25 years ago, German citizen Matthias Rust violated the state border of the USSR on a Cessna sports plane and, having covered 1220 km in 5 hours 50 m, landed in Moscow not far from Red Square on Vasilyevsky Spusk.
How the years have flown by, how much has happened... I remember that mixed feeling of awesomeness, disappointment and slight irony that gripped many. Jokes circulated around the country; Red Square was called “Sheremetyevo-3” with a grin. The vaunted “Soviet power,” about which the Soviets are now so nostalgic, turned out to be “phony.” A few years later the USSR collapsed...
In the history of the border service and air defense of the USSR, there were two shameful incidents that clearly showed that the entire power of the Red Army was exaggerated
On May 15, 1941, a German Ju-52 aircraft invaded Soviet airspace, flew with impunity along the route Bialystok - Minsk - Smolensk - Moscow, and, unnoticed by anyone, landed safely at the Central Airfield in Moscow near the Dynamo stadium
The border guards and air defense overslept...
46 years later, on May 28, 1987, on Border Guard Day, again a German plane (this time a light-engine Cessna) flew over the USSR state border and landed on Red Square...
On the afternoon of May 28, 1987, 18-year-old Matthias Rust took off from Hamburg on a four-seat light Cessna 172B Skyhawk aircraft ( Cessna 172B Skyhawk). He made an intermediate landing at Helsinki-Malmi airport to refuel. Rust told airport traffic control that he was flying to Stockholm. At some point, Rust lost contact with Finnish air traffic control and then headed towards the Baltic Sea coastline and disappeared from Finnish airspace near Sipoo. Rescuers discovered an oil slick in the sea and regarded it as evidence of a plane crash. Rust crossed the Soviet border near the city of Kohtla-Jarve and headed for Moscow.
In one case (at the Tapa airfield (Estonia)), two fighters on duty were alerted. The fighters discovered Rust's plane, but did not receive instructions on further actions and, having made several flights over the Cessna plane (Rust's plane was moving at low altitude and at low flight speed, which made it impossible for it to be constantly escorted by high-speed fighters), they simply returned to the airfield. Moving to Moscow, Rust was guided by the Leningrad-Moscow railway. Along the route of its flight, duty units from the airfields of Khotilovo and Bezhetsk took off into the air, but the order to shoot down the Cessna was never received.
The automated air defense system of the Moscow Military District was turned off for maintenance work, so tracking of the intruder aircraft had to be done manually and coordinated by telephone. Thus, Matthias Rust's plane was not included in the list of aircraft shot down during the Cold War.
Rust landed on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, coasted to St. Basil's Cathedral, got off the plane at 19:10 and began signing autographs. He was soon arrested.
How could it happen that a nineteen-year-old bespectacled boy emerged victorious in a battle with a powerful air defense system?
The explanation that the Russians of that time were quite satisfied with was that Soviet interceptors simply could not fly as slowly as the Cessna flew, now seems at least naive. After all, in order to land a plane flown not by a military ace, but by an amateur pilot, you do not need to clamp it in a vice; it is quite enough to fire a warning shot over the target. And, in any case, the military should not have allowed an unknown person, carrying an unknown thing on board, to fly calmly into the center of the capital.
But this happened. And the reason for this was a chain of amazing coincidences that literally haunted the German pilot that day. The chain is so mysterious that many Western journalists, new to Soviet realities, upon learning about it, hastened to declare the flight a successful staging.
What was later classified as “aerial hooliganism” began after the pilot contacted ground services at the twenty-second minute, reported that he was all right, said goodbye and headed east. To the Soviet border.
Attempts by the Finnish dispatcher to contact the plane again were unsuccessful: immediately after the communication session, Rust turned off all radio devices, with the exception of the radio compass. The pilot's behavior created a real threat to flight safety on the very busy Moscow-Helsinki route, and air traffic control services were forced to change the flight routes of aircraft that entered the danger zone on the fly. And soon the Cessna completely disappeared from radar screens. Rescuers who arrived at the point of disappearance found an oil slick spreading across the surface of the sea. Within three hours, divers were working on the spot, trying in vain to find the remains of the monoplane at the bottom of the sea.
It is difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there. There was no plane at the bottom. He couldn't be there, he was in the air. After the pilot dropped to fifty meters and became practically invisible to civilian services, he threw the stored cans of oil into the water and continued on his way to the borders of the USSR.
At 14.29, an unknown low-speed object appeared on the radar screens of the Tallinn air defense near the city of Kohtla-Jarve. Military radars worked much more accurately than civilian ones, and by that time the pilot had reached a normal altitude for the Cessna: almost two thousand meters, so there were no difficulties with detection. The fact of crossing the border was not registered by either radar or visual surveillance, so it was initially assumed that it was a lost civilian aircraft. However, the object did not respond to radio requests, did not respond to the “friend or foe” code, and Soviet air traffic controllers claimed that they were in no way connected with it. As expected, the object was assigned the all-Union combat number 8255 and the code “alien.” Three divisions of the Missile Forces were brought to full combat readiness. The target could be destroyed at any moment, all it took was a team. But she didn’t arrive.
Four years before the events described, a South Korean Boeing 747 passenger plane was shot down in Soviet airspace over Sakhalin under not entirely clear circumstances. 269 people died. The response in the world was simply frantic; many countries boycotted Russian planes for several weeks and banned them from entering their airspace.
After this, the Soviet troops issued a terribly secret order prohibiting opening fire on civilian and sport aircraft unless their behavior showed that they were pursuing military goals. It seemed that the pilot of the plane knew about the order and therefore behaved rather arrogantly. He did not hide, flew a straight course, did not swerve, did not try to hide behind the hills, walked quite high and stubbornly remained silent. Undoubtedly, not only our military, but also representatives of the enemy air force knew about the secret order. Western intelligence officers and Western politicians knew about him. But how could a nineteen-year-old German amateur pilot know about this? But the Boeing incident was still on everyone’s lips...
To identify the object, two MiG-23 interceptor fighters were alerted from the Tapa military airfield. Twenty minutes after the plane appeared on the radar, at 14.48, the pilot of the first fighter reported to the ground that he could see a target through the clouds - a light-engine aircraft like our Yak-12, white in color with a blue stripe on the side. However, immediately after establishing visual contact, the plane dived down to a height of 20 - 30 meters, and disappeared not only from the interceptor pilot’s field of view, but also from the radar screens.
