Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

But that’s neither here nor there. We were talking about Khrushchev’s dream. His proposal. The two returnee space dogs, reborn into the world in August 1960—August of year 3 Anno Canis—devoted themselves to their procreative activities under the scientists’ round-the-clock watch, until at last they achieved their mission as the lab animals they now were. The bitch Strelka became pregnant by Belka and gave birth to a litter of six. For the next few weeks, the scientists monitored the six puppies’ every movement. Veterinarians and animal ecologists were called in. There seemed to be nothing at all unusual about the pups. The scholars presented their results: all six of the heroes’ children were in perfect health. They had entered their third month now and were growing like beanstalks. Ura! cried the scientists. We have approached a step nearer to launching a manned spacecraft! Khrushchev selected one of the six puppies, a bitch, and sent it as a gift to the leader of those bastards in the West. John F. Kennedy had been inaugurated as president of the United States in January 1961. Khrushchev had heard that the Kennedys were unusually fond of dogs, and so he sent the puppy with a card signed “From Khrushchev” to Kennedy’s daughter Caroline. This present, however, had nothing to do with Khrushchev’s dream. It bore no relationship to the political/military adventure he was fantasizing about. He was just rubbing it in. The young American president, leader of the capitalist bloc, oozed charm, and so Khrushchev had decided to send him a message, that was all. “Pretty cool, huh?” he was saying. “Here in the Soviet Union we’ve already bred a second generation of our space dogs! Not bad, eh? Yes sir, science and technology are pretty advanced here in the Communist bloc, if I do say so myself. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. We’re screwed, you’re thinking. How about it? Am I right, Kennedy, my boy?”

There went the first puppy.

There had been six, so now there were five. Five healthy Russian laika puppies. There they were. And Khrushchev had a dream. Or rather, he had a whim. He had created the space dogs, so now, he thought, he would create a platoon of dogs descended from those Soviet heroes! There was no telling when the Cold War might suddenly turn into a hot war. Proxy wars were brewing in the Third World even now. They could send this new platoon of dogs there, to the front lines. A meticulously trained, elite group led by the descendants of space dogs. Yes! Yes! Khrushchev groaned at the brilliance of his idea. What will happen if we succeed with these dogs? It will be the best possible propaganda within the Communist world, and with respect to the West it will have the combined effect of the first Sputnik flights—all that shock and shame balled up into one. And it will work! Just imagine! Mere animals, beasts, made special by the impossibly rare distinction of descent from the very dogs that expanded the USSR’s territory into outer space, kicking the shit out of dippy little capitalist soldiers! Wahahahahaha!

It started as a joke. But Khrushchev’s every word was a command. The enormous Soviet state had developed a rigid system of governance. Almost immediately, Khrushchev’s dream was funneled through bureaucratic channels, transformed into stern directives. Power in the USSR was apportioned, essentially, to three separate organs. The party, the military, and the Committee for State Security, aka the KGB. The task of realizing Khrushchev’s dream would fall to the third of these three pillars of the state. Because the KGB would be able to push the plan ahead most efficiently and with the greatest secrecy.

It wasn’t a joke anymore.

Among the largest military organizations within the KGB was the Border Guard. Though it wasn’t really part of the official Soviet military—it was not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense—it was sizeable. Usually its forces numbered two hundred thousand; in its heyday it was expanded to include some three hundred fifty thousand. Its forces were highly trained and its units were provided with the latest small arms, firearms, rockets, tanks, armored vehicles, armed helicopters, and military transport aircraft. Naval units, of course, had their own ships. Members of the KGB, as well as their families, were all part of a privileged class in the USSR. This was a necessary consequence of the KGB’s status as an organization dedicated to preserving the peace by collecting intelligence about ordinary citizens. In addition, because the Border Guard’s operations included suppressing anti-Soviet guerrilla activities, and crushing antigovernment minority movements—meaning all such movements, since all minority movements were so regarded—was a regular part of this, Russian applicants were given preferential treatment in hiring. Pure Slavic Russians. Slavs. That was the nature of the Border Guard. It was a privileged military elite.

Each individual defensive platoon in the Border Guard had its own team of guard dogs. A posse of war dogs, in other words. In emergency situations, of course, they used all manner of small arms, firearms, and attack vehicles, but they also used dogs to close the border.

At this point in history, in the vast Soviet state, troops of dogs, who had been fighting all along on the front lines, were active in this context as well.

The stern directives made their way down the chain of command.

And at the end of the chain, where Khrushchev’s dream landed—stripped of its romance, reduced to an ordinary, utterly pragmatic order—was the handler.

He was a major in the Border Guard. A young commissioned officer, twenty-seven years old. Six months before the order was passed down, he had been assigned to head up the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs. Needless to say, he was a pureblooded Slav. Blond hair, white skin. Mild and yet somehow forbidding features. He had not, however, been born into a privileged class. He had made his way up in the world, but his father was a farmer. His parents worked on a kolkhoz . His blood was pure, but his Slavic lineage contained no trace of any aristocratic blood, no noble seed. He was a second son. After graduating with outstanding grades from a school that trained future military men, he applied to the KGB, eager to show his loyalty to the homeland in some more passionate way—actually, the KGB had first gotten in touch with him, though that was kept highly secret—and after two years spent on the European border as a candidate officer, he was assigned to a detachment that answered directly to the head office. Later, he successfully applied to a special forces training school. He spent a year and a half studying a curriculum centered on guerrilla warfare but which included various other topics, ranging from assassination and advanced firearm techniques to basic procedures for causing confusion behind enemy lines and their applications, methods of torture and how to resist them, medical techniques, the use of codes, and individual survival techniques. Many students found the regimen too demanding and dropped out. The last three months of training took place at a camp on the Arctic Ocean. There the students were housed three to a room—prior to this they had lived in a wide hall—and were encouraged to develop a sense of camaraderie. There were microphones buried in the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, and every conversation was recorded. Anyone who couldn’t keep himself perfectly in control at all times was given the boot. A man needed nerves of steel to survive. If your roommates said, “Man, this is hell, isn’t it?” you had to respond immediately, “Absolutely not.” If they kept pressuring you to agree, saying, “C’mon, you know it is. We’re all exhausted,” you had to tell them right off, “I will either graduate from here, or I will quit the military. One or the other.”