On May 28, 1987, a single-engined Cessna 172 light aircraft flown by a 19-year-old West German amateur pilot, Herr Mathias Rust, made an unauthorized and unimpeded flight of more than 650 km from Helsinki (Finland) to the centre of Moscow, where it landed beside the walls of the Kremlin (the seat of the Soviet government) close to Red Square.
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Herr Rust, who had chartered the plane from his Hamburg flying club for a tour of Scandinavia, had flown to Reykjavik in Iceland and then via the Faroe Islands and Norway to Finland, leaving Helsinki's international airport at Malmi purportedly bound for Stockholm (the Swedish capital). He was at first assumed to have successfully evaded the Soviet Union's extensive air defence network by flying low enough to avoid radar detection. However, in the statement issued following an extraordinary session of the politburo of the central committee of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union on May 30 it was revealed that the plane had been detected by Soviet air defence forces as it approached Soviet airspace off the north coast of Estonia near the town of Kohtla-Jarva, and that Soviet fighter aircraft had twice circled the plane, but that confusion over its origins had prevented its being intercepted. (Rust confirmed at his trial that he had switched off his radio to avoid being challenged when approached by a Soviet aircraft.) Observers speculated that responsible officials had either assumed the plane to be domestic, or that they had been reluctant to act for fear of repercussions similar to those which had followed the shooting down in 1983 of a South Korean airliner which had intruded into Soviet airspace over the Pacific island of Sakhalin . The affair was particularly embarrassing in view of the fact that May 28 was celebrated annually in the Soviet Union as Border Guards' Day.
Herr Rust was arrested and detained for questioning shortly after landing. It appeared at first that the authorities were not adopting a severe attitude towards him, but subsequent comment in the Soviet media alleged that although Herr Rust 'had no malicious intent' he had not been acting alone, and the CPSU newspaper Pravda on June 5 suggested that he had been sent on a 'suicide mission' to precipitate a crisis in Soviet-West German relations. Meanwhile the West German government issued a statement on June 1 calling Herr Rust's flight a 'foolhardy act' which might have had 'extremely unfortunate consequences for himself and for political developments'.
Herr Rust went on trial on Sept. 2 before the Soviet Supreme Court on charges of unlawful entry into the Soviet Union, violation of international flight rules, and malicious hooliganism. He faced a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment relating to the second charge. He initially pleaded guilty to all three charges, but subsequently withdrew his guilty plea in respect of the charge of hooliganism.
On Sept. 4 Herr Rust was sentenced to four years in an ordinary-regime labour camp for 'malicious hooliganism'; his claim that he had been engaged in a peace mission was rejected and his aim was declared to have been that of 'seeking publicity'. Herr Rust was also given concurrent sentences of three years for violating international flight rules and two years for illegal entry into the Soviet Union. Sentences handed down by the Supreme Court were not open to appeal.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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