And five minutes later, the same radars in the same area detected another target, albeit following a different course and at a different altitude. The easiest way was to assume that this was the same hooligan plane. Which is what the dispatchers did. And since the new goal was consistently identified as “I am mine,” the recent incident was immediately attributed to imperfect technology. The alarm was canceled, the interceptors were returned to the ground, and information about the incident was securely hidden in the depths of the native military unit. For now.
Meanwhile, Cessna continued its air attack to the southeast and by three o'clock in the afternoon it was already flying over Pskov. It was here that something happened that was later interpreted by the competent authorities as an “accident.” At this time, training flights of one of the local air regiments took place in the vicinity of the ancient city. There were up to a dozen aircraft in the air at the same time, so the appearance of a new point on the radar went unnoticed by anyone.
Exactly at 15.00, all air objects had to change their state identification system codes. However, since the flights were training, and the pilots were yesterday's cadets with a minimum of experience, many of them, in the excitement of the flight, simply forgot about changing the code and became “strangers” to the system. Having seen a huge number of “strangers” on the radar screen, the head of the radio engineering group forcibly assigned them the code “I am mine.” This technique was often practiced by our military, although it was not advertised. Among others, Matthias Rust's plane also received this code. Now it was flying in our airspace as a Soviet small plane and was of no interest to the military.
So the Cessna flew another two hundred kilometers until it again disappeared from radar screens in the area of the city of Staraya Russa. According to journalists from the German newspaper Bunte, Rust made an intermediate landing here. Indeed, if you divide the total length of the route along which Rust flew, which is about a thousand kilometers, by the flight time (about seven hours), it turns out that the plane flew at an average speed of 140 km/h, while the Cessna's cruising speed was 172R is 220 km/h. Indirectly confirming the hypothesis of an intermediate landing is the fact that Rust, who took off from Malami in jeans and a green shirt, arrived in Moscow in a red jumpsuit. If you think that he might have changed clothes on the way, then try doing the same while sitting behind the wheel of a car. I can assure you that the Cessna's cabin is not much more spacious.
When an hour later the plane again appeared on the air defense radar screens in the area of Lake Seliger, it again did not have any code. However, along with him, seven more unidentified targets appeared on the screens. All of them, including the Cessna, were moving in the direction of the wind and at its speed and were identified by the duty shift as “unknown weather formations.”
Further along the path of the “meteological formation” lay Torzhok. Here Rust's plane was legalized for the second time and finally. And chance helped again. The day before the flight, a plane crash occurred forty kilometers from Torzhok: a MiG-25 fighter and a Tu-22M long-range missile carrier-bomber collided in the air, and now the air above the accident area was simply teeming with search helicopters. Quite by chance, the Cessna Rusta flew over the same place. And since the speed and altitude of the Cessna almost exactly coincided with the speed and altitude of the search helicopters, the dispatchers considered it as another search helicopter and left it alone.
So Rust flew into the air defense area of responsibility of the Moscow district like a Moscow helicopter that had violated the flight regime. The operational duty officer of the Central Command Post, hoping that the Moscow District would deal with their intruder themselves, gave the order to remove the target from the alert.
And another coincidence. In general, this day was simply crammed with happy coincidences for the German pilot. When Rust was already approaching Moscow, someone from above (who remained unclear) gave the order to temporarily turn off the automated control system (ACS) of the air defense to carry out unscheduled maintenance work. If not for this order, Rust’s plane could have been shot down simply “by default,” as an unidentified object approaching a strategically important center. A little later, the same unknown person “from above” stopped flights over Sheremetyevo for twenty minutes. It was through this twenty-minute window that Matthias Rust flew into the capital at 19.38.
This is where the detective story ends and the joke begins.
As the pilot himself stated during the trial, he initially wanted to land the plane in the Kremlin itself, but, after making sure that there was no suitable site on its territory, he decided to land it right in front of the Intercession Cathedral. However, the square was filled with people, and Rust, with his landing lights on, passed several times over the heads of the walkers, flapping his wings. In response to this, the walkers waved their hands and smiled at him in a friendly manner.
On the same day, only a little earlier, a helicopter was flying over Red Square taking photographs. Therefore, when the officer on duty at the Red Square security department, Major Tokarev, received a call and asked: “Who’s flying there?” - he calmly replied: “Yes, this is filming,” and when guard Kosorukov contacted him and said that a plane was flying over the square, he only lazily objected: “You make sure that cows don’t walk around the square, and the plane is a dick.” him!
Only on the third attempt did Matthias Rust manage to land the plane at the beginning of the Moskvoretsky Bridge and taxi to Vasilyevsky Spusk. Deputy chief of the Moscow police N.S. immediately arrived at the scene of the incident. Myrikov. Directly from the square, he radioed his boss, Lieutenant General Bogdanov, and reported: “Comrade General! A German plane landed on Red Square,” in response to which Bogdanov only cursed and interrupted the connection. But the deputy chief of the Moscow traffic police, Colonel Pankov, arrived immediately: “We have to go. When “Russia” was burning, I didn’t believe it right away either.” Bogdanov arrived immediately after him. And about twenty minutes later, “men in gray” arrived there and took the embarrassedly smiling pilot to Lubyanka.
The political leadership of the country took full advantage of the incident with Rust: within a few days, the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal Sergei Leonidovich Sokolov, who had long displeased Gorbachev, lost his posts, the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces Alexander Koldunov was retired, and almost the entire General Staff was turned over. Many officers were fired practically “for nothing,” for example, Sokolov himself was in Berlin during Rust’s flight at a consultative meeting of the Warsaw Pact states and could not in any way be responsible for the incident. We have to admit that the West German pilot, willingly or unwillingly, greatly helped the Soviet authorities in the fight against the powerful military lobby.
Versions about Rust's motives
The world's media put forward different versions of the reasons for Rust's flight: to win a bet, to impress a girl.
Many representatives of the Soviet Armed Forces considered the flight an action of foreign intelligence services.
In Soviet newspapers, his flight was presented as a failure of the Soviet air defense system. Mikhail Gorbachev used the incident to remove Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov and air defense commander Alexander Koldunov, as well as to subsequently reduce the armed forces.
The commander of the Moscow Air Defense District, Colonel General Vladimir Tsarkov, appointed to the post in May 1987, received a reprimand a few days before the events, but retained his position.
