MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

This is incredible! What can you believe? Why do they keep changing the truth? Why is what I see so different from what they say?

Recoiling from the quackery of social studies, Viktor veered toward the sciences — mathematics, chemistry, physics, and especially biology. Here logic, order, and consistency prevailed. The laws of Euclid or Newton were not periodically repealed, and you did not have to take anybody's word for anything. You could test and verify for yourself.

He shifted his reading to popular science magazines and technical journals, to books and articles about biology and medicine, aviation and mechanics. At the time, Soviet students were required to study vocational as well as academic subjects, and those who excelled could participate in an extracurricular club the members of which build equipment and machinery. Viktor designed a radio-controlled tractor which was selected for a Moscow exhibition displaying technical achievements of students throughout the Soviet Union. As a prize, he received a two-week trip to the capital.

The broad boulevards of Moscow, paved and lighted; subway trams speeding through tiled and muraled passages; theaters, restaurants, and museums; ornate old Russian architecture; department stores and markets selling fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers; traffic and official black limousines — all represented wondrous new sights. Collectively they elated him while they inspired pride in his country and hopeful questions.

Is not the Party right after all? Does not what I have seen prove that we are making progress? Will not all cities someday be like Moscow?

The final morning he joined a long line of men and women waiting four abreast outside the Kremlin to view the perpetually refurbished body of Lenin. The Kremlin, with its thick red walls, stately spires, and turrets, connoted to him majesty and might, and upon finally reaching the bier, he felt himself in the presence of history and greatness. He wanted to linger, but a guard motioned him onward. Leaving reverently, he asked the guard where the tomb of Stalin was. The answer astonished him. They had evicted Stalin from the Lenin mausoleum. Why, they've thrown him away like a dog!

While telling his classmates back in Rubtsovsk about Moscow, Viktor heard disturbing news. The KGB had arrested the older brother of a friend for economic crimes. He remembered how admiring all had been the year before when the youth had bribed a Party functionary to secure employment in the meat-packing plant. There, as everybody knew, a clever person could wax rich by stealing meat for sale on the black market, and procurement of the job had seemed like a triumph of entrepreneurship. He will be imprisoned. He will be one of them in the trucks. He will be a zek.

The specter shocked Viktor into recognition of a frightening pattern in the behavior of many of his peers. Some had taken to waylaying and robbing drunks outside factories in the evening of paydays. Others had stolen and disassembled cars and machinery, to sell the parts on the black market. A few, sent to reform school for little more than malicious mischief or habitual truancy, had emerged as trained gangsters, who were graduating from petty thievery to burglary and armed robbery.

They are becoming real criminals. They never will be New Communist Men. Nothing is going to fix them. How did our communist society do this to them? I do not understand. But if it can make them that way, it could make me that way. That I will not allow. It is as Father said. I must make my own way. I must start now before it is too late.

Always Viktor had received good marks in school without especially exerting himself. He attended to his homework dutifully but quickly so he could devote himself to his own pursuits. Frequently in class, particularly during political lectures, he read novels concealed behind textbooks. Now he resolved to strive during the remainder of school to earn the highest honors attainable, to obey all rules and laws, to try to mold himself into a New Communist Man. Through distinction, he would find his way out of Rubtsovsk and into the sky.

Faithful to his vows, he disassociated himself from most of his friends, studied hard, and parroted the political polemics, even when he believed them absurd. As part of the final examinations in the spring of 1965, he artfully wrote three papers entitled «Progress of the Soviet System,» «Crisis of the Western World,» and «Principles of the New Communist Man.» They faithfully regurgitated the dogma of the day and were brightened by a few original flourishes of his own. The teacher, who read portions of «Progress of the Soviet System» aloud, commended his selection of the tank as the best exemplification of the supremacy of Soviet technology. Although Viktor achieved his goal in social philosophy, a perfect grade of five, he was not entirely proud because he suspected that not all he wrote was true.