In June 1970, fourteen Soviet Jews tried to steal an airplane to fly themselves to freedom. A new documentary marks their story—and Natan Sharansky reminisces.
In June 1970, fourteen Soviet Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate tried to steal an airplane to fly themselves to freedom in the West. Led by Edouard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits, the group had spent months plotting their move.
The hijackers, claiming to be traveling together to a wedding—hence “Operation Wedding,” the name of their scheme—had bought all the seats on the small aircraft to ensure there would be no one but themselves on board. They intended to subdue the pilots non-lethally and leave them on the side of the runway, having provided sleeping bags to keep them warm until rescued. Dymshits, a former Red Army pilot, would fly the plane.
When they arrived at the small airstrip outside of Leningrad, KGB agents were waiting to arrest them.
The sensational news spread throughout the Soviet Union, reported first by Voice of America and then by Pravda. Some Soviet Jews reacted with dread; others felt proud and emboldened. At the time, Jews in the Soviet Union numbered approximately 2.5 million. Religious practice was restricted, the teaching of Hebrew was banned, and Zionism was branded a subversive ideology. Small groups of Jews were meeting in secret to preserve what remained of their religious and national identity. Although many had begun to apply for exit visas—at risk of losing their jobs or even their friends—most were denied. The Soviet government strictly curtailed emigration in general, and by 1970 had barred Jews altogether from leaving for Israel.
The trials of the would-be hijackers were closed, although activists did what they could to follow the proceedings. Dymshits and Kuznetsov, the ringleaders, were sentenced to death. But the international outcry—protest marches were held in Paris, London, and New York, and other forms of pressure were brought to bear as well—the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev commuted their sentences to fifteen years apiece.
Yesterday,Operation Wedding, a documentary about the hijacking directed by Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov (the daughter of Kuznetsov and Sylva Zalmanson, another participant in the plot) received its New York premiere at Columbia University. In anticipation of the screening, which was arranged by my student organization, I recently interviewed Natan Sharansky, who at the time of the hijacking had been a twenty-two-year-old mathematics student in Moscow. I was curious about his recollections of this incident, which would launch his own career as the world’s most famous Soviet Jewish dissident and later “prisoner of Zion.” We spoke in Jerusalem, where since 2009 he has served as chairman of the Jewish Agency.
The thwarted hijacking, Sharansky tells me, influenced him more profoundly than any other event apart from the Six-Day War of 1967. He had been unaware of the underground Zionist movement that developed in Riga and Leningrad in the 1960s, so the deeds of Kuznetsov and his co-conspirators were his first indication that some Jews were actually fighting for any opportunity to leave for Israel and willing to take extreme risks in the attempt. His reaction, he says, was typical of countless other Soviet Jews dreaming of emigration and afraid of saying so. In a society where anyone could be a KGB informant, no reasonable person could be expected to take a chance of speaking out.