At the base a KGB officer delivered an orientation lecture. After cautioning against Western spies, he spoke at length about the Chechens, one of some hundred ethnic and racial minorities that constitute the Soviet population. Native inhabitants of the eastern Caucasus, the Chechens were fiercely independent Muslims, racially akin to Iranians, who never had been satisfactorily subjugated by the czars or communists. Fearing that out of their hatred for Russians they would collaborate with the Germans, Stalin had deported them en masse to Kazakhstan. Cast into cold deserts and infertile mountains, they had suffered privation and hunger and perished in vast numbers. Khrushchev had allowed the survivors to go back to their native region around Grozny. When they returned, they found their land, homes, shops, and jobs had been appropriated by Russians. Convinced of their righteousness, they commenced to kill Russians indiscriminately and barbarically, usually with knives. A young Russian sailor coming home from five years at sea was slashed to death in the railway station before his terror-stricken mother in 1959. Russian residents thereupon formed vigilante groups armed with axes, took out after the Chechens, then stormed government offices, demanding intervention to protect them from the wild Muslims. Troops, backed by tanks and armored cars, had to be called in to restore civil order. The government warned the Chechens that if they persisted in cutting up Russians, they all would be «sent far north where the polar bears live.» The wholesale butchery largely subsided, but not individual murders, and many Chechen youths still subscribed to the credo that true manhood could not be attained without the killing of at least one Russian.
«Most of all, you must guard yourself against the Chechens,» the KGB officer said. «The Chechens use knives wantonly, and under stress they will butcher you. You know how valuable you are to our country. It is your patriotic duty to take care and ensure your own safety. Never sleep on duty. Always stand watch with a long knife.»
It sounds like hell around here! They will just butcher you for nothing! It sounds like we're in the darkest of Africa in the last century, like an outpost among savages. But this is 1969! The Soviet Union! And the Party says we've solved the nationality problem.
Flight instructor Grigori Petrovich Litvinov, tall, thin, and prematurely bald at thirty-one, looked and acted like an ascetic, abstaining totally from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity. He wore about him an air of perpetual calm and, in Belenko's hearing, never raised his voice. Upon being introduced, he insisted that they address each other by first names and admonished Belenko not to fear asking questions, however naive. «I will answer the same question a hundred times, I will stay up all night with you if need be, until you understand.»
There was no need for such special attention. After being familiarized with the L-29 jet trainer, Belenko managed it more easily and surely than he had the old prop plane in which he had learned. The wasteful, melancholy waiting in Omsk, the submission to the straitjacket life of a cadet were now repaid by his certainty that he had done right. Alone in the cockpit, he was serenely free and unbound; he was where he knew he belonged.
Toward the end of the six months of basic flight training at Grozny, Litvinov and Belenko were changing clothes in the locker room. As Litvinov picked up his flight suit to hang it in the locker, a thick little book, small enough to be hidden behind a man's palm, tumbled out of a front flap pocket onto the floor. Belenko glanced down and saw the title of the book: Holy Bible. Litvinov's eyes were waiting to meet his when he looked up. They asked: Will you inform? Belenko's answered: Never.
Neither said anything, nor was the incident ever mentioned subsequently. Belenko thought about it, though. It's his business what he reads. If the Bible is full of myths and fairy tales, let everybody see that for himself. Everybody knows that a lot of what the Party makes us read is full of shit; we can see and prove that for ourselves. Why not let everybody read anything he wants to? We know our system is the best. Why be afraid of other ideas when we can show they are not as good? Unless… unless, of course, we're afraid that our ideas aren't the best.
The schedule stipulated that the cadets would study the MiG-17 for two months back at Armavir preparatory to the final phrase of training. But the two months stretched into four because an emergency had sprung up in the countryside — another harvest was nearing. Each weekend and sometimes two or three more days a week, officers and men alike were packed into buses and trucks to join the battle of the harvest. For Belenko, it was a pleasant diversion. They mostly picked fruit and ate all they wanted. Because the schools and colleges of Armavir had been closed for the harvest, many pretty girls worked and flirted with them in the orchards. The farmers were hospitable and slipped them glasses of cider and wine. And at night they went back to the barracks, a good meal, and a clean bunk.
Yet Belenko despaired at the acres and acres of apples, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of apples, rotting because nobody had arranged for them to be picked in time. He remembered how precious apples were in Siberia, how once in Rubtsovsk he had paid a whole ruble to buy one apple on the black market.
Why doesn't anything work? Why doesn't anything change? It's barely ten years before 1980. But we're no farther along toward True Communism than we were when they first started talking about it. We're never going to have True Communism. Everything is just as screwed up as ever. Why?
In April 1970 Belenko was assigned to a MiG-17 training regiment seventy-five miles northwest of Armavir near Tikhoretsk, whose 40,000 residents worked mainly in canneries and wineries. Although not accorded the privileges of officers, the cadets now, by and large, were treated as full-fledged pilots. They arose at 4:00 A.M. for a bountiful breakfast, then flew two or three times, breaking for a second breakfast around 9:30. The main meal at noon, which always included meat and fruit, was followed by a nap of an hour or so. They attended classes from early afternoon until early evening — tactics, future trends in aerodynamics, technology of advanced aircraft, military leadership, political economics, science of communism, history of the Party, Marxist/Leninist philosophy. Passes were issued on Saturday nights and Sundays, unless they were called to clean factories or work in the fields on weekends, requests which occurred roughly every other week.
Fortune again gave Belenko a good flight instructor, Lieutenant Nikolai Igoryevich Shvartzov, who was only twenty-four. He longed to be a test pilot and was able enough; but he had given up this ambition because he had no influence in Moscow, and nobody, so it was believed, could become a test pilot without influence. At the outset, Shvartzov gave Belenko only two instructions: «Let's be completely honest with each other about everything; that way we can trust and help each other,» and, «If a MiG-17 ever goes into a spin, eject at once. You can pull it out of a spin, but it's hard. We can always build another plane. We can't build another you.» Throughout their relationship, they were honest and got along well.
The MiG-17, light, swift, maneuverable, was fun to fly, and Belenko had confidence in it. Vietnam had proven that, if skillfully flown at lower altitudes, it could cope with the American F-4 Phantom. Should he duel with an American pilot in an F-4, the outcome would depend on which of them was the braver and better pilot. It would be a fair fight. That was all he asked.