In September 1976 Lt. Viktor Belenko defected from the Soviet airbase at Chuguyevka, Siberia, to a civilian airport in Hakodate, Japan. In his defection he brought to the West the best fighter the Soviets had managed to produce up to that time: the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat. Immediately after landing, he requested –and obtained– political asylum in the United States.
In his book MiG Pilot, the Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko (McGraw-Hill 1980), John Barron, using the manuscript Belenko provided him, exposed in detail the reasons that moved Lt. Belenko to attempt a defection to the ‘adversary’: the absurd life that common Soviet citizens weres forced to live in those days of the so-called “years of Brezhnev’s stagnation.” Constant and daily shortages of everything imaginable, from major food staples such as meat and sausages to the classical toilet paper. When they were available, then the kilometric lines the citizens had to make to purchase them. As an elite fighter pilot, Lt. Belenko had access to many articles that were beyond the reach of the common citizen, such as meat and similar food items (but not even he had access to toilet paper. An old issue of Pravda was used for that matter).
However, it was not so much the scarcity of those articles that pushed him to defect. It was what he considered to be the obvious discrepancy between the promises of the Soviet Communist system and the reality of life under it. All the promises the system made for a better life were accessible only to a select few members of the Nomenklatura in the upper echelons of Soviet life. Another point of contention for him was the apparent contradictions between what Soviet propaganda fed their citizens about the West, and the achievements Western society produced. In Belenko’s own words: “If they were so bad, how come they could send a man to the moon and bring him back? If they are falling apart right now, how come they’re producing better fighters than ours and have more Nobel Prize winners than we do?”
Comparing Belenko’s defection to the plot to kill Adolph Hitler, when Count Claus Stern von Stauffenberg placed the bomb under Hitler’s table in July 1944, he and the other plotters were summarily executed. Today von Stauffenberg and all his co-conspirators are generally considered heroes, since they took action against what they perceived to be an unbearable system headed by a mad man.
Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belenko was sometimes hailed as a hero for having escaped the totalitarian oppression of the Soviet regime in a bold and daring way. However, after 2004 he’s once again vilified as a traitor to Rodina, “Mother Russia.” His detractors accuse him of having been ‘recruited’ by the CIA while still in the fighter pilot school, and even of doing it solely for monetary gain, namely, the ‘promise’ of US$100,000 given to all those who defected to the West bringing with them a fighter plane.
I invite you the reader to comment on Belenko's defection. Moreover, I'd like to hear your opinions on the following questions:
1) Is the old adage “once a traitor always a traitor” true?
2) Whoever betrays a repressive totalitarian regime is a traitor or a hero?
3) By defecting with a MiG-25 Belenko betrayed the Soviet Union; is he therefore a traitor to “Mother Russia”?
In his book MiG Pilot, the Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko (McGraw-Hill 1980), John Barron, using the manuscript Belenko provided him, exposed in detail the reasons that moved Lt. Belenko to attempt a defection to the ‘adversary’: the absurd life that common Soviet citizens weres forced to live in those days of the so-called “years of Brezhnev’s stagnation.” Constant and daily shortages of everything imaginable, from major food staples such as meat and sausages to the classical toilet paper. When they were available, then the kilometric lines the citizens had to make to purchase them. As an elite fighter pilot, Lt. Belenko had access to many articles that were beyond the reach of the common citizen, such as meat and similar food items (but not even he had access to toilet paper. An old issue of Pravda was used for that matter).
However, it was not so much the scarcity of those articles that pushed him to defect. It was what he considered to be the obvious discrepancy between the promises of the Soviet Communist system and the reality of life under it. All the promises the system made for a better life were accessible only to a select few members of the Nomenklatura in the upper echelons of Soviet life. Another point of contention for him was the apparent contradictions between what Soviet propaganda fed their citizens about the West, and the achievements Western society produced. In Belenko’s own words: “If they were so bad, how come they could send a man to the moon and bring him back? If they are falling apart right now, how come they’re producing better fighters than ours and have more Nobel Prize winners than we do?”
Comparing Belenko’s defection to the plot to kill Adolph Hitler, when Count Claus Stern von Stauffenberg placed the bomb under Hitler’s table in July 1944, he and the other plotters were summarily executed. Today von Stauffenberg and all his co-conspirators are generally considered heroes, since they took action against what they perceived to be an unbearable system headed by a mad man.
Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belenko was sometimes hailed as a hero for having escaped the totalitarian oppression of the Soviet regime in a bold and daring way. However, after 2004 he’s once again vilified as a traitor to Rodina, “Mother Russia.” His detractors accuse him of having been ‘recruited’ by the CIA while still in the fighter pilot school, and even of doing it solely for monetary gain, namely, the ‘promise’ of US$100,000 given to all those who defected to the West bringing with them a fighter plane.
I invite you the reader to comment on Belenko's defection. Moreover, I'd like to hear your opinions on the following questions:
1) Is the old adage “once a traitor always a traitor” true?
2) Whoever betrays a repressive totalitarian regime is a traitor or a hero?
3) By defecting with a MiG-25 Belenko betrayed the Soviet Union; is he therefore a traitor to “Mother Russia”?