True, the head of the USSR did not guess correctly with the new candidacy: Dmitry Yazov, who replaced Sokolov, subsequently betrayed the President and took an active part in the putsch.
The most cited assessment of the consequences of Rust's flight for the Soviet Armed Forces is given by American national security specialist William Odom: “ After the flight of Rust, radical changes were carried out in the Soviet army, comparable to the purge of the armed forces organized by Stalin in 1937."
And among the people, the flight was reflected in a whole series of anecdotes. Red Square instantly received a second name - Sheremetyevo-3. This was facilitated not least by the fact that shortly after Rust’s landing, smoking was prohibited and corresponding signs were posted. They said that the flight took place as part of the “Freedom for Marshal Sokolov!” movement that was expanding in Germany. Rumors spread around Moscow that a police post had been set up near the fountain in GUM to prevent an American submarine from surfacing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko in one of his poems called Rust a “impudent air chicken”:
Sassy air chicken
I almost knocked down the Kremlin -
that's all because
that he was slapped awake
koalas from air defense.
And Yuliy Kim wrote a song "Quadrille for Matthias Rust" :
Hello, dear kinder,
A guest who is not expected by anyone,
In our global squabble
Desperate little dove!
He flew in, chirped,
He spread his wings,
Huge arsenal
Immediately disgraced!
Man can't wait
A series of centuries:
- Tired of the twentieth century,
I want the thirty-third.
Where there are no guns, no borders,
No bad weather
Where no less than the birds,
People have freedom!
Air defense generals,
Thank you forever:
You didn't kill him
But how could they!
Well done Matyusha Rust,
He joked in Russian:
And smart, and not a coward,
And he sits in jail!
Party, government,
There is this opinion:
Let him go
As an exception.
It will be a celebration
New thinking!
Rust was accused of hooliganism (his landing, according to the court, threatened the lives of people in the square), violation of aviation legislation and illegal crossing of the Soviet border. Rust said in court that his flight was a “call for peace.” On September 4, Rust was sentenced to 4 years in prison. Matthias Rust returned to Germany on August 3, 1988 after Andrei Gromyko, then chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, signed an amnesty decree. Rust spent a total of 432 days in pre-trial detention and prison.
Matthias Rust in court.
In November 1989, Rust, who was doing alternative duty at a hospital in the German city of Riessen, stabbed a nurse because she refused to go on a date with him. For this, in 1991 he was sentenced to 4 years in prison, but was released after just 15 months.
In April 1994, Rust announced that he wanted to return to Russia. There he visited an orphanage and began donating money to it. It seems that he tried to run a shoe trading business, but went bankrupt. Lived in Trinidad for a long time.
In 1997, Rust converted to Hinduism and married an Indian girl named Geeta, the daughter of a wealthy tea merchant from Bombay. After the marriage, Rust and his wife returned to Germany.
In April 2001, Rust appeared in court on charges of sweater theft - he stole a cashmere sweater worth $81 from a department store in Hamburg and paid a fine of 4,5 thousand dollars.
As of 2002, Rust lived in Hamburg with his second wife Athena.
Now Matthias Rust makes a living playing poker.
Rust's memoirs will be published in 2012, on the 25th anniversary of his famous flight.
20 years later in 2007, Rust explained his motives as follows:
I was full of hope then. I believed that anything was possible. My flight was to create an imaginary bridge between East and West.
In 2012, he admitted his flight was irresponsible, stating the following:
I was 19 then. My fervor and my political beliefs told me that landing on Red Square was the only option for me... Now I look at what happened completely differently. I certainly would not repeat this and would call my plans at that time unrealizable. It was an irresponsible act.
Until 2008, Rust’s plane was owned by a wealthy Japanese businessman. He kept the plane in a hangar, hoping that its value would increase over time.
In 2008, the aircraft was purchased by the German Technical Museum, where it is exhibited in the foyer.
At the controls of the plane that landed on Red Square in 1987 was 18-year-old German Matthias Rust. A joke immediately appeared that there was now a Sheremetyevo-3 airport in the center of Moscow. The Soviet generals had no time for jokes - many lost their posts, including the Minister of Defense.
Matthias Rust himself, who has since served time both in the USSR and at home, recently in an interview with Stern magazine called that flight irresponsible and added that he would definitely not repeat it now. However, he won’t be able to. The skies of Europe are still closed to him, although history itself is not closed even 25 years later.
Matthias Rust prefers to control the situation. He recently returned from Latin America. There I passed as a pilot again. Flew. In Europe, Rust has not been allowed to fly an airplane for 25 years.
“I sometimes dream about that flight, usually during the day, when I take a nap after lunch. And even if I have a little free time, the memories come up on their own,” says Matthias Rust.
Rust sat down on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Then he drove to Vasilievsky Spusk, willingly signed autographs, spoke, and brought a letter of peace to Gorbachev. They even brought him bread and salt. And it seemed that the Iron Curtain was just a smoke screen, because everything was so simple.
“The flight maps were available. The KGB still didn’t want to believe me that I simply ordered them, like any other road atlases. Then they themselves ordered the same maps through the Soviet embassy then in Bonn and were very surprised when they received them "- recalls Matthias Rust.
Here is the route of an 18-year-old pilot who had flown only 50 hours at that time: a long flight from Germany over the sea to the Faroe Islands, followed by Iceland (Reykjavik), Norway (Bergen), Finland (Helsinki), and then almost at random to Moscow. He navigated by railroad. This part of the route is full of the most amazing coincidences. Rust's plane flew into the rescue operation area. The bomber crashed. Many helicopters in the air. Rust's Cessna is mistaken for a light-engine Soviet aircraft. Then he is once again assigned the code “I am mine.” At the same time, Rust was discovered immediately after he crossed the state border and could have been shot down, including on the approach to Moscow.
“We have the S-300 system, it takes the target at 100 meters. And if I launch three missiles at this lousy airplane and they explode at an altitude of 50-100 meters, and there is a kindergarten below, what will I do then? It was a provocation planned 100% advantageously,” says the commander of the Moscow Air Defense District troops in 1987-1989. Vladimir Tsarkov.
Tsarkov claims: Rust’s flight is an operation of Western intelligence services. And the border violator himself is a well-trained pilot, and he had already visited Moscow beforehand. Rust says: he sat down at random.
