Flight of Matthias Rust. High cover provocation. Matthias Rust: landing on Red Square and subsequent fate (10 photos) The plane landed on Red Square

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 throughout 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 history border service and the 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 plane 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 stopped communicating with Finnish air traffic control and then headed towards coastline Baltic Sea and disappeared from airspace Finland 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 railway Leningrad-Moscow. Along the route of its flight, duty units from the airfields of Khotilovo and Bezhetsk took to 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 Bolshoi 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 flight routes on the fly aircraft falling into the danger zone. 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 not connected with it in any way. 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 was stubbornly 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 white light-engine aircraft like our Yak-12 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 in the vicinity ancient city training flights of one of the local air regiments took place. 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 we 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 zone of the Moscow District as if it were a Moscow helicopter that had violated flight rules. 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 another twenty minutes later, “men in gray” arrived there and took the embarrassedly smiling pilot to the Lubyanka.

The country's political leadership took advantage of the incident with Rust to full program: 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 They 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, who was 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. Not in last degree This was facilitated 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,
Spread the 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 service 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 at the time. 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.

On September 4, 1987, exactly thirty years ago, the trial of Matthias Rust, a young German amateur pilot who, a few 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, the 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 in the territory Democratic Republic 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 “security” actually high 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 “purge” 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 international rules flights 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 Mathias 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 distant 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 argued that he wanted to “build bridges” between the West and the East. But oh true history he still prefers to remain silent about his flight.

On May 28, 1987, on Border Guard Day, a sports plane from the American manufacturing company Cessna violated the airspace of the Soviet Union. He landed in the capital not far away on Vasilyevsky Spusk, very close to Red Square. Namely, he landed on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge and coasted to St. Basil's Cathedral. Great amount Video cameras and cameras of tourists recorded this moment when the pilot climbed out of the cockpit, he was surrounded by people wanting to get an autograph. He was arrested ten minutes later. The offender turned out to be Matthias Rust, a nineteen-year-old athlete pilot. His father sells aircraft in Germany. At 14:20, Ruth's plane crossed the air border of the USSR at an altitude of 600 m above the Gulf of Finland near the city of Kohtla-Jarve (Estonia). This was recorded by air defense radars, as a result of which the missile divisions were put on full combat readiness. A fighter was sent to intercept the Cessna aircraft. He quickly discovered it, but no command was given to shoot it down. Therefore, the intruder’s plane was “led” almost all the way to Moscow. Since 1984, the Soviet Union had an order that prohibited opening fire on sports/civilian aircraft.

It is unlikely that Rust knew that at about 15:00, when he would fly near the city of Pskov, the local air regiment would be conducting training flights there. Some planes were landing, others were taking off. At exactly three o'clock the code of the state recognition system was changed, which meant a simultaneous change of code by all pilots. However, many inexperienced pilots did not carry out this operation: they were let down by lack of experience or forgetfulness. Be that as it may, the system recognized them as “strangers”. In the current situation, one of the commanders could not figure it out and assigned the “me-mine” attribute to all aircraft, including Rust’s sports aircraft. He made his further flight with local air registration. But there was also a secondary legalization near Torzhok, where rescue work took place as a result of a collision of our planes - a low-speed German Cessna was mistaken for a Soviet search helicopter.

Newspapers of that time were full of headlines: “The country is in shock! The German sports pilot dishonored the huge defense arsenal of the USSR on Border Guard Day.” Also, the world media put forward more “romantic” versions - the guy was trying to win a bet or impress his chosen one. They also said that Matthias Rust’s flight was nothing more than a marketing ploy. Since his father sold Cessna airplanes in Western Europe, and the pace of sales during this period just decreased. It is clear that such a PR move became an impetus for aircraft sales. After all, in fact, this is the only aircraft that managed to “defeat” the USSR air defense system. The Soviet military was sure that such an action was the machinations of foreign intelligence services.

After this incredible incident, many people began to invent various jokes on this topic. For example, call Red Square “Sheremetvo-3”. No less popular was the joke that the Moscow-Leningrad highway was the softest, as it was covered with the hats of generals and colonels. After the state of shock passed among the Russian people, they began to have fun with their characteristic enthusiasm. A joke was born about two pilots who met on Red Square, one of whom asked for a cigarette, to which the other replied: “What are you doing?! You can’t smoke on airfields!” And one more thing: a crowd of people with things gathered on Red Square. Passers-by ask them: “What are you doing here?”, to which they answer: “We are waiting for the plane from Hamburg to land.” There was another story that the police were patrolling near the fountain of the Bolshoi Theater. "For what?". “What if an American submarine emerges from there?”

