MiG Pilot Read online

  Shortly before supper three or four days later, Belenko and other instructors saw Krotkov acting as if he had gone mad. Furiously cursing, he was smashing his guitar to bits against a tree. When quieted, he told them he had just come from a confrontation with the KGB.

  You have a big mouth, the KGB officer told him. If you keep opening it, we are going to kick you out of the service. Despite your gold medal, you will find no job; nobody will touch you. So, unless you want to starve, you had better stop singing duty songs and reciting dirty poems. You had better zip up your mouth for good.

  Belenko recalled a stanza from a patriotic Soviet march — “Where can man breathe so freely….” What kind of freedom do we have when we are afraid of a song or a poem?

  About the time of the Khotkov incident Belenko — who had been made an instructor for the SU-15 high-performance interceptor — heard a rumor. Supposedly a pilot had stolen an AN-2 transport and attempted to fly to Turkey. MiGs overtook and shot him down over the Black Sea.

  If I were in an SU-15 and had enough fuel, nobody would ever catch me.

  The thought was terrible, obscene; instantly and in shame he banished it, daring not entertain it a millisecond more. But the thought had occurred.

  In the autumn of 1975 Belenko decided to request officially a transfer to a combat unit, preferably a MiG-25 squadron. The squadron commander, deputy regimental commander, and regimental commander all tried by a combination of cajolery and ridicule to dissuade him from “forsaking duty” or “acting like a test pilot.” But the transfer request was submitted precisely as military regulations authorized, and each had no legal choice except to forward it until the matter reached the school commandant, Major General Dmitri Vasilyevich Golodnikov.

  The general, a portly, bald man in his late fifties, sat behind a polished desk in his large office furnished with a long conference table covered by red velvet, a dozen chairs, red curtains, wall maps, and a magnificent Oriental rug. Belenko, who had never met a general, was surprised that he spoke so affably.

  He understood, even admired Belenko’s motives. He himself would prefer to be with combat forces in Germany or the Far East, where one might “see some action.” But the overriding desire of every officer must be to serve the Party, and the Party needed him here. In a combat squadron he would provide the Party with one pilot; as an instructor he was providing the Party with many. Therefore, Golodnikov asked that Belenko withdraw his request, take some leave, and resume his duties with fresh dedication. If he had any problems, with his apartment or anything else, they could be worked out.

  Belenko thanked the general but said that having been an instructor almost four years, he believed he could best serve the Party by becoming a more accomplished pilot, and that he could not do unless he learned to fly more sophisticated combat aircraft.

  “Belenko, let’s be frank with each other. You are an excellent instructor and a fine officer. Both your record and your superiors tell me that. You know as well as I that many of the young instructors they are sending us are not ready to be instructors; they barely can fly themselves. That is why we cannot afford to lose experienced instructors. I am not proposing that you spend the rest of your career as an instructor. I will be retiring in a couple of years, and I have friends. When I leave, I shall see that they help you.”

  Belenko understood the invitation to accept initiation into the system, to sell himself to the system. Yet it only reinforced his determination. When he said no a second time, Golodnikov abruptly dropped the mask of reason and affability.

  “You are defying me!”

  “No, sir, Comrade General. I am making a request in accordance with the regulations of the Soviet Army.”

  “Your request is denied.”

  “But, Comrade General, the regulations say that my request must be forwarded.”

  “That matter is closed.”

  “You will not forward my request?”

  “You are dismissed. You may leave.”

  Belenko stood up and stared straight into the eyes of the general. “I have something to say.”

  “What?”

  “I will stay in this school. I will work harder to follow every rule and regulation, to teach the students to fly, to enforce discipline in our regiment and school, to combat drunkenness, the theft of alcohol, the forgeries, embezzlement, and corruption that exist everywhere in our school. To do that, it wffl be necessary to dismiss from the Army certain officers and commanders who are aiding and abetting these practices. And to do that, it will be necessary for me to write a letter to the Minister of Defense, in accordance with the Soviet Army Manual of Discipline, proving what is going on in our school.”

