MiG Pilot

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.

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.”