Punishment of Matthias Rust

September 2, 1987 judicial panel Supreme Court The USSR Criminal Cases Office began hearing the Rust case. He was accused of hooliganism. According to the court, his landing threatened the lives of people in the square. He crossed the border illegally and violated aviation laws. The case took place in open session. The following lost their positions: Alexander Koldunov (head of the air defense forces), Sergei Sokolov (minister of defense) and about three hundred other officers.

Matthias Rust himself stated at the trial that his flight was a “call for peace.” On September 4, 1987, he was sentenced to four years in prison for violating flight rules, illegal border crossing and malicious hooliganism. In total, he spent 432 days in pre-trial detention in prison, and the Presidium of the Supreme Council pardoned him, but he was expelled from the USSR.

Rust returned to Germany, but in his homeland he was remembered as a madman who put the world in danger. He was permanently deprived of his piloting rights. He worked as a nurse at a hospital in the city of Riessen. During his next duty in November 1989, Rust attacked a nurse with a knife who refused him a kiss, for which the court decided to imprison him for four years, but after keeping him in prison for five months, he was released.

In mid-1994, Rust announced that he was going to live in Russia again. After which he disappeared for 2 years. Some said that he sold shoes in Moscow, others spread rumors about his death. In fact, Rust traveled a lot. Having seen the world, upon returning to his homeland he announced that he was going to marry the daughter of a rich tea merchant. The wedding ceremony took place in India according to local rites. After the wedding, he and his wife returned to Germany. In 2001, he appeared in court again. This time he was accused of stealing from a department store, where he was going to steal a cashmere pullover. As a result, the court sentenced him to a fine of 5,000 euros. As for his personal life, not everything worked out here either - he is divorced. According to him, he wanted to have a family, many children, but he just could not find the only one who would understand him. He makes his living as a professional poker player. At the same time, he restored his documents in South Africa and plans to fly again.

VKontakte Facebook Odnoklassniki

Today is the 25th anniversary of the landing of a German “amateur” pilot under the walls of the Kremlin

Today is the 25th anniversary of the landing of the German pilot Matthias Rust in the very heart of Moscow, under the walls of the Kremlin. His defiantly insolent flight on May 28, 1987 from Finland to Moscow, which was never stopped by our air defense systems, became one of the milestones in the collapse of the great power - the Soviet Union. A small single-engine airplane, piloted by an “amateur”, managed to “overcome” a powerful air defense system that was perfect for those times.

How could this happen? Unfortunately, many of the circumstances of what happened a quarter of a century ago are still being carefully hidden by someone. Nevertheless, over the years it has been possible to find more and more evidence that that “breakthrough” of the Soviet air defense system, which supposedly testified to the collapse of the entire Soviet system, was in fact a carefully planned secret operation by someone, which was successfully implemented primarily with the help of traitors from the highest echelons of the Soviet leadership. And these traitors then used this incident to discredit the Soviet army and almost completely replace its command. Military journalist Evgeniy Kirichenko talks about this today on the pages of Free Press.

Rust: “I was waiting for the landing command. But it didn’t come.”

In fact, Rust’s plane, which did not respond to the request “Own - alien” was immediately detected by our radar equipment. The first to spot him was the radar operator, Private Dilmagombetov, who immediately reported this to the duty officer at the company control center, Captain Osipov. Then the mark from Rust’s Cessna was spotted by the operator of another station, Corporal Shargorodsky, and informed the operational duty officer that he was observing an unidentified target. However, at the higher checkpoint, the issuance of information “upward” was delayed for 15 minutes, taking a time out to figure out who was flying - state border violator or flight regime violator. The decision was made by Lieutenant Colonel Karpets and Major Chernykh, who were later made to blame for this whole story - demoted and sentenced by a military tribunal to five years.

But the information, albeit belatedly, was issued further on command. A fighter piloted by Senior Lieutenant Puchnin took off to intercept Rust. He circled the Cessna twice and reported to the ground that in front of him - "a light-engine sports aircraft with a blue stripe along the fuselage." If he had then received a command from the ground to destroy the border violator, he would have easily done it. According to Rust, recorded in the interrogation report, he only saw a Soviet interceptor once and even distinguished orange overalls and oxygen masks in the cockpit Soviet pilots who were sitting in one row.