“Without visiting the site, it is impossible to land in such difficult conditions. What if there is a cable passing over the road, this is unknown,” notes Michael Hanke, instructor at the Pegasus pilot school.
And although pilots of the same planes in Germany still sometimes jokingly say: “Well, let’s go to Moscow,” they all understand that now such an adventure would be impossible.
In fact, Matthias Rust’s flight had virtually no impact on the development of small aviation in Europe. The terrorist attacks of September 11 had an impact. After them, a special device is installed on any aircraft, which transmits the individual identification number of the aircraft to ground services. That is, on the radar it is no longer just a dot, but a dot with its own unique number, that is, for example, this plane cannot be confused with any other in the air.
A Soviet court sentenced Matthias Rust to 4 years in prison. He served a little more than 14 months in a model colony. After his release, his fate was not easy. He returned to Germany, but even after that he broke the law. First, an attack on a woman with a knife. It's time again. Then stealing a sweater from a department store. He explains that he was barely making ends meet.
“Everything turned out this way because it had to happen. It’s just my destiny,” says Matthias Rust.
The plane in which Rust made the historic flight is exhibited in Berlin at the Technical Museum. Here it is one of the symbols of the end of the Cold War. However, his wings are still decorated with signs resembling a bomb. There are still too many questions in this story today. The case materials of the pilot Rust are still classified.
I accidentally came across a story about a brave 19-year-old German who in 1987 managed to land a plane on Red Square. The event is well-known, everyone saw the footage of the plane on the square, but few know how preparations for the flight went and how Matthias Rust managed to get to Moscow, bypassing the USSR air defense. A story worthy of a movie.
Rust's flight to Moscow in May 1987 launched a campaign to discredit the Armed Forces
When the German pilot Matthias Rust landed on Red Square in May 1987, this event caused many lay people to doubt the perfection of the domestic air defense system. Much has been written about this incident, but practically nothing has been published about the true reasons and how it all happened.
It is appropriate to note here some of the events that preceded this flight.
At the end of August 1983, air defense forces in the Far East near Moneron Island destroyed a South Korean Boeing 747, which violated our airspace to a depth of 500 km. The plane did not keep in touch with the ground and did not respond to the actions of fighters near the cockpit. In addition, the plane’s course crossed areas of airspace that were closed even to the flights of its own aircraft.
Counteraction to the flight of the aircraft took place in compliance with the provisions of combat documents and in strict accordance with international rules. (Note that this is not the first incident involving the shooting down of a South Korean plane.)
The press and television, especially foreign ones, opened a discussion, and sometimes just hysteria, about the legality of the actions of the air defense forces to stop this flight. Since 1985, the winds of democratic change have further fanned this topic. However, the Ministry of Defense did not make specific proposals for adjusting combat documents.
POSTCARDS WITH VIEWS OF TEMPLES
And so, on May 28 at 14.00 on the Helsinki-Moscow air route at an altitude of 600 m, an air defense unit on duty in the area of the Estonian town of Kohtla-Jarve detects a small aircraft without the identification signal “I am one of mine”, which is not in the application as allowed to enter Soviet airspace Union. This is how events developed to stop the illegal entry into the airspace of the USSR of an aircraft of unknown nationality, unknown type and for unknown purposes.
In general, the situation was reminiscent of the Far Eastern version with the South Korean Boeing, but one cannot discount the fact that the “Moneron syndrome” was still in force, and all this happened on one of the busiest air routes, practically in the center of Europe.
Only later, the materials of a thorough investigation will confirm that the technical complex of means along the entire route of Rust’s flight, which was about 1130 km, worked flawlessly, and this small airplane was observed almost along the entire route. And only the human factor and a series of incredible but tragic coincidences ultimately led to the failure of the air defense forces on duty to carry out the combat mission, to serious personnel changes in the USSR Ministry of Defense and the beginning of the reorganization of the air defense system.
To the question “Did 19-year-old German citizen Matthias Rust end up in Moscow by chance?” You can answer unequivocally: “No, not at all by chance.”
From the case materials, it turned out that the young but capable pilot was fond of flying at maximum range on his favorite, as he said, Cessna-172 aircraft. In 1986 alone, he flew several times to Shetland and the Faroe Islands. Flying over the ocean out of sight of land is not considered simple. Rust had considerable experience in instrument navigation. During 1986, he carefully studied on a map the area over which he was to fly a year later, collecting postcards with views of churches and temples in the area as landmarks. In May 1987, Rust decided that he was ready for the planned flight.
He took off from Helsinki Airport at 13.30 Moscow time. The flight plan included Stockholm, which is only two hours on a Cessna 172. After 20 minutes, Matthias Rust contacted the dispatcher, reported that everything was fine on board and said goodbye. After this, he turned off all means of communication, except for the receiver of the on-board radio compass, and sent the plane into the Gulf of Finland with a decrease in altitude to 200 m, after which it turned 180 degrees and headed to a point that had been determined in advance and was located exactly on the route connecting Helsinki and Moscow. Finnish air traffic control authorities recorded a change in the flight level of Matthias Rust's plane and a deviation from the established route. Since this posed a threat to flight safety in the area, the controller requested (by radio) Rust's aircraft. Attempts to contact the pilot were unsuccessful.
Soon, Rust’s plane disappeared from all radar screens of the surveillance system 40 km from the coastline over the waters of the Gulf of Finland. Within 30 minutes, a search helicopter and two patrol boats were sent to the area where the plane was supposed to crash, and some objects and a small oil slick were discovered. Presumably, the conclusion was drawn that the plane fell into the water and additional forces and resources were needed to reliably verify this (a few months later, the Finnish rescue service would issue Rust an invoice of 120 thousand US dollars for carrying out search and rescue work on the spot supposed disaster).
Pyct, meanwhile, carried out his plan to reach the city of Moscow. The weather at this moment was cloudy, with clearings, with the lower edge of the clouds 400-600 m, the wind was west, and drizzling rain fell from time to time.
For about an hour of flight, Rust strictly followed the course of the radio beacon, the navigation station of which was located in the Helsinki area. Further, the entire flight was carried out according to the readings of the magnetic compass and visual comparisons of objects that were previously plotted on the map. The main landmarks are Lake Peipsi, Lake Ilmen, Lake Seliger, and the Rzhev-Moscow railway. With such extensive landmarks, it is simply difficult to get lost.
