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.”
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.
Each pilot periodically stood watch as duty officer for twenty-four hours, during which he supervised the enlisted personnel, inspected the barracks and mess hall, and generally tried to enforce discipline. What Belenko saw on his first watch appalled him.
Between 180 and 200 men were jammed into barracks marginally adequate for 40. Bunks stood in tiers nearly against each other, and the congestion was such that it was difficult to move without stumbling into somebody. There were two water faucets in each barracks, the toilet was outside, and sometimes during the night men relieved themselves in their neighbor’s boots. They were given a change of underwear once a week and allowed to go into the village for a steam bath once every ten days, there being no bathhouse on the base.
Comparable congestion in the mess hall made cleanliness impossible, and the place smelled like a garbage pit. While one section of forty men ate, another forty stood behind them waiting to take places and plates. If they chose, they then could wait in line to dip the plate in a pan of cold water containing no soap. Usually they elected to simply brush the plate off with their hands. For breakfast the men received 150 grams of bread, 10 grams of butter, 20 grams of sugar, barley mush cooked with water, and a mug of tea. Dinner consisted of thin soup, sometimes thickened with cereal, buckwheat groats, perhaps a piece or two of fatback, and a mug of kissel, a kind of starchy gelatin. Supper was the same as breakfast.
Except for a television set, no recreational facilities of any kind were available to the enlisted men (or the officers, for that matter), and there was little they could do. There was much they were forbidden to do. They were forbidden to listen to a transistor radio, to draw pictures of women, to listen to records, to read fiction, to write letters about their life in the service, to lie or sit on their bunks during their free time (there was no place else to sit), to watch television except when political or patriotic programs were shown, and to drink. But drink they did, in staggering quantities, for alcohol was the one commodity available in limitless amounts.
To fly seventy minutes, the maximum time it can stay aloft without refueling, a MiG-25 needs fourteen tons of jet fuel and one-half ton of alcohol for braking and electronic systems. So wherever MiG-25s were based, huge quantities of alcohol were stored, and in the Soviet Air Force the plane was popularly known as the Flying Restaurant. And officers from surrounding bases — Air Force, Army, political officers — seized on any pretext to visit Chuguyevka and fill their bottles.
According to a story circulated at Chuguyevka, a group of Air Force wives, distraught over their husbands’ habitual drunkenness, staked a protest at a design bureau in Moscow, appealing to it to design aircraft that would not use alcohol. Supposedly a representative of the bureau told the ladies, “Go screw yourselves. If we want, we will fuel our planes with cognac.”
In April 1976 Belenko’s squadron commander asked him to take a truck and pick up a shipment of office supplies from a railroad freight terminal thirty miles north of Vladivostok, paper and office supplies being essential to the functioning of the squadron. It was a task that should have been performed by the deputy squadron commander, but he never stayed sober enough to be trusted with the truck.
The morning was bright, the dirt road empty and not yet dusty, and forests through which he drove were awesome in their natural, unspoiled beauty. They reminded him of man’s capacity to despoil nature and himself and of delicious hours in other forests.
Starting back, Belenko saw a frail, ragged figure walking along the road, and the man looked so forlorn he decided to give him a lift. The hitchhiker, who had few teeth, gaunt eyes, sparse hair, and a sallow, unhealthy complexion, looked to be in his sixties. He explained that he worked at the freight terminal and walked or hitchhiked daily to and from his hut eight miles down the road.
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost twenty-five years. After the war I spent ten years in the camps, and ever since, I’ve worked around here, doing whatever I could find. I am not allowed to go back to the Ukraine, although I miss my home very much. I have relatives, but it is too expensive for them to visit me. You know how life is. The first years were very hard for me because it is so cold here. The Ukraine is warm and sunny, you know, and there are flowers and fruit. I wish I could see it once more before I die. But I guess I won’t, I have no passport.”*
“How old are you?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Are you married?”
“Oh, yes. She spent eight years in the camps. She’s also from the Ukraine. Her relatives were exiled. They’ve all died now, and there’s just the two of us. We thought about children, but we were afraid we couldn’t take care of them. It’s not easy to get a good job if you’re an exile. You know how life is.”
“What did you do? Did you kill someone?”
“No, I gave bread to the men from the forest.”**
Belenko was sent to a training center near Moscow for a few weeks’ intensive study of the MiG-25, and when he returned in Mid-June, a state of emergency existed in Chuguyevka. A dysentery epidemic had disabled fully 40 percent of the regiment, two soldiers had committed suicide, at least twenty had deserted, there had been more hunger strikes, and the enlisted men now were verging on open mutiny. Fuel shortages had prevented pilots from flying as much as they needed to master their new aircraft. American reconnaissance planes, SR-71s, were prowling off the coast, staying just outside Soviet airspace but photographing terrain hundreds of miles inland with side-angle cameras. They taunted and toyed with the MiG-25s sent up to intercept them, scooping up to altitudes