- I was waiting for the landing command, - Rust asserted. - But it didn't come. So I maintained course 117, moving at 600 altitude.

Rust was lying. He was not going to land, because his task was to fly to Red Square at any cost. And the violator was circled more than once. To avoid further encounters with fighters, Rust will then go to low altitude. Such a decision could only be made by a pilot who was well aware of the methods of countering our air defense system.

Although Rust could have easily been shot down that day. This decision had already been made by General Kromin - Commander of the Leningrad Separate Air Defense Army. The instructions that came into being after the September events of 1983, when Far East A South Korean Boeing was shot down, as if by mistake, violating the Soviet border. The instructions prohibited shooting down passenger and light-engine sports aircraft, and the general painfully searched for a solution, thereby saving the life of the German guy. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of his negotiations at the army command post:

- Well, are we going to shoot it down? The pilot reports: Yak-12 type (Soviet light-engine sports aircraft, similar to Cessna).

It was the similarity of Rust’s plane with the Yak-12 that misled our pilot, and after him - and everyone else. The general decided that he was dealing with a flight violator who had forgotten to turn on the identification mode on board or had taken off with faulty equipment. The target was handed over for escort to units of the Moscow District, which regularly “followed” it until the mark from the Cessna disappeared from the indicator screens.

Rust was landing to refuel near Novgorod, where he was “changed”?

As is known, the Cessna 172, piloted by Rust, took off from Helsinki at 13:15 Moscow time and landed on Red Square at 19:30. That is, she was in the air for 6 hours and 15 minutes, covering a distance of approximately 880 km. This means that the Cessna was traveling at an average speed of about 140 km/h, which is much lower than the cruising speed of this type of aircraft, which is 220 km/h.

In addition, over most of the territory where the violator of the Soviet border flew, the wind was favorable to him. That is, according to all calculations, Rust should have arrived in Moscow two hours earlier than the actual landing time. Consequently, the Cessna either deviated significantly from the route (it is unknown for what purpose) or made an intermediate landing somewhere.

It is not surprising that inquisitive people, including the correspondent of the West German magazine Bunde M. Timm, having made similar calculations, asked the questions: where did the “amateur” pilot “sit down” and who could change his clothes? “After all, from Helsinki, - the correspondent was perplexed, - Matthias Rust took off in jeans and a green tunic, and after landing in Moscow he got off the plane in a red jumpsuit.” In Helsinki, according to Timm, there was no image on the tail stabilizer of the Cessna atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima. Where did it come from on the plane after it landed on Red Square?

Rust’s version of an intermediate landing is also supported by the fact that soon after the Soviet interceptors flew over the intruder, air defense reconnaissance systems began to provide information to the higher command post about the target’s descent, then at about 15:32 they lost it. Apparently, the Cessna, having met with the fighters, decided not to tempt fate and, having chosen a suitable site, landed.

By the way, in the area Staraya Russa, where Rust could have made an alleged forced (or perhaps planned) landing, at that time there were up to fifty airfields and more than 60 sites belonging to various departments. None of these sites in that area had any connection with the authorities controlling the order and rules of use of airspace. In a word, even if they wanted, witnesses to the landing of an overseas guest would not be able to call where they should. Simply an ideal place to “dive” from the all-seeing radars of the Soviet air defense. And if Rust accidentally chose such a landing site, then this accident is comparable to winning all the main prizes in one lottery.

But still - Could a German amateur pilot have needed an intermediate landing? Judging by how skillfully, with a sharp loss of altitude, he escaped from the Finnish air defense fighters, we can conclude that Rust was not afraid of interceptors. Having masterfully simulated a fall into the bay, he crossed our border, and the Finnish pilots, having discovered a rainbow spot on the waves from the air, returned reassured to their base.

Here, by the way, is another mystery: how could an oil stain appear on its own at the site of Rust’s “fall”? A technical examination carried out later showed that it was impossible to fake such a stain using a canister or barrel dropped into the bay from an airplane. Only a submarine or boat could provide such camouflage support to a German pilot.

Another mystery. Why did not only our fighters sent to intercept Rust, but also the locators of several radio engineering units at once lose the air intruder? This happened somewhere in the middle of the route.