TURN
So, information about the detection of an unknown aircraft arrived at the automated command post of the unit at 14.10. Negotiations with civilian dispatchers took place for about 15 minutes under the conditions of “moneron syndrome”; what could it be? By this time the plane was already near the coastline. Three on-duty anti-aircraft missile divisions were put on combat readiness, they observed the target, but did not receive commands to destroy, everyone was waiting for the decision of the commander of the Air Defense Army, Major General Kromin.
When it became clear that this was not the requested aircraft, all army units were put on alert #1 and a pair of fighters on duty were scrambled from Tapa airfield to identify the object.
At 14.29, the pilot, Senior Lieutenant Puchnin, reported that in a break in the clouds he observed a white sports aircraft, like the Yak-12, with a dark stripe along the fuselage. This was already in the area of the city of Gdov.
The decrease took place at the junction of the detection zones of two radar units, and for a period of up to 1 minute Rust was not observed on the radars. However, the flight path in the automated system remained stable.
At 14.31 the object was detected, but with a heading of 90 degrees instead of 130. It was now moving along the Gdov-Malaya Vishera highway. It was decided that the same object had been discovered. From the army command post, instructions were given to clarify the parameters of the object and a command was issued to scramble another couple of fighters on duty to identify it. The fighters returned empty-handed. According to the pilots' reports, they found nothing on their onboard radars. However, the mark was steadily observed by all ground units. Changes in movement parameters were noted: speed within 80-85 km/h (instead of 180-210 km/h), altitude 1000 m (instead of 600 m).
Professionals know that in spring and summer, under certain climatic conditions, stable vortex currents arise in the atmosphere, which move with wind currents, exist for quite a long time and on radar screens it is very difficult to distinguish them from a small aircraft. In such cases, great experience and skill are needed. At this moment, apparently, he was not enough to make the right decision. The calculation was obliged to note that within a minute the height of the object almost doubled, and the speed decreased almost three times.
At 15.00 Rust’s plane was already in the Pskov area. The weather improved, the rain stopped, and Rust again took the altitude of 600 m as the most economical for this type of aircraft and continued the flight.
In the same area, training flights of one of the aviation regiments were taking place. There were from 7 to 12 aircraft in the air in different zones. Some took off, others landed, so their number was constantly changing.
RUST IS LEGALIZED
At 15.00, in accordance with the schedule, the code number of the state identification system was changed. All ground and air assets and systems had to carry out this operation simultaneously.
This did not happen immediately with fighters. Being carried away by the technique of piloting, not all young pilots switched the necessary switch in time, and immediately they became “strangers” to the air defense system. The commander of the radio engineering unit, knowing the situation with the unidentified aircraft, orders the operational duty officer of the system in which the fighters were located to forcibly assign the attribute “I am one of my own.”
“Otherwise we can shoot down our own,” he explains his position to the young officer. He, in turn, explains that this contradicts the instructions and documents. An officer of a higher command post removes an intractable senior lieutenant from duty and replaces him with a young lieutenant who, without understanding the military situation, carried out the order, assigning the attribute “I am one of my own” to all fighters in the air, including Matthias Rust’s plane.
By 16.00, already legalized, Pyct flies over Lake Seliger and falls into the area of responsibility of another unit.
The system's tracking tools again confirmed that an aircraft was detected without the "I am mine" signal. Analysis of the situation again. The duty pair of fighters rises again. In low cloud conditions, the commanders did not dare to lower the fighters to an altitude below 600 m, breaking through the clouds from top to bottom. It was too dangerous. Thus, Rust's plane was not visually detected.
The day before Rust’s flight, one of the Air Force planes crashed 40 km west of the city of Torzhok; a search and rescue group was working here. One of the helicopters that day and hour served as a communications relay, patrolling in the area. The decision was made that the plane without the “I am mine” signal was the application helicopter, which was in the search and rescue zone. Twice legalized Rust continued his flight to Moscow. There were less than two hours left before landing.
Without accurately understanding the unidentified target, General Kromin reported it to the command post of the Moscow Air Defense District and the Central Command Post (TsKP) of the Air Defense Forces as a simple violator of the flight regime, that is, a Soviet light aircraft that had taken off without a request.
The operational duty officer of the Central Command Command, Major General Melnikov, not having a complete description of the aircraft violating the flight regime, did not report it to the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces, Chief Marshal of Aviation Koldunov, who was at his workplace at that time. The First Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Timokhin, who remained in charge of the Chief of Staff, did not respond to the report of the operational duty officer. Hoping that the Moscow District would deal with the intruder aircraft themselves, General Melnikov gave the command to remove this target from the alert at the Central Command Control Center.
At the district command post at that time, intense combat work was underway on control targets, which was led by the first deputy commander of the district troops, Lieutenant General Brazhnikov. He did not attach any importance to the information about “a simple violator of flight regulations.”
ACCORDING TO THE LAW
Now let us turn to the legislative or legal basis for the actions of air defense forces on duty. USSR Law on the State Border of the USSR of November 1982. Article 36 stated: “Air defense troops, while protecting the State Border of the USSR... in cases where stopping a violation or detaining violators cannot be accomplished by other means, use weapons and military equipment ".
10 months will pass, and in accordance with this Law, on September 1, 1983, a South Korean Boeing that intruded into the country's airspace will be shot down. The fact of his downing will be hidden for some time behind the words “observation of him was lost.” And only a week later, in the Statement of the Soviet Government, it will be reported that “the interceptor fighter carried out the order of the command post in full accordance with the Law...”
The law was, however, by order of the USSR Minister of Defense, by which it was put into effect, it was allowed to open fire only on military aircraft of capitalist countries. And that's not always the case. As a result, having reached units and subunits, the order “grew” to a special instruction of... 20 pages. And according to this document, whoever made the decision to use or not use fire could go to prison.
If we add to this the Chicago Convention, according to which lethal fire on civil aviation intruders is prohibited, then one can imagine the position of all those who led the air defense forces on duty on that ill-fated day.
GOAL - RED SQUARE
Meanwhile, at 18.30 Matthias Rust had already approached the outskirts of Moscow, crossed Khodynka and headed straight to the Kremlin. The weather in Moscow was spring-like, warm, windless and partly cloudy.
Pust's plans included landing the plane directly in the Kremlin. But, having convinced himself from a height of 60 m that there is no suitable site there, he decides to land on Red Square, the size of which allowed him to do this.
