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.
“Drunkenness induced by aircraft alcohol is constant and widespread,” they said. “The soldiers are running away from the base and taking girls from the villages away into the forests for days. Several times the soldiers have refused to eat their food. We have had strikes here! We have brawls among the soldiers, and to our shame, some officers have been involved in them. Soldiers are writing letters to their parents about what a horrible situation we have here, and the Organs of State Security have been investigating. At any time we could have an inspection. If there is an inspection, it will show that this regiment is not combat-ready. Our planes often cannot fly because everybody is so drunk or people have run away.
“Each of you is responsible. You must concentrate your attention on the soldiers. Explain to them that our difficulties are temporary and will be eliminated eventually. Tell them that our country is not yet rich enough to build planes and barracks at the same time. Emphasize that the Dark Forces of the West have enlisted the Chinese and Japanese in their plot to kidnap our Mother Country.”
How many times, thousands of times, have I heard that the Dark Forces want to kidnap our Mother Country? Do they want our food? That is very funny. They are starving, but they sell us wheat to keep us from starving. Our system is the best, but we want to learn to grow corn and fly and do everything else just as they do. Do we have anything that they want? That anybody wants?
The collapse of morale and discipline and the resultant chaos were outgrowths of a massive and urgent military buildup progressing throughout the Soviet Far East. At Chuguyevka three squadrons of MiG-25s (thirty-six combat aircraft plus four or five modified with twin seats as trainers) were replacing three MiG-17 squadrons. A far more complex aircraft, one MiG-25 required four to five times more support personnel — engineers, mechanics, electronics, and armament specialists — than a MiG-17. Within the previous two months the number of officers and men at Chuguyevka had quadrupled, and more were arriving weekly. But no provision whatsoever had been made to expand housing, dining, or any other facilities to accommodate the enormous influx of people.
Belenko and Ludmilla were comparatively lucky in that they shared a two-room apartment with only one family, a flight engineer, his wife, and two children. Other apartments were packed with three or four families of officers, and despite the best of will, conflicts over use of the bathroom and kitchen inevitably arose, afflicting everyone with strain and tension. Ludmilla was able to work part time as a nurse at the base dispensary, but for most other wives, some of whom were teachers or engineers, employment opportunities were nil.
Each pilot periodically stood watch as duty officer for twenty-four hours, during which he supervised the enlisted personnel, inspected the barracks and mess hall, and generally tried to enforce discipline. What Belenko saw on his first watch appalled him.
Between 180 and 200 men were jammed into barracks marginally adequate for 40. Bunks stood in tiers nearly against each other, and the congestion was such that it was difficult to move without stumbling into somebody. There were two water faucets in each barracks, the toilet was outside, and sometimes during the night men relieved themselves in their neighbor’s boots. They were given a change of underwear once a week and allowed to go into the village for a steam bath once every ten days, there being no bathhouse on the base.
Comparable congestion in the mess hall made cleanliness impossible, and the place smelled like a garbage pit. While one section of forty men ate, another forty stood behind them waiting to take places and plates. If they chose, they then could wait in line to dip the plate in a pan of cold water containing no soap. Usually they elected to simply brush the plate off with their hands. For breakfast the men received 150 grams of bread, 10 grams of butter, 20 grams of sugar, barley mush cooked with water, and a mug of tea. Dinner consisted of thin soup, sometimes thickened with cereal, buckwheat groats, perhaps a piece or two of fatback, and a mug of kissel, a kind of starchy gelatin. Supper was the same as breakfast.
Except for a television set, no recreational facilities of any kind were available to the enlisted men (or the officers, for that matter), and there was little they could do. There was much they were forbidden to do. They were forbidden to listen to a transistor radio, to draw pictures of women, to listen to records, to read fiction, to write letters about their life in the service, to lie or sit on their bunks during their free time (there was no place else to sit), to watch television except when political or patriotic programs were shown, and to drink. But drink they did, in staggering quantities, for alcohol was the one commodity available in limitless amounts.
To fly seventy minutes, the maximum time it can stay aloft without refueling, a MiG-25 needs fourteen tons of jet fuel and one-half ton of alcohol for braking and electronic systems. So wherever MiG-25s were based, huge quantities of alcohol were stored, and in the Soviet Air Force the plane was popularly known as the Flying Restaurant. And officers from surrounding bases — Air Force, Army, political officers — seized on any pretext to visit Chuguyevka and fill their bottles.