void of the garage without adventure or meaning.
Returning to Omsk in August, Viktor heard that because the military anticipated need for many more doctors, there would be an unusual number of openings in the fall classes at the local medical school. Out of a whim to test his capacities, he took the entrance examinations. Toward the end of the month the medical school notified him that he ranked near the top of all applicants and advised him to report for enrollment.
Just three days after medical-school classes convened, they abruptly and unexpectedly were suspended so students could participate in the harvest. Legions of young people from factories, the universities, the Army were being trucked into the countryside. The manufacture of goods, the education of physicians, the training of the nation’s guardians must wait. All available manpower had to be mobilized for the frantic, desperate battle of the harvest.
Viktor and some of his classmates were deposited on a
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.
Having been told they would be paid the same wages as the
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.
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.”
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
