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
