MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

Belenko seldom had cause or time to venture into downtown Salsk at night, but bachelor pilots did, and though they often were assaulted by robbers who knew they had money, they were under the strictest of orders never to engage in violence lest they injure themselves. The attacks proliferated, and one evening a gang of sadistic thugs killed an officer, blinded a second with sulfuric acid, and partially blinded a third as they emerged from a 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.