MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

On their fourth flight, she instructed, «Make a ninety-degree turn to the left.» He banked and, pulling out a little late, altered course about 100 degrees but otherwise executed flawlessly. «Okay, ninety degrees to the right». This time he watched the compass carefully and straightened out on a heading exactly ninety degrees from the previous course. «I'm going to put us into a spin and let you try to rescue us.» She arched the plane upward and throttled back the power until it stalled, then nosed over into a dizzying spin. «Now it's up to you!»

Easily Viktor pushed the stick forward, stepped on the rudder, halted the spin, and pulled back out of the dive.

«Very good! Try a loop.»

Viktor dived, then lifted the plane upward and over and backward into a loop. At the height of the loop, when they were upside down, he snapped the plane into a half roll and righted it, effecting an Immelmann turn, a much more difficult maneuver than could be expected of him.

«Impudent! But good!»

Without instructions, he did a full loop, then a series of quick rolls.

«All right! All right! Let's see if you can land.»

Unharnessing their parachutes, Nadezhda, who heretofore had addressed Viktor formally as Viktor Ivanovich, said, «Viktor, you can do it. You have the talent. You can be a great flier.»

Everyone else saw it, too. Viktor could fly, as naturally as a fish swims. And to him the sky had become as water is to a fish. Before his first solo flight, he was cocky and, afterward, still cockier. When he landed after his final flight test, the lieutenant colonel who flew in the back seat shook his hand. «Young man, outstanding. I hope we see you in the Air Force.»

The instructors and cadets gathered in the mess hall on a Friday night, their last before returning to Omsk, for a great party. Even before vodka began to evaporate inhibitions, Nadezhda abandoned her role as a superior and confided that his performance had won her a commendation. «You have made me proud, Viktor.»

In the morning melancholy replaced euphoria as Viktor canvassed his immediate future. It was too late to apply this year for Air Force cadet training. He could continue the nightly DOSAAF classes, but now the theory of flight seemed a pallid substitute for the reality of flight. He would have to subsist during the next months in the dark void of the garage without adventure or meaning. What a miserable fix. Well, whining won't help you. That is the way it is. Do something about it.

Returning to Omsk in August, Viktor heard that because the military anticipated need for many more doctors, there would be an unusual number of openings in the fall classes at the local medical school. Out of a whim to test his capacities, he took the entrance examinations. Toward the end of the month the medical school notified him that he ranked near the top of all applicants and advised him to report for enrollment. Why not? If you could be a doctor as well as a flier, think of all the adventures you could have! One of the cosmonauts is a doctor. If he could do it, why can't you?

Just three days after medical-school classes convened, they abruptly and unexpectedly were suspended so students could participate in the harvest. Legions of young people from factories, the universities, the Army were being trucked into the countryside. The manufacture of goods, the education of physicians, the training of the nation's guardians must wait. All available manpower had to be mobilized for the frantic, desperate battle of the harvest.

Why are we so unprepared? The harvest is not something that happens only once every twenty or thirty years. It is known that each fall crops must be harvested. Why do we have to tend to the business of the kolkhozniks?

Viktor and some of his classmates were deposited on a kolkhoz outside Omsk, hundreds of miles away from the collective where he had stayed as a child in 1954. The years had brought some improvements. The kolkhoz manager traveled about in a little car instead of a horse-drawn buggy. Some of the kolkhozniks had transistor radios, and once a week they were shown a movie on portable screens. But Viktor could identify no other substantive changes.

The huts, the muddy streets, the stink were the same. The bedraggled work force was composed mainly of the elderly, women, children, half-wits, or men too dull to escape into more prestigious and less onerous jobs at the tractor station or dairy. Abused and neglected, machinery still broke down and rusted. And nobody gave a damn about anything except his small private plot of land that he was allowed to cultivate.

It's all the same. Everything's still messed up. Why, we've made no progress at all. Something is wrong here.