With a left turn and descent, Rust comes in for landing between the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower and St. Basil's Cathedral. However, this could not be done due to the many people in the square. He makes a second attempt, sharply gaining altitude and turning around the Rossiya Hotel. Also descending, turning on the navigation lights and shaking his wings, Rust hoped that passers-by would understand his intentions and clear the diagonal of the area for landing. However, this did not happen.
Having made another U-turn over the Rossiya Hotel, Rust nevertheless managed to use the stopwatch to detect the operating mode of the traffic light on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge. Having begun the descent over Bolshaya Ordynka Street, Rust very accurately calculated the descent trajectory of his aircraft. And, as soon as the traffic light at the beginning of the bridge turned red, the plane, almost touching the chassis of the roofs of the cars, touched the bridge covering with its wheels. This distance was enough to slow down, taxi to the cathedral and turn off the engine. The clock on the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower showed 19 hours 10 minutes, but it was far from evening.
DEBRIEF
Rust's flight gave rise to heavy accusations not only against the Air Defense Forces, but also against the Armed Forces. On May 30, a meeting of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee was held, which ended with the dismissal of the Minister of Defense, Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Sokolov, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces, Chief Marshal of Aviation Alexander Koldunov.
By June 10, 34 officers and generals were brought to justice in the Air Defense Forces. The flywheel of punishment continued to spin. Many were removed from their positions, expelled from the CPSU, dismissed from the Armed Forces, and put on trial. The prestige of the Armed Forces was dealt a blow. In fact, the entire leadership of the Ministry of Defense, up to and including the commanders of military districts, was replaced. It seemed that there were some circles in the country interested in undermining the people’s trust in their Armed Forces. This was evidenced by the reluctance to understand that the country's air defense system was created to combat not any means capable of flying into our airspace, but primarily to repel attacks from air and space by combat aircraft, cruise missiles and other unmanned aerial vehicles that pose a danger to objects of the country that no air defense of any state in peacetime can resist air hooligans deliberately violating airspace, especially on sports-type aircraft at low and extremely low altitudes. Such a task is beyond the capabilities of the state from an economic point of view, and even more so for a country with a border length of more than 60 thousand km.
A BLOW TO PRESTIGE
In this case, Rust’s flight to Moscow was clearly provocative. The flight was planned in advance, as evidenced by the choice of an experienced pilot, his program of purposeful training on instruments for maximum range, and a thorough study of the features of the upcoming route over the territory of the USSR.
One can only guess who was behind this provocation. The calculation of striking a blow to the prestige of the USSR Armed Forces and their leadership, at the center of which were the Air Defense Forces, was accurate. And yet, the power structures, starting with the Politburo, created a national level of excitement around the problem of the Rust flight. Thus, his people were confused and the prestige of the Armed Forces was undermined.
It turns out that our potential enemy inflicted a serious defeat on the defense capability of the USSR through the hands of the “own” Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. Rust marked the beginning of a decline in the prestige of service in the Armed Forces, which continues to this day. There was no need to even dream of anything better.
The West relished Rust's flight to Moscow. The Stern magazine praised his “feat” of breaking through the strongest air defense system of one hundred surface-to-air missile launch complexes, 6 air regiments with 240 interceptor fighters, etc. The article reported that after 48 hours, Air Defense Commander-in-Chief Alexander Koldunov, who shot down 46 German planes in World War II, lost his post, and that the incident with Rust gave Mikhail Gorbachev a reason to remove 75-year-old Marshal Sergei Sokolov from his post as Minister of Defense...
It was also noted that on May 1, on the podium of the Mausoleum there were only five military men instead of fifteen. The calculation of Rust's adventurous flight was confirmed. We knew how to deal with our own.
On August 4, Rust, who was sentenced to four years in prison, was pardoned. In an interview with an Izvestia correspondent, Andreev, a member of the board of the USSR Prosecutor's Office, in every way belittled the severity of the criminal's guilt, reducing Rust's "leprosy" to malicious hooliganism, painted a picture of the favorable conditions in which Rust was kept in the colony. But our commanders were punished with all the unjustified cruelty for this case. No one even thought of rehabilitating them.
It is worth recalling here how similar cases were dealt with in other countries. On September 12, 1954, a Cessna aircraft landed at the White House in Washington, next to the presidential residence. The plane crashed after colliding with a tree near a building. The pilot died.
Soon after landing, Rusta made unauthorized flights over Paris for several nights in a row, a light aircraft, diverting known forces and means to prevent flights.
But neither in the USA nor in France were defense ministers fired for these flights, much less the honor of all armed forces. They treated it more sensibly there. First of all, we strengthened the radar service, urgently introduced more advanced technical means into combat formation, and speeded up the flow of operational information.
Rust's landing in Moscow at one time turned into a great tragedy for the Air Defense Forces in conditions when air defense fully met the requirements of the time. Now let’s try to imagine a similar flight in our time, when the air defense system in relation to its main assets has been significantly weakened due to the implementation of the so-called. the principle of "reasonable sufficiency". Today, such a “Rust” can fly unhindered almost anywhere and at any time. There's a lot to think about.
May 28 marks a unique anniversary: on this day in 1987, a plane piloted by German pilot Matthias Rust landed on Red Square. This incident became, oddly enough, one of the most striking events of perestroika.
Who else, besides the German pilot, made “incursions” into Red Square, the website says.
Flight of Rust
On May 28, 1987, news broadcasts reported that a foreign civil plane under the control of a German pilot had landed on Red Square. Rust's plane flew across the entire territory of the USSR: from the Gulf of Finland to Moscow - and was not shot down.
It is still unknown what motives motivated the German pilot, to whom and what he wanted to prove, and most importantly, why he landed on Red Square, but the fact remains that Rust’s plane freely crossed the border of the Soviet Union and Finland and flew towards Moscow.
The plane could have been shot down several times - several fighters took off from the Estonian airfield in alarm, but without receiving an order to shoot down the air transport of the border violator, they returned back. And Moscow’s air defense, consisting of automated air defense systems, was turned off that day for unscheduled preventive maintenance.
Mathias Rust. Photo: ITAR-TASS
Rust's plane landed on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, and then coasted to St. Basil's Cathedral. The pilot who got off the plane was arrested, although he managed to give out a few autographs to those who wanted it. The court sentenced Rust to 4 years in prison, but the pilot served a little more than a year, after which he was granted amnesty and returned to his homeland.
