There was alarm at Armavir when Belenko returned from leave. A cholera epidemic had spread from the shores of the Black Sea through the region, and all military personnel were being quarantined indefinitely on their bases. A military physician briefed the cadets about the nature and dangers of cholera, noting that one good antidote was «vodka with garlic.» Belenko was astounded, for from his own reading, he already knew about cholera.
Cholera! If we have the best medicine in the world, why should we have cholera? Cholera is a disease of the yellows and blacks. It is a disease of filth. Well, of course. There is shit and filth and garbage everywhere: on the beaches, in the outhouse and garbage pit of every house, every apartment building. People can't bathe or even wash their dishes properly. What can you expect? How many toilets could we build for the price of one spaceship?
The cholera epidemic was followed by an outbreak of a virulent and infectious respiratory ailment, then by an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease. In consequence, the cadets were locked on base throughout the autumn and winter. The knowledge that he could not look forward to even a few hours of freedom had a claustrophobic effect on Belenko and may have contributed to his brooding. Regardless, he experienced a resurgence of intellectual conflict and corrosive doubts. The political officers, to make their points intelligible, had to disclose some facts, and Belenko's analysis of these facts plunged him into ever-deepening spiritual trouble.
To demonstrate the inherent injustice and totalitarian nature of American society, a political officer declared that the Communist Party was terribly persecuted in the United States. Wait a minute! You mean they have a Communist Party in the United States; they allow it? Why, that would be like our allowing a Capitalist Party in the Soviet Union!
To illustrate the persecution of the Communist Party, political instructors dwelt on the case of Angela Davis, a black and an avowed communist, once dismissed from the faculty of the University of California on grounds of incompetence. She was subsequently arrested but ultimately acquitted of murder — conspiracy charges arising from the killing of a California judge abducted in the midst of a trial. You mean the Americans allow communists to teach in their universities? Why did the Dark Forces let her go? Why didn't they just kill her?
To prove that the American masses were basically sympathetic to communism and opposed to the imperialistic policies of the Dark Forces that held them underfoot, the political officers showed films of some of the great antiwar demonstrations.
You mean that in America you can just go out and demonstrate and raise hell and tear up things if you don't like something! Why, what would happen here if people rioted to protest our sending soldiers to Czechoslovakia? Well, we know what would happen.
To dramatize the poverty, hunger, and unemployment of contemporary America, the political officers showed films taken in the 1930s of Depression breadlines, current Soviet television films of New York slums and of workers eating sandwiches or hot dogs and drinking Coca-Cola for lunch. The narrative, explaining that a sandwich or hot dog was all the American could afford for «dinner,» struck Belenko because in the Soviet Union the noon meal is the main one of the day.
If they are starving and can't find jobs and prefer communism, why don't they come over here? We need workers, millions of them, especially in Siberia, and we could guarantee them all the bread they need and milk, too. But wait a minute. Who owns all those cars I see?
In a spirit of logical inquiry, Belenko asked about the cars visible everywhere in the films. The instructor commended him for the prescience of his question and answered it with relish. True, the Dark Forces permitted many workers to have cars and homes as well; not only that, they also had built highways all across the land. But they charged the workers tolls to travel the highways, and they made the worker mortgage his whole life for the car and house. If he lost his job or got sick, he was ruined, wiped out, impoverished for life; he was a slave to the bankers and thus controlled by the Dark Forces.
That's very clever of the Dark Forces. But… if I had to choose between having a car and a house now and maybe being wiped out later or waiting maybe fifteen years for an apartment, which would I choose?
The West and especially the United States were depicted as being in the throes of death. The forces of socialism, led by «our Mother Country,» were advancing everywhere — in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Cuba (referred to as «our aircraft carrier»). The Americans no longer were all-powerful. To see their deterioration, one had only to look at their internal strife and the irresolute flaccidity they displayed in Vietnam.
Yet no week passed without warnings of the dreadful threat posed by the encircling Dark Forces of the West and then — plots «to kidnap our Mother Country.» This ubiquitous threat justified every sacrifice of material and human resources necessary to build Soviet armed forces into the mightiest in the world.
If they are so weak, why are they such a threat? What is the truth?
In tactics, the cadets studied mostly the methods of the Americans, the Main Enemy, whom they primarily were being trained to confront. A professor who had flown MiGs in Korea and served as an adviser to the North Vietnamese was frank in his characterization of U.S. pilots. They were professionally skilled and personally brave. Even when ambushed by larger numbers of MiGs jumping up at them from sanctuaries in China, they would stay and fight rather than flee. They drove on toward their targets no matter how many missiles, how muck flak was fired at them. The Americans were quick and flexible in adapting to new situations or weapons, and they were ingenious in innovating surprises of their own. You never could be sure of what to expect from them except they always loved to fight.
The students asked a number of questions, as they were encouraged to do, and one wanted to know why the Americans were so good.
The professor explained that over the years they had perfected an extremely effective training program. They had developed psychological tests that enabled them to identify candidates with the highest aptitudes for flying and combat. Their recruits already had attended universities and thus began training with a «strong theoretical base.» And virtually all their instructors had a great deal of actual combat experience because the Americans always were fighting somewhere in the world.
Yes, but how can such a rotten and decadent society produce pilots so brave?
A political officer supplied the answer. «Oh, they do it for money. They are extraordinarily well paid. They will do anything for money.»
I wonder how much they pay them to make them willing to die.
His analysis of the case of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam probably disturbed Belenko most of all. Political officers proclaimed the slaughter of more than a hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children at the village of My Lai the ultimate example of American inhumanity and degeneracy. To demonstrate that the mass murder had actually occurred, they quoted verbatim from numerous American press accounts reporting the atrocity in macabre detail. There could be no doubt about it. The Americans themselves publicly had charged one of then: own officers with the killing of 109 innocent civilians. *
But why are the Dark Forces putting him in jail? If they are pure and true Dark Forces, he did just what they wanted. They should be giving him a medal. And why do the Dark Forces allow their newspapers to tell about аll this? Every society has its animals. I myself have seen some of ours in Rubtsovsk. Our newspapers won't even report one murder. But the Americans are shaming themselves in front of the whole world by reporting the murder of one hundred nine men, women and babies. Why?
His disquietude, however, receded before the prospect of flight. Belenko and some ninety other cadets were transferred to an air base eight miles outside Grozny near the Caspian Sea. Grozny was an ancient city of nearly 400,000, and undoubtedly it once had been lovely. The baroque architecture, ornate buildings, and cable cars gliding through narrow brick streets still made it somewhat attractive. But it stood in a valley which captured and held the smoke, pollutants, and stench discharged from surrounding oil refineries and chemical factories, and the river running through the city was an open sewer of industrial wastes.