  “You may not do that.”

  “Why not? It’s strictly in accordance with regulations. Let me tell you some of the things I will say. I will talk first about the death of Lieutenant Lubach and his student. The investigating commission said it was an accident. It was murder. You said that many of our young instructors are not qualified. But why do you certify them as qualified? Why did you send Lieutenant Lubach’s records to a combat squadron and have them returned so it would look as if he had experience in a combat squadron when you knew he couldn’t fly? Why did you let him take that student up and kill himself and the student?”

  The general’s face flushed. “That is none of your business.”

  Belenko cited a colonel, one of the general’s deputies, who, while piously haranguing officers to curb alcoholism, supervised the wholesale theft of aircraft alcohol, even using military trucks to transport it into Salsk for sale.

  “All right. We know about that. That is being taken care of.”

  Next, Belenko detailed how officers forged records and reported more flight time than had been flown so as to obtain excesses of alcohol and how huge quantities of aviation fuel were being dumped to keep the records consistent.

  “All right. What next? Go on.”

  Belenko recalled how during a recent practice alert another of Golodnikov’s aides, a lieutenant colonel, had staggered among students on the flight line, raving incoherently, provoking laughter, and causing one student to say aloud, “To hell with all this. Let’s go have a drink.”

  “That officer has been punished.”

  But Belenko sensed that his blows were telling, and he went on, reconstructing a suppressed scandal involving a colonel in charge of housing. The colonel kept a second apartment that was supposed to be allocated to an officer, and there employed prostitutes to entertain visiting dignitaries. A general from Moscow was so taken by one of these young ladies that he locked her in the apartment for three days and nights. It happened that the girl was, or at least the KGB believed her to be, a Western agent, and during one of those three nights she was scheduled to meet her clandestine supervisor, in whom the KGB was most interested. When she failed to appear, the other agent became alarmed and escaped. The KGB ascertained some of the truth, but Golodnikov or others concealed enough to allow the colonel to retire quietly without being punished and without calling down upon themselves the righteous vindictiveness of State Security.

  Golodnikov, who had avoided Belenko’s stare, now stared back at him with sheer hatred.

  “There is more….”

  “Enough! Nothing you have said has anything to do with your duties as an instructor. This is pure blackmail.” Golodnikov pressed a buzzer, and an aide appeared. “Tell the chief of the hospital to report to me immediately. Immediately! No matter what he is doing.”

  Belenko saluted and started to leave. “No, Belenko. You stay. You had your chance. Now it is top late for you.”

  Shortly, Colonel Malenkov, a trim, dignified figure who always looked composed in an immaculate uniform, appeared. “This lieutenant urgently needs a complete examination.”

  “Dmitri Vasilyevich, only two weeks ago I myself gave Lieutenant Belenko a complete physical examination.”

  “This will be a psychiatric examination. It is clear to me that this officer is insa
ne. I am sure that is what the examination will find.”

  Belenko, clad in a ragged robe, was locked alone in a hospital room. Nobody, not even the orderlies who brought the repugnant rations which must have come from the soldiers’ mess, spoke to him. Probably the solitary confinement was meant to intimidate him, but it afforded him sufficient respite to realize that he must say or do nothing which might give anybody grounds for labeling him insane.

  On the third morning he was led to Malenkov’s office, and the doctor shut the door behind him. The pilots liked Malenkov because they felt he appreciated both their mentality and frustrations. He had been a combat infantryman in World War II, then trained as a physician, not because he wanted to be a physician — he yearned to be an architect — but because the Party needed doctors. He had served the Party as a military doctor for a quarter of a century. Asked what had happened, Belenko explained, and they talked nearly an hour.