Subsequently, Rust repeatedly came to the attention of German law enforcement agencies. In 1989, he stabbed a nurse who refused to see him, for which he was sentenced to 4 years in prison.
And 12 years later, Rust was tried for stealing a sweater from a store. Now the former pilot makes a living playing poker.
Let us note that Rust was not the first who dared to make such a flight. 50 years before the German pilot - in 1938 - the Englishman Brian Montague Grover, who fell in love with a girl from the Soviet Union, tried to commit a similar act. He flew on a single-seater plane from London to Germany, and then flew to the USSR. To Moscow, like Rust. Only Grover’s goal was not Red Square, but the Tushinsky airfield, where military parades were then held.
However, Grover never managed to fly to the capital of the USSR - the plane ran out of fuel, and he was forced to land in the Tver region on one of the collective farm fields. The Englishman was arrested and could well have received 10 years in prison for illegally crossing the border, but the court turned out to be humane and sentenced him to a 1,500 ruble fine.
Other cases of “intrusions” on Red Square
It is not clear why Red Square began to attract Russians as a race track, but recently, cases of cars and other vehicles entering the main square of the country have become significantly more frequent. This is strictly prohibited: Red Square can only be visited on foot, and even then not always - sometimes the main square of the country is completely closed to the public, for example, during preparations for open-air concerts.
However, this does not stop Russians from breaking the rules. One of such incidents occurred on September 20, 2010, when a biker drove into the square. A young man in a helmet drove out from Vasilyevsky Spusk and intended to drive towards the State Historical Museum. Police and FSO officers immediately rushed to the motorcycle. The offender, seeing the danger, tried to escape, but failed - the motorcycle overturned. The driver was not injured. An administrative violation report was drawn up against him.
Please note that travel to the territory of the Alexander Garden and Manezhnaya Square is also prohibited. However, this prohibition was also violated. On October 12 last year, a MGIMO student, a native of Chechnya, was detained for driving an SUV into the territory of the Alexander Garden. As it turned out later, the young man was showing two passengers in the car the center of Moscow. An administrative protocol was drawn up against the violator.
On March 20 of this year, a Muscovite driving a foreign car was detained for a similar offense. The woman went to Red Square to show the city center to her friend, a Finnish citizen. The violator was detained and fined.
On May 2, police detained a teenager who drove into Red Square on a scooter. The young man did not have any rights with him. An administrative protocol was drawn up regarding the offense.
On September 4, 1987, exactly thirty years ago, the trial of Matthias Rust, a young German amateur pilot who several months earlier, on May 28, 1987, landed his plane on Red Square - in the very heart of the Soviet capital, ended with a guilty verdict. .
The Cessna-172 plane, piloted by 18-year-old German citizen Matthias Rust, landed right next to the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed in the center of Moscow. The Soviet leadership was in real shock. After all, not only did the plane of an ordinary German guy cover the distance from the Soviet border to the capital of the country and was not shot down by air defense systems, but this event also happened, which is very symbolic, on May 28 - Border Guard Day. This was a real slap in the face of the entire Soviet system. Naturally, Matthias Rust was arrested immediately after the plane landed.
Almost immediately after Rust’s plane landed on Red Square, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Gorbachev decided to dismiss a number of senior military leaders, primarily those who were responsible for the air defense of the Soviet state. The highest-ranking “retiree” was the Minister of Defense of the Soviet Union, 72-year-old Marshal Sergei Sokolov. He held this position since 1984, replacing the deceased Marshal Dmitry Ustinov. Before his appointment as Minister of Defense, Marshal Sokolov was First Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR from 1967 to 1984, for seventeen years. A participant in the Great Patriotic War, Marshal Sokolov was one of the most prominent Soviet military leaders. In particular, from 1980 to 1985. he was responsible for managing the actions of Soviet troops on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. However, the flight of the German youth cost the respected marshal his career. Of course, they could not throw the honored military leader “on the street” - already in June 1987, he took the post of inspector general of the Group of Inspectors General of the USSR Ministry of Defense.
In addition to Marshal Sokolov, Air Chief Marshal Alexander Koldunov, who held the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces of the Soviet Union and was directly responsible for the security of the airspace of the Soviet country, was dismissed immediately after the flight of Matthias Rust. Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Alexander Koldunov spent the Great Patriotic War as a fighter pilot, after the war he served in the Air Force fighter aviation, and then in the air defense. 
He took the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces in 1978, nine years before Matthias Rust’s flight. But it was not only senior military leaders who lost their positions. About 300 senior officers were dismissed from service. A powerful blow was dealt to the personnel of the Soviet armed forces. They also found “scapegoats” - two officers of the Air Defense Forces received real prison sentences. These were Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Karpets, who was the operational duty officer for the Tallinn Air Defense Forces division on the day of Rust’s flight, and Major Vyacheslav Chernykh, who was on duty for the radio engineering brigade on that ill-fated day.
As for Rust himself, after being detained on Red Square, he was arrested. On June 1, a few days after the flight, Matthias Rust turned nineteen years old. The young German celebrated his birthday in prison. The whole world followed the fate of the guy who demonstrated that the defense system of the Soviet Union was by no means “iron”. And this was indeed the case - with outright traitors who had penetrated the top leadership of the Soviet state, it simply could not be ironclad. Naturally, without “support” at the highest level, Rust’s flight would simply be impossible. In the worst case scenario, he would have been shot down in the skies over Estonia. However, Rust was literally given the green light to fly all the way to the Soviet capital. This could only happen with the sanction of the highest Soviet leaders. It is not very clear who exactly gave the go-ahead for Rust to land on Red Square, and it is unlikely that we will ever know about it. But it is obvious that this was a person or people who were part of the highest group of the Soviet elite.
The displaced military leaders were in opposition to the course that by this time the Soviet leadership, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, had begun to pursue. Striking a blow at the command of the armed forces was one of the main tasks of those people who stood behind the methodical and systematic destruction of the Soviet state. After all, the famous marshals and generals who went through the Great Patriotic War and were true patriots of the Soviet state could simply not allow all those manipulations with the country that led to the disaster of 1991 to be carried out. Subsequently, American military expert William Odom even compared the “cleansing” of the Soviet military elite after the flight of Matthias Rust with the repressions against Soviet military leaders that took place in 1937-1938. It is interesting that after each such purge, a catastrophe occurred three or four years later. In 1941, the terrible Great Patriotic War began, and in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and this process was also accompanied by rivers of blood in the former Soviet republics, numerous military conflicts, mass unrest, and an unprecedented wave of crime and violence.
