MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

«I want to be a fighter pilot I want to grow professionally. Most of all, I want to get away from all this lying, corruption, and hypocrisy.»

«Well, that seems to me like a healthy, progressive ambition. We shall see. You may go now.»

Escorting Belenko to the door, the psychiatrist extended his hand and gripped Belenko's very hard. In a half whisper he said, «Good luck, Lieutenant. Don't worry.»

Four days later Belenko learned the results of the examination entirely by chance from an Armavir classmate who was visiting the base with an inspection team. An ear problem had forced him to quit flying, and he worked in the personnel center of the Air Defense Command. When he offered congratulations, Belenko asked what he meant.

«Haven't you been told? You're going to a MiG-25 squadron in the Far East. The general here gave you a fantastic recommendation. Said you're such an outstanding pilot you belong in our most modern aircraft. You must have been licking his ass every day the past four years.»

Belenko did not ask whether the records mentioned the psychiatric examination. Obviously they did not. Doubtless Malenkov and/or the psychiatrist had convinced Golodnikov that in the interests of his self-preservation he had better give Belenko what he asked and ship him as far away as possible as soon as possible.

Belenko was thankful for the transfer but unmollified and unforgiving, and in the days preceding his departure, his bitterness swelled. While he was away, word had spread or had been spread that he was insane. Krotkov, the guitar player, and a couple of other instructors welcomed him. Everybody else avoided him; they feared to be seen near him. He thought of scenes in The Call of the Wild. If a husky in a dogsled team was helplessly wounded, accidentally or in a fight, the other huskies, along whose side it had toiled, would turn on it as one and devour it.

I knew them as individual human beings. Now they act like a pack of animals. Our system makes them that way.

There is nothing I say say to them. There is no way I can defend myself, against them or our system. There is no way anybody can defend himself. If it hadn't been for Malenkov, I'd be in a lunatic asylum right now. If our system can do that to me, it can do it to anybody.

He was not conscious of it at the time. But within him the dam that contained the poisonous doubts, the disastrous conclusions, the recurrent rage had burst, and nothing could repair it. In a sense different from that in which they were spoken, the words of Golodnikov did apply. For Belenko it indeed was now too late.

Ludmilla cried every day their first week or so in Chuguyevka, 120 miles northeast of Vladivostok, almost a continent away from Salsk. By comparison with this village of 2,000 souls, isolated in forests not far from Korea to the south and Manchuria to the west, Salsk, which she so despised, seemed glittering and glamorous. The streets were unlighted and unpaved, the frame houses were unpainted, the outhouses and open garbage pits in their yards buzzed with flies and crawled with worms, and the whole place stank as bad as the poorest kolkhoz on the hottest summer day. The social center of the village was Cafe No. 2, popular because it sold beef which local entrepreneurs imported from Vladivostok. The patrons laced the beer with vodka, and because of the effects of overindulgence, the cafe also reeked. Sausage and meat were unavailable in the three stores, and fruit and vegetables also were scarce except at the bazaar on Sunday.

A sawmill was the main employer of the village. A few citizens, among them a number of Ukrainians exiled to the Far East for life, worked as supervisors at a kolkhoz a couple of miles away or at the chemical factory on the outskirts. Electrified barbed-wire fences guarded the chemical factory, the labor force of which was composed of zeks. They were marched in each morning in a column, their 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.