exacerbated them. Their marriage deteriorated into sullen hostility, and disagreements over trivial issues erupted into acrimonious quarrels.

  In their continuing efforts to inculcate pilots with the conviction that the United States symbolized the quintessence of degeneracy, political officers dwelt on the unfolding Watergate scandals. The details confused Belenko, and by now he was skeptical of anything the political officers said. But what he did understand at the culmination of the scandals heightened his skepticism. The President of the United States had been compelled to resign in disgrace, and other ranking figures of the American government faced prosecution and probable imprisonment, all because, so far as he could determine, they had lied.

  You mean they can throw out their leader and put his men in jail just because they lied! Why, if we did that here, the whole Politburo and every Party official in the country would be in jail! Why, here, if you know somebody in the Party, you can do anything you want, you can kill a man, and you won’t go to jail. I’ve seen that for myself.

  And where are the Dark Forces? If the Dark Forces control everything in America and put their own men in power, why would they let their men be thrown out? The truth must be that the Dark Forces can’t control everything. But if they don’t control everything, then the Party is lying again. What does the Party tell the truth about?

  B
elenko seldom had cause or time to venture into downtown Salsk at night, but bachelor pilots did, and though they often were assaulted by robbers who knew they had money, they were under the strictest of orders never to engage in violence lest they injure themselves. The attacks proliferated, and one evening a gang of sadistic thugs killed an officer, blinded a second with sulfuric acid, and partially blinded a third as they emerged from a restaurant. Thereafter pilots were forbidden to enter Salsk after dark.

  Sometimes Belenko did go into the city to shop for Ludmilla at the bazaar where on Sundays kolkhozniks sold poultry and produce from their plots. Beggars congregated at the open-air market, and some brought along emaciated children to heighten public pity; tramps crawled around the stalls like scavengers searching the ground for scraps of vegetables. Generally there was much to buy at the bazaar, but everything was expensive. A kilogram of potatoes or tomatoes cost one ruble; a small chicken, ten; a duck, twelve; a turkey, forty — one-third the monthly salary of the average doctor. In winter prices were much higher.

  Each fall Belenko had to organize his twelve subordinates into a labor squad and sortie forth into the annual battle of the harvest. Treading through the dust or mud and manure of the kolkhoz, they reaped grain, tinkered with neglected machinery, and tried to toil usefully alongside the women, children, students, and old men. The sight of Air Force pilots, engineers, and mechanics so deployed made him alternately curse and laugh.

  They brag all the time of our progress — in the newspaper, on radio, and television. Where is the progress? It’s all the same: the crime, the poverty, the stupidity. We’re never going to have a New Communist Man; we’re never going to have True Communism.

  Each squadron at the base had a Lenin Room, where pilots could watch Brezhnev’s televised speeches and read Pravda, as they were required to do, and occasionally chat. After a Brezhnev speech, someone referred sarcastically to an exchange of letters between a worker and Brezhnev, published in Pravda. “Let’s write him a letter about our shitty aircraft and ask him for some nice F-15s.” Nobody talked that way except Lieutenant Nikolai Ivanovich Krotkov. There was no doubt that Krotkov was brilliant. He had graduated from flight school with a gold medal, played guitar and sang superbly, and could recite forbidden poetry verbatim by the hour. This was perilous. He had already been warned about singing the forbidden songs of Aleksandr Galich, the famous Russian satirist who was expelled because of his ideological irreverence.