  “Viktor Ivanovich, I know you are all right. I know that what you say is true; at least, I have knowledge of some of the incidents you describe. But why try to piss into the wind? If you want to live in shit the rest of your life, go ahead and express your feelings. If you want to sleep on clean sheets and eat white bread with butter, you must learn to repress your feelings and pay lip service.

  “Golodnikov is not a bad fellow; he’s a friend of mine. You drove him into a corner, and you have to let him out. If I tell him you were temporarily fatigued from overwork, that you recognize your mistake, that you regret it, that you will pursue this no further, I’m reasonably sure it all will be forgotten. Why don’t we do that?”

  If I do that, I always will know that I am a coward. For what purpose do I live? To grovel and lie so I may eat white bread? What would Spartacus do?

  “I will not do that. I will tell the truth.”

  Malenkov sighed. “Oh, Viktor Ivanovich. Now you drive me into a corner. What can I do? I will have to tell the truth, too, and try to help you. But we still have to go through with the psychiatric examination.”

  Although Malenkov could have chosen a local psychiatrist or a military psychiatrist, he instead drove Belenko to the medical institute in Stavropol, one hundred miles away. There he had a personal friend, an eminent psychiatrist whose name Belenko never caught. As they entered, he said, “All you have to do is relax and tell the truth.”

  The psychiatrist and Malenkov talked alone some twenty minutes before calling in Belenko. “Well, well, what do we have here?” he asked Belenko, who as factually as he knew how reported his confrontation with Golodnikov. “Why, we have an open rebellion! Nothing less,” exclaimed the psychiatrist. “You must be very distraught or very brave.”

  For an hour and then, after a brief pause, another two hours the psychiatrist questioned Belenko about all aspects of his life, from early childhood to the present. Neither his mannerisms nor wording disclosed anything to Belenko about his reactions to the answers, and until the last few seconds Belenko did not know whether he had “passed” the examination.

  “So, Lieutenant, tell me. Just what is it that you want?”

  “I want to be a fighter pilot I want to grow professionally. Most of all, I want to get away from all this lying, corruption, and hypocrisy.”

  “Well, that seems to me like a healthy, progressive ambition. We shall see. You may go now.”

  Escorting Belenko to the door, the psychiatrist extended his hand and gripped Belenko’s very hard. In a half whisper he said, “Good luck, Lieutenant. Don’t worry.”

  Four days later Belenko learned the results of the examination entirely by chance from an Armavir classmate who was visiting the base with an inspection team. An ear problem had forced him to quit flying, and he worked in the personnel center of the Air Defense Command. When he offered congratulations, Belenko asked what he meant.

  “Haven’t you been told? You’re going to a MiG-25 squadron in the Far East. The general here gave you a fantastic recommendation. Said you’re such an outstanding pilot you belong in our most modern aircraft. You must have been licking his ass every day the past four years.”

  Belenko did not ask whether the records mentioned the psychiatric examination. Obviously they did not. Doubtless Malenkov and/or the psychiatrist had convinced Golodnikov that in the interests of his self-preservation he had better give Belenko what he asked and ship him as far away as possible as soon as possible.

  Belenko was thankful for the transfer but unmollified and unforgiving, and in the days preceding his departure, his bitterness swelled. While he was away, word had spread or had been spread that he was insane. Krotkov, the guitar player, and a couple of other instructors welcomed him. Everybody else avoided him; they feared to be seen near him. He thought of scenes in The Call of the Wild. If a husky in a dogsled team was helplessly wounded, accidentally or in a fight, the other huskies, along whose side it had toiled, would turn on it as one and devour it.

  I knew them as individual human beings. Now they act like a pack of animals. Our system makes them that way.

  There is nothing I say say to them. There is no way I can defend myself, against them or our system. There is no way anybody can defend himself. If it hadn’t been for Malenkov, I’d be in a lunatic asylum right now. If our system can do that to me, it can do it to anybody.

  He was not conscious of it at the time. But within him the dam that contained the poisonous doubts, the disastrous conclusions, the recurrent rage had burst, and nothing could repair it. In a sense different from that in which they were spoken, the words of Golodnikov did apply. For Belenko it indeed was now too late.

