At daylight a policeman halted a six-wheel truck able to negotiate the mud and induced the driver to deliver Lieutenant Belenko to his first post. His new uniform and boots were soiled and splattered with mud. In his thoughts, much more was indelibly soiled.
Nevertheless, Belenko shared the elation of all the other newly arrived officers when they were handed keys to their apartments in a building that had been completed and certified for occupancy only a month before. To be promised an apartment was one thing; to be given an apartment as promised, quite another. Eagerly and expectantly Belenko unlocked the door and smelled dampness. The floor, built with green lumber, already was warped and wavy. Plaster was peeling off the walls. The windowpane in the kitchen was broken, and no water poured from the faucet. The bathtub leaked; the toilet did not flush. None of the electrical outlets worked.
Already gathered in the halls were other officers, who had found comparable conditions in their apartments. Together they marched forth to collar the construction superintendent responsible for building the apartments. Unmoved by their recitation of ills, he told them that the building had been inspected and approved by an acceptance commission from their regiment. Any deficiencies that might have developed subsequently were none of his concern.
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.
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.”
“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