- More likely, - as Lieutenant Colonel V. Petrenko, senior navigator of the aviation department of the Moscow Air Defense District, explained to the author of the publication in SP, - being an experienced pilot, of which there is no doubt, Rust had a good idea of ​​what could be expected from a meeting with fighters. It was enough for the interceptor to pass over the Cessna in afterburner, and it would have been blown to pieces. Therefore, it is quite possible that Rust dived sharply, going to a low altitude, where he was not exactly a fighter - not a single locator will catch. Or just take it and land...

Former deputy head of the combat training department of the radio technical troops of the Moscow Air Defense District, Lieutenant Colonel E. Sukhoverov, believes that German pilot deliberately made an intermediate landing in order to confuse our locator specialists. That is, from a border violator, as he was identified in the Gulf of Finland region, to simply a violator of flight regulations, at whom no one will shoot.

Those who prepared his adventure with landing in Moscow, the author of the publication summarizes, could not help but know how the duty forces of the Soviet air defense in September 1983 in the Far East shot down a South Korean Boeing, which allegedly flew into Soviet territory by mistake and did not responded to requests from the ground. This sad experience helped Rust to deceive the Soviet rocket scientists, because when the Cessna was detected again, the locator specialists displayed it on their screens not as an “air enemy”, but as an “aircraft without an identification signal,” that is, a violator of the flight regime. On the air defense side, this implied other, more loyal actions. However, as you know, our troops could not accurately identify Rust from the very beginning...

If events developed this way, the author continues, then calling the flight of the “dove of peace” that landed on Red Square simply a prank somehow defies the tongue. It seems that Rust and those who prepared him understood too well the system for collecting and processing radar information of the Soviet air defense system.

Again, only a strange coincidence of circumstances can explain the fact that the route of the state border violator ran through the area where the MiG-25 fighter and Tu-22m bomber crashed the day before. In the area where the planes were supposed to crash, active search and rescue operations were underway, and several “turntables” were spinning in the air. Naturally, in such a mix it was possible to miss the “air enemy,” who, I emphasize, was already identified at that time as a “flight violation.” Moreover, Rust flew his airplane at the same altitude and at the same speed as the search and rescue helicopters that were spinning along his route.

No less strange is the appearance of six unidentified targets in the area of ​​Ostashkov, Kuvshinovo and Selishcha. The duty shift of the radio engineering battalion, observing these marks on the screens of their radars, began to issue coordinates of targets at 16:39. Their escort lasted about half an hour. Then, having made sure that the targets were moving with a course and speed commensurate with the direction and speed of the wind, they stopped paying attention to them, deciding that they were seeing cloud marks on their indicators.

However, the then head of the radio engineering troops, Colonel A. Rudak, who after these events was removed from his post by the new Minister of Defense of the USSR Dmitry Yazov (although on that ill-fated day of May 28, 1987, Rudak was on vacation), still believes that the radar operators did not observe meteorological formation, and the so-called. MRS (small-sized balls). They were launched by someone in the area of ​​Lake Seliger. According to the officer, the configuration of the marks on the radar indicators most closely matched the configuration of the MRS. And their “clustered” arrangement on the locator screen speaks for itself: it means they were launched in one place.

Moreover, the balls appeared in the area of ​​​​responsibility of the radio engineering battalion just at the time when the Cessna was flying through it. The radar operator could easily lose the mark of the air intruder among the marks of the MRS, moving in the same direction-course of a tailwind blowing, as luck would have it, towards the Mother See. It later turned out that a group of West German tourists was in the area of ​​Lake Seliger on May 28. And to launch such a ball, as explained knowledgeable people, as easy as pie. A gas lighter or an aerosol can is enough.

Experts do not rule out that at the time of Rust’s flight, the balloons were launched to overload air defense information channels: this tactic has been practiced more than once in the northern and northwestern directions by our Scandinavian neighbors. However, for some reason, experts from the authorities did not check this version.

By the way, it was precisely at the time when the radar operators were trying to make sense of the tinsel of all kinds of marks that littered the indicator screens that the operational duty officer of the command post of the Moscow Air Defense District, Major General V. Reznichenko, gave the command to turn off the automated control system to carry out unscheduled routine maintenance. This general’s decision during a complex search and rescue operation, when several important air objects were in the air at once, looked rather strange.

