MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

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 complicated 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.