MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

A few days after his fourth birthday Viktor sat close by the stove, a source of both warmth and mystery. What made it yield such good warmth? To find out, he slid open one of the portals, and a burning coal tumbled out onto the straw covering the clay floor. As the hut filled with smoke, he sought escape by crawling into his grandmother's bed and burying himself under blankets. Smoke still billowed from the hut when he regained consciousness outside, lying in the snow and coughing under the watch of the neighbors who had rescued him. That evening, after they had scrubbed and straightened the hut, his grandmother said, «Viktor, God is watching over you.»

During warm weather Viktor wandered and explored, unrestrained, with older boys. A favorite playground was a forbidden area in the woods off the main road between the village and the mines. Here retreating German troops had made a determined stand, and although some nine years had passed, the battlefield had not been entirely cleared. Among trenches and revetments there could still be found live rifle and machine-gun bullets, which the boys used to make firecrackers to scare «witches» — that is, women who scolded them — and small «bombs» for killing and surfacing fish in the river.

Digging for bullets, they unearthed a large, flat, cylindrical object that seemed to them an authentic treasure — one that could be smelted down for thousands of slingshot pellets. Building a bonfire, they gathered around to begin the smelting. The fire waned, and Viktor, being the youngest, was ordered to gather more wood. As he returned, the land mine exploded, hurling him against a tree and causing a severe concussion. Hours later he awakened in the arms of his grandmother, who said with conviction, «You see, Viktor, it is as I said. God is watching over you.» The blast had killed two of his friends and badly crippled a third.

That same spring Viktor heard commotion and what sounded like wailing outside the hut. People were gathering in the street, mostly women but some older men also, commiserating with one another, weeping and sobbing, a few hysterically. «Our savior and protector is gone!» a woman moaned. «Who will provide for us now?» The news of the death of Joseph Stalin had just reached the village. Always portrayed by every Soviet medium as a kind of deity, Stalin was so perceived in the village — the military genius who had won the war, the economic genius who had industrialized a feudal society, the political genius who had liberated the Soviet people from capitalist slavery, the just and benign patriarch who had secured the welfare of all.

Accidents frequently took lives in the mines, so Viktor was familiar with mourning and funerals. He had always seen the villagers confront death with stoic restraint, and their bravery added to his regard of the miners as heroic men who risked their lives for the Mother Country. But never had he experienced such unrestrained outpouring of grief and despair as now. It alarmed him and made him wonder, too, how life would proceed without the noble Stalin.

A letter in the autumn saddened both his aunt and his grandmother. His father was coming to take him to Siberia. The grandmother sewed a kind of knapsack for him, and they packed it with food, including some smoked meat, to which they never treated themselves. Through a thick December snowfall the women walked with him and his father to the rail station and held each other, then waved as the train pulled away. He never saw either again.

Authorities in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk had assured his father that the room in the communal apartment for which he had waited forty-two months would be available by December. It was not, and Viktor was sent to stay on a collective farm, or kolkhoz, to the south with relatives of his father's friend, the factory manager. The family — father, mother, and four children — were crowded into one room, and his first evening Viktor stared in wide-eyed wonderment as a cow was led into the hut for the night so she would not freeze to death.