  Ludmilla cried every day their first week or so in Chuguyevka, 120 miles northeast of Vladivostok, almost a continent away from Salsk. By comparison with this village of 2,000 souls, isolated in forests not far from Korea to the south and Manchuria to the west, Salsk, which she so despised, seemed glittering and glamorous. The streets were unlighted and unpaved, the frame houses were unpainted, the outhouses and open garbage pits in their yards buzzed with flies and crawled with worms, and the whole place stank as bad as the poorest kolkhoz on the hottest summer day. The social center of the village was Cafe No. 2, popular because it sold beef which local entrepreneurs imported from Vladivostok. The patrons laced the beer with vodka, and because of the effects of overindulgence, the cafe also reeked. Sausage and meat were unavailable in the three stores, and fruit and vegetables also were scarce except at the bazaar on Sunday.

  A sawmill was the main employer of the village. A few citizens, among them a number of Ukrainians exiled to the Far East for life, worked as supervisors at a kolkhoz a couple of miles away or at the chemical factory on the outskirts. Electrified barbed-wire fences guarded the chemical factory, the labor force of which was composed of zeks. They were marched in each morning in a column, their shaved heads bowed, their hands clasped behind their backs, watched by dogs and guards with machine guns. Their rags, their canvas boots, their forlorn, empty eyes were the same as those Belenko remembered seeing twenty years before in Rubtsovsk.

  A few days after Belenko reported to the base seven miles from the village, the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Ivanovich Shevsov, and the chief political officer convened all pilots and officers in a secret meeting. To Belenko, their candor bespoke desperation.

  “Drunkenness induced by aircraft alcohol is constant and widespread,” they said. “The soldiers are running away from the base and taking girls from the villages away into the forests for days. Several times the soldiers have refused to eat their food. We have had strikes here! We have brawls among the soldiers, and to our shame, some officers have been involved in them. Soldiers are writing letters to their parents about what a horrible situation we have here, and the Organs of State Security have been investigating. At any time we could have an inspection. If there is an inspection, it will show that this regiment is not combat-ready. Our planes often cannot fly because everybody is so drunk or people have run away.

  “Each of you is responsible.
You must concentrate your attention on the soldiers. Explain to them that our difficulties are temporary and will be eliminated eventually. Tell them that our country is not yet rich enough to build planes and barracks at the same time. Emphasize that the Dark Forces of the West have enlisted the Chinese and Japanese in their plot to kidnap our Mother Country.”

  How many times, thousands of times, have I heard that the Dark Forces want to kidnap our Mother Country? Do they want our food? That is very funny. They are starving, but they sell us wheat to keep us from starving. Our system is the best, but we want to learn to grow corn and fly and do everything else just as they do. Do we have anything that they want? That anybody wants?

  The collapse of morale and discipline and the resultant chaos were outgrowths of a massive and urgent military buildup progressing throughout the Soviet Far East. At Chuguyevka three squadrons of MiG-25s (thirty-six combat aircraft plus four or five modified with twin seats as trainers) were replacing three MiG-17 squadrons. A far more complex aircraft, one MiG-25 required four to five times more support personnel — engineers, mechanics, electronics, and armament specialists — than a MiG-17. Within the previous two months the number of officers and men at Chuguyevka had quadrupled, and more were arriving weekly. But no provision whatsoever had been made to expand housing, dining, or any other facilities to accommodate the enormous influx of people.

  Belenko and Ludmilla were comparatively lucky in that they shared a two-room apartment with only one family, a flight engineer, his wife, and two children. Other apartments were packed with three or four families of officers, and despite the best of will, conflicts over use of the bathroom and kitchen inevitably arose, afflicting everyone with strain and tension. Ludmilla was able to work part time as a nurse at the base dispensary, but for most other wives, some of whom were teachers or engineers, employment opportunities were nil.