- I think there is no military secret in this if I say that during combat duty the ACS equipment is never turned off, - Vladimir Borisovich later recalled. - Even if the electricity suddenly goes out, the automated control system will be switched to backup power. Therefore, when unknown persons in civilian clothes approached me and asked me to turn off the automated control system, I was even taken aback. In the air - several unidentified targets, and among them - either an “air enemy” or a “flight violation”, and I’ll take it and turn off the equipment?! In addition, the troops had a group of inspectors from the General Staff who could “launch” a control target at any moment. I asked them directly: “Who are you?” And then they said that they were techies, that is, representatives of industry. I flatly refused to turn off the ACS...

The “industrialists” began to insist, and Major General Reznichenko demanded from them an official document signed by at least the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces. The operational duty officer was sure that such a document was unlikely to be shown to him. And I was very surprised when “representatives of the plant” literally in a matter of minutes brought a paper signed by the commander in chief...

- After all, I had no intention of turning off the ACS, - Vladimir Borisovich was worried about the flood of memories, - but they began to threaten me: they say, we’ll call where we need to, and you won’t end up in trouble. Oh, if only I knew what it would lead to later...

Vladimir Borisovich admitted that from the very beginning he was alarmed by the ridiculous request of the “plant representatives” who started preventive work at an inopportune hour. Previously, in such cases, the opinion of the operational duty officer was always taken into account. Why was he neglected this time?

“The West managed to attract people from Gorbachev’s inner circle to implement the project”

Soviet newspapers of that time, Kirichenko writes, as if by agreement, dubbed Rust’s unprecedented flight a boyish prank, a hooligan prank, for which it seemed impossible to punish. At the same time, Rust’s “air hooliganism” led to the resignation of senior army officials and gave Mikhail Gorbachev a reason to begin a radical reduction of the armed forces. This was followed by the destruction of the Warsaw Pact, the fall of communist regimes in Eastern European countries and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which was so prevented by the then USSR Minister of Defense, Marshal Sokolov.

When you think about it, the trick of the German amateur pilot seems far from harmless. This whole story is very similar to a performance played out according to a carefully thought-out scenario, in which Western intelligence services and numerous agents of influence embedded in our echelons of power were probably involved.

The author of the publication cites in confirmation the words of American national security specialist William E. Odom, who believes that 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.

“Since Gorbachev came to power, - writes Odom, - Only the Deputy Minister of Defense for Armaments retained his position. The replaced officials included the Minister of Defense, all his other deputies, the Chief of the General Staff and his two first deputies. Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces of the Warsaw Pact and Chief of Staff of the Allied Forces, all four “supreme commanders”, all commanders of groups of forces (in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary), all fleet commanders, all commanders of military districts. In some cases (especially the command of military districts) commanders were replaced three times... It is difficult to say how far down the official ladder the wave of purges swept, but it probably reached at least the level of division commands, and perhaps went further lower"...

Given such devastating consequences, it can be assumed that the flight of the West German amateur pilot was not a boyish prank at all, but a skillfully disguised espionage mission to study missile-hazardous areas and the duty schedule of Soviet air defense radar systems.

- There is no doubt that Rust's flight was a carefully planned provocation by Western intelligence services, - The author quotes the words of Army General Pyotr Deinekin, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force in 1991-1997. - And, most importantly, this special operation was carried out with the consent and knowledge of individuals from the then leadership of the Soviet Union. This sad thought about internal betrayal is suggested by the fact that immediately after Rust’s landing on Red Square, an unprecedented purge of the top and middle generals began. It was as if they were specially waiting for the right occasion.

- At that time I was the commander of the anti-aircraft missile forces of the USSR Air Defense and found myself, as they say, at the forefront of events, - recalls another direct participant in those events - Colonel General Rasim Akchurin, brother of the famous cardiologist Renat Akchurin. - At that very fateful moment, I was checking the Leningrad Air Defense Army in the Baltics. If Rust had been shot down, I assure you, even his fragments would not have been collected. But we had no right to fire at him; we could only force him to land. However, it was not possible to land it, because the fighters and Rust’s airplane had too different speeds. But Rust was escorted, and our cars flew over him.

- I believe that this was a brilliant operation developed by Western intelligence agencies, - says Igor Morozov, a former KGB colonel and participant in the war in Afghanistan. - After 25 years, it becomes obvious that the West (and this is no longer a secret to anyone) managed to attract people from Gorbachev’s inner circle to implement the grandiose project, and they calculated the reaction of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee with one hundred percent accuracy. But there was only one goal - decapitate the USSR Armed Forces.

These are the sad facts cited by military journalist Evgeniy Kirichenko in his publication.

 

It might be useful to read: