MiG Pilot

outpouring of grief and despair as now. It alarmed him and made him wonder, too, how life would proceed without the noble Stalin.

A letter in the autumn saddened both his aunt and his grandmother. His father was coming to take him to Siberia. The grandmother sewed a kind of knapsack for him, and they packed it with food, including some smoked meat, to which they never treated themselves. Through a thick December snowfall the women walked with him and his father to the rail station and held each other, then waved as the train pulled away. He never saw either again.

Authorities in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk had assured his father that the room in the communal apartment for which he had waited forty-two months would be available by December. It was not, and Viktor was sent to stay on a collective farm, or kolkhoz, to the south with relatives of his father’s friend, the factory manager. The family — father, mother, and four children — were crowded into one room, and his first evening Viktor stared in wide-eyed wonderment as a cow was led into the hut for the night so she would not freeze to death.

Despite the scarcity of space, the family welcomed him as one of their own and, as had his aunt and grandmother, shared with him unstintingly. He soon recognized, however, that the kolkhozniks were far poorer than the miners of the Donbas. The collective allocated each family grain for bread on the basis of the number of workdays credited to the household, rather than according to the number of members. The ration for families with very young children or elderly relatives unable to work was thus short. The small salary paid the kolkhozniks barely enabled them to buy essential salt, soap, and kerosene. For purchase of shoes, clothing, and other necessities, they depended on proceeds from the sale of milk and produce grown on their tiny private plots, which they tended fervently and carefully. Throughout the winter their diet consisted of bread and milk for breakfast, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and bread for dinner and bread and milk for supper. After the cow stopped giving milk, they drank water.

The winter of 1954 was especially severe in Siberia, so cold that frozen birds littered the ground, and in February the cow could not be allowed outside very long even in daytime. The children amused themselves around the wood-burning stove with games of their own design, and Viktor devised the most popular. The hut was inhabited by big reddish-brown cockroaches, which were accepted as legal residents of all peasant homes and hence not necessarily considered repellent. The intricacy of their bodily composition and functioning fascinated Viktor, and he studied them long and curiously. How did such complicates creatures come to be? Why are they here? What gives them life? Watching how quickly they skittered about, he conceived the idea of harnessing the cockroaches by attaching threads between them and toy carts carved from wood. After many failed attempts and mangled insects, he succeeded and began to stage races. The competition became such a source of mirth for all that sometimes after supper the father would say, “Well, Viktor, let us have a race.”

The spring thaws awakened and changed the kolkhoz. The pure air turned pungent with the omnipresent stench of ordure, but radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes appeared in the garden, and they tasted delicious. Viktor worked in the fields eleven to twelve hours a day alongside other children, women, and older men, in their fifties or sixties, who constituted most of the labor force. The few teenagers among them malingered and caviled, cursing their barren life in general and the paucity of meat in particular. Once Viktor heard an old woman snap at them: “During the war, we were glad to eat grass and acorns and mice and grasshoppers. You should be grateful that things are much better now.” It never occurred to him that the toil was onerous. He liked the outdoors, the physical exertion, and the discoveries of how soil, moisture, sun, and time transform seed into wheat. For a boy of seven it was a pleasant summer.

His father retrieved him in September and in effect appointed him housekeeper of their room on the second floor of a frame apartment building housing employees of the Altai truck factory in Rubtsovsk. His duties included some shopping, preparing a cold supper, cleaning the room, keeping the coke fire burning, and hauling water twice daily from a well about 150 yards down the street. Straining with the pails of water, he remembered the kolkhoz and in a few days built a yoke that enabled him to carry two buckets simultaneously. After slipping on winter ice, he constructed a crude, yet serviceable sled to transport water and other cargo. He did not object to the chores any more than he had minded the work on the farm. Rather, from them he gained a sense of partnership and worth, and he prided himself in their accomplishment.

His father went out often in the evening and on Sundays to visit women, and they talked mostly during supper or while playing chess (which, by unspoken agreement they quit after Viktor started winning easily). Only once did his father ever discuss his future with him. “You will find your own way in life. I have no friends or relatives in the Party who can help you. I cannot give you money to buy your way out of Rubtsovsk. If you wish a life different from mine, you can find the way only through education. The war took away my opportunity for an education. You still have a chance.”

Viktor needed no encouragement. Schooling excited him from the outset and offered, so he thought, the opportunity to learn the answers to all questions about life. And it was through school that he sought an answer to the first question about Soviet life that ever seriously troubled him.

In wartime desperation, the Russians had quickly transfigured Rubtsovsk from a placid market town into a raw, roaring industrial city by transferring factories threatened by the Germans in the west. The forced industrialization was effected mainly by prison labor, and a web of concentration camps developed around the city. Although many camps were closed after Stalin died, those around Rubtsovsk remained, and their inmates were utilized in industrial construction with something akin to wartime urgency. Barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and lights were erected around construction sites, and shifts of prisoners, or zeks, as the Russians called them, were trucked in to keep the work going twenty-four hours a day.

Viktor first sighted some zeks while leaning into a stinging wind on the way to school. They were shivering and huddled against one another for warmth inside wire cages on the back of trucks, guarded by Central Asians clad in heavy sheepskin coats and armed with submachine guns. The thin cloth coats, painted with white numerals; the canvas boots; the cloth caps partially covering their shaved heads — all were ragged.

He had seen people in dirty, tattered clothes before. Never had he seen eyes so vacant. There was no expression; it was as if he were looking at men whose minds and souls had died while their bodies continued to breathe. The concept of political prisoners was unknown to him. Criminals were criminals, and he was sure that each of the gaunt trembling, hollow figures he saw must have done something terrible. Yet he cried out to himself, Kill them! Kill them or set them free! I would not treat a rat like that. I would rather die than be in a cage.

His recurrent vision of the zeks subsequently caused him to wonder: Why are they so rejected? What made them that way? In tune, as schools taught him the verities of Marxism-Leninism, he felt he understood. Man, political instructors emphasized, is but the product of his social and economic environment. Capitalism, although a necessary stage in human evolution, created an inherently defective socioeconomic environment based on selfishness, greed, and exploitation of the many by the few. Given such a defective environment, defective human behavior was inevitable. The criminality, alcoholism, acquisitiveness, indolence, careerism, and other aberrant behavior that admittedly persisted in the Soviet Union to some limited extent were merely the malignant remnants of capitalism.

Viktor still pitied the zeks but now understood them for what they were — unfortunate victims of the lingering influences of decaying capitalism. Although the past could not be altered, nor their plight remedied, the misery they personified eventually would end with the advent of True Communism.

Shortly before Viktor’s tenth birthday his father married a co-worker, the widow of a friend killed in an assemblyline accident. They moved in with her, her mother, sixty-eight, son, six, and daughter, three. She owned a house, a real stucco house consisting of three rooms and a kitchen, well built by her late husband and his relatives on a small parcel of land her parents had been permitted to keep. The outhouse was only a few paces away in the backyard, and the well less than a minute’s walk down the block.

The stepmother was a plump, shapeless woman of thirty-five, slightly cross-eyed, and she wore her lusterless hair swept straight back into a tight little bun, a style that emphasized the plainness of her face. Formerly a teacher, she managed both her accounting job at the factory and the household well, for she was by nature efficient, industrious, and, Viktor thought, conniving. He disliked her instantly and, while treating her civilly, gave her no cause to be fond of him.

Despite his father’s admonitions, he addressed her formally as Serafima Ivanovna, refusing ever to call her