Therefore, it is hardly worth assessing the act of Matthias Rust as a “harmless prank” of a young romantic aviator. Most likely, a carefully thought-out and organized provocation took place here, in which both Western intelligence services and impressive cover from the Soviet side could have participated. At least, many prominent Soviet and Russian military leaders agree on this opinion, who believe that without the “Kremlin roof,” Matthias Rust’s flight would have ended tragically for him. The purpose of organizing such a flight was to weaken the Soviet state by solving the following tasks: 1) creating a pretext for a large-scale “purge” of unwanted senior military leaders, 2) discrediting the Soviet defense system in the eyes of citizens of the USSR and the world community, 3) strengthening anti-Soviet sentiments in society. It was after the flight of Matthias Rust and the dismissal of USSR Defense Minister Marshal Sergei Sokolov that Mikhail Gorbachev began to rapidly reduce the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. Rust’s flight in this context was another argument - why do we need “such an army”, and even in “such numbers”, which missed the flight and landing on Red Square of a sports plane of some German youth.
It is noteworthy that shortly before Matthias Rust’s flight, USSR Minister of Defense Marshal Sokolov personally reported to Mikhail Gorbachev about how the air defense system of the Soviet state was organized and how it worked. When leaving the General Secretary, Sokolov forgot some documents, including a very secret map. But the next day, when he tried to return the documents, Gorbachev said that he did not remember where they were. This version was subsequently voiced, according to a number of publications in the Russian media, by Colonel General Leonid Ivashov. Be that as it may, most military leaders agree on one thing - the action with Rust’s flight was thoughtful and planned. There is another very interesting version, according to which Rust landed on Red Square with full fuel tanks, which indicates only one thing - it was refueled somewhere on Soviet territory. And this could only be done directly under the control of the “omnipotent” Soviet KGB.
The trial of Matthias Rust was scheduled for September 2, 1987. Matthias Rust was charged under three articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR - illegal crossing of the air border, violation of international flight rules and malicious hooliganism. In the definition of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, hooliganism was interpreted as intentional actions that grossly violate public order and express clear disrespect for society, while malicious hooliganism was understood as the same actions, but accompanied by “exceptional cynicism or special insolence.” The landing of the plane on Red Square, where many Soviet people were walking, was regarded as such. For malicious hooliganism, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR provided for liability in the form of imprisonment for up to five years or correctional labor for up to two years. Violation of the rules of international flights provided for an even wider range of punishment - from one year to ten years in prison, however, under the same article one could get off without a real sentence - by paying a large fine.
At the trial, Matthias Rust stated that he flew to Moscow in order to demonstrate to the Soviet people his desire for peace. However, the prosecution did not heed these arguments of the young German. The prosecutor requested ten years in prison for Matthias Rust under three articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. But the trial turned out to be much more lenient than the accusation.
On September 4, 1987, Matthias Rust was sentenced. He was sentenced to four years in prison. On the one hand, anti-Soviet elements in the Soviet Union itself and the world community immediately expressed indignation at such, from their point of view, brutal reprisal against the “messenger of peace.” On the other hand, on the contrary, today many questions arise about the sentence, which seems to some to be overly liberal. Firstly, those articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR were applied to Matthias Rust, which were not harsh and could not entail such serious measures as, say, the death penalty. Secondly, four years of imprisonment for such an act of national importance looked very strange, especially in comparison with what four years were then given to ordinary Soviet citizens.
The leniency of Rust's sentence indicated that no one intended to punish him seriously. In the old days, when the Soviet Union was truly an enemy of the capitalist West, Matthias Rust, at best, would have received ten years in the far northern camps, and at worst, would have simply been sentenced to death. But in 1987 the situation changed. It is possible that the liberal punishment for Rust was supposed to demonstrate to the West the further readiness of the Soviet Union for “democratization.”
In early August 1988, less than a year after the trial, Matthias Rust was granted amnesty and safely returned to his homeland. The young German spent only 14 months in pre-trial detention and in a colony. In fact, Mikhail Gorbachev generously forgave Matthias Rust for the biting slap in the face of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Army, inflicted in front of the whole world. Of course, “Western friends” persistently asked for Matthias Rust (by that time Moscow was already looking at the West with wide open eyes); German Chancellor Helmut Kohl could personally turn to Mikhail Gorbachev. Mikhail Sergeevich, who a few years later successfully gave the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany, could not refuse his West German colleague.
The decision to release Matthias Rust was enthusiastically received both in the West, where it once again confirmed the weakening of the superpower and its willingness to henceforth yield to the West in everything, and in the Soviet Union itself, fortunately, anti-Soviet sentiments at that time in society were already very strong, especially among the “active” part of society - the capital’s intelligentsia, young representatives of the nomenklatura. Both the flight of Matthias Rust, and the lenient sentence, and his imminent release demonstrated the beginning of changes in the life of the Soviet Union and fit perfectly into Gorbachev’s perestroika. First they forgave Rust, then they allowed the GDR to be included in the Federal Republic of Germany, the overthrow of all pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe, and in the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
By the way, the life of Matthias Rust after returning to his homeland in Germany developed very interestingly. Some actions perfectly characterize the true appearance of the “messenger of peace.” So, already in November 1989, 15 months after his release from the Soviet colony, Matthias Rust, who by that time was doing alternative service in a hospital in Riessen, began to look after a nurse. He asked her out on a date, and after the nurse refused to go with him, he stabbed her. For this, Matthias Rust was arrested by the “native” German authorities. In 1991, he was sentenced to four years in prison - exactly the same sentence given to Rust for landing on Red Square. But after 15 months, Rust was released from prison (and again it repeats - in the USSR he was released after fourteen months).
In 1997, ten years after his flight, Rust, who by that time lived in the distant West Indies, in the state of Trinidad and Tobago, converted to Hinduism and married a local girl of Indian origin. Then he returned with his young wife to his homeland, Germany, but in 2001 he again came to the attention of the police - this time for stealing a sweater from one of the supermarkets. In the mid-2000s, twenty years after his flight, Matthias Rust claimed that he wanted to “build bridges” between the West and the East. But he still prefers to remain silent about the true history of his flight.
