Belenko spent the better part of a month completing the mountains of paperwork requisite to dismissal. In the process he finally comprehended why no one in his own class had been expelled, why second-year soldiers who preyed on neophytes were not prosecuted, why the flight engineer was not cashiered, why the cadet would not have been dismissed had he not been egregiously hopeless.
Party had decreed that a certain number of qualified pilots would be trained in a given time. The Party had decreed that pilots, officers, soldiers, all would be transformed into New Communist Men. That was the plan. A commander who publicly disciplined a subordinate or dismissed a student risked the wrath and punishment of the Party by convicting himself, ipso facto, of incompetence, of undermining the plan.
The consequent fear created a system in which problems were masked and perpetuated, rather than eliminated, and it spawned corruption or a psychological environment in which corruption flourished. Prior to an inspection by senior officers of the Air Defense Command, Belenko was scheduled to perform a complicated one-hour exercise in which he and a student in another MiG would intercept and down a third MiG. The exercise would be recorded on the films of gun cameras and chronometer tapes for examination by the inspectors. But the morning of the planned exercise, the sky was filled with thunder and lightning.
Nevertheless, a deputy regimental commander ordered them to fly. “What! That’s impossible.”
“Listen to me. Just tell your student to climb up to five hundred meters. You make a quick intercept, and both of you come right back down. It won’t take five minutes. I’ll show you how to fix it when you get back.”
For the next three days Belenko and the deputy commander juggled films and tapes to fabricate a record of an elaborate and successful exercise. When they finished, one obstacle remained. What about the fuel? They had flown six minutes. The records showed the exercise had lasted sixty minutes. How to explain the leftover fuel? Dump it. So thousands of gallons of jet fuel were dumped on the ground.
On a typical flying day, Belenko arose at 3:30 A.M. to catch the bus that left at 4:00 for the base, where he had breakfast, underwent a medical examination, and briefed his students prior to the first takeoff at 7:00. He flew with them until 1:00 P.M., when the main meal of the day was served. From 2:00 to 3:00 P.M. he and his fellow instructors customarily were berated by the training squadron commander and a political officer for the failures, on and off duty, of their students and subordinates. Unable to articulate or manifest his anger at the daily censure, he attended to paperwork and counseled students until supper at 6:00 P.M. Unless paperwork or political conferences detained him, he usually arrived home by bus around 7:30 P.M. To be fresh and alert by 3:00 the next day, he needed to go to sleep as quickly as possible.
On Sunday, his lone day off, he wanted and needed to rest. Ludmilla, who worked at a hospital six days a week, wanted to go out, to do something, and they argued about how the day should be spent. Ludmilla complained about much else.
She abhorred Salsk and the life of a military wife, and Belenko understood her feelings. Salsk, a place where “undesirables” had been sent in Czarist times, was a drab, dingy, poor city set on treeless flatlands over which stinging winds howled. Dust intruded everywhere except when rain turned it to mud. The two motion-picture theaters were small, and you rarely could enter without waiting more than an hour. Service in the city’s few restaurants also meant more than an hour’s wait and the fare was not worth the delay. There was no officers’ club at the base, nor any other facility that wives might enjoy. Unable to change these circumstances or his working hours, which she also resented, Belenko could only sympathize and ask that she bear up in hope of eventual transfer to a more pleasant duty station.
Money was another and more disruptive source of conflict. Ludmilla earned 65 rubles a month as a nurse, and their combined income of 365 rubles was princely by Soviet standards. Unless he were to become a KGB officer or Party official, and either possibility was unthinkable, there was no pursuit that would pay him as much. But she nagged him for not earning more, and they often were short because she spent so capriciously and made costly trips to Magadan. At first he tried to indulge her.
Let life teach her. She is young and will grow.
On the chance that they could duplicate the happiness of their wedding trip, he proposed that during his next leave they vacation in Leningrad. About a week before they were to depart, he discovered that she had bought a ring for 140 rubles, spending most of the money he had saved for the trip. He vented his rage, and she announced her intention of divorcing him and returning to her parents.
He dissuaded her by reasoning that they simply were experiencing the kind of crisis that besets all young married couples, and soon she was pregnant. A child, he thought, would reunite them emotionally by giving them a new, shared interest. And for a while after the birth of their healthy son, Dmitri, in January 1973, they did share parental joy. But working twelve to fourteen hours daily six days a week, Belenko seldom could be with the child. The necessity of caring for him confined Ludmilla and thereby intensified her disdain of their mode of life. Instead of lessening their tensions, the baby exacerbated them. Their marriage deteriorated into sullen hostility, and disagreements over trivial issues erupted into acrimonious quarrels.
In their continuing efforts to inculcate pilots with the conviction that the United States symbolized the quintessence of degeneracy, political officers dwelt on the unfolding Watergate scandals. The details confused Belenko, and by now he was skeptical of anything the political officers said. But what he did understand at the culmination of the scandals heightened his skepticism. The President of the United States had been compelled to resign in disgrace, and other ranking figures of the American government faced prosecution and probable imprisonment, all because, so far as he could determine, they had lied.
You mean they can throw out their leader and put his men in jail just because they lied! Why, if we did that here, the whole Politburo and every Party official in the country would be in jail! Why, here, if you know somebody in the Party, you can do anything you want, you can kill a man, and you won’t go to jail. I’ve seen that for myself.
And where are the Dark Forces? If the Dark Forces control everything in America and put their own men in power, why would they let their men be thrown out? The truth must be that the Dark Forces can’t control everything. But if they don’t control everything, then the Party is lying again. What does the Party tell the truth about?