The 19 Year Old Who Fooled the USSR

         After learning about the Cold War in class I realized that during the last 20 years or so, my dad lived in Western Europe, close to Germany right where so many different Cold War events occurred. I asked him if he remembered anything in particular about the War but I knew that he lived in the Netherlands, nothing really happened there. The one thing he could remember kind of being a part of was the story of Mathias Rust. During 1987, my dad was a 17-year-old exchange student living in Hamburg. That same year Mathias Rust, 19 at flew more than 500 miles alone through every Soviet defensive shield in a single-engine plane to land at the gates of the Kremlin.

The Cessna airplane Rust flew right into the Red Square

         A year before, Rust had been sitting in his parent's apartment in Hamburg while he was watching TV when he came up with the idea. He was already working towards earning his pilot's license, so he simply told his parents that he was going to tour northern Europe in order to clock up hours towards his licence. Why did he decide to fly into the USSR? In 1986 the Reykjavik summit that was supposed to lead to arms agreements between the US and the USSR it collapsed at the last second. Rust, who was very passionate about politics believed that "...every human on this planet is responsible for some progress and I was looking for an opportunity to take my share in it."

Mathias Rust - "Of course
I was afraid to lose my life."

       During Rust's actual flight he first stopped in the Shetland Islands in the UK, and then the Faroe Islands. He spent one night in each. Next came the Reykjavik, then Bergen in Norway before he arrived on May 25th in the Helsinki, the capital of Finland. He spent several days there trying to decide if he really had the courage to go through with his plan. The USSR had the largest air defence system in the world at the time. Less than five years earlier, the Korean Air Flight 858 had been shot down after straying into Soviet airspace, causing the death of all 269 passengers on board. On the morning of May 28th, he told the air traffic control in Helsinki he would be heading to Stockholm. Back in Helsinki, the air control operators began to worry. Rust was heading in the wrong direction and then vanished from their radar screens before they could contact. An enormous manhunt was launched by the Finnish coastguard and when a patch of oil was spotted on the sea surface, divers were brought in to search for a wreck. At the same time as this manhunt, Rust was sitting safely, for now, in his cockpit as his plane crossed into Soviet airspace.
            The Soviet radars saw his presence within an hour and a combination of unbelievable luck and human error had led to Rust's plane being mistaken for a friendly aircraft. Rust's goal was to land right in the middle of the Red Square but this was proving to be very difficult to achieve since there were a ton of people walking through the center of it. Instead, Ruscontinuallyly flew only 30 feet above the Red Square as the citizens watched in awe as the plane flew above. Finally Rust spotted a bridge next to St Basil's Cathedral and decided to instead touch down there. Later, when he was questioned by the Russian police, he learned that the bridge was usually spanned by thick cables, by chance, they had been removed from the bridge that very morning for maintenance, allowing him to land. He told the police that questioned him that he was "on a peace mission from Germany", the Soviet police force then shook his hand assuming that he was from East Germany, not the West.  Rust ended up being sentenced to 4 years in a labour camp and as a result, the minister of defence had been forced to retire, and the head of the air defence services had been sacked. Over the next few months, more than 150 people lost their jobs.
         To my dad and many others at the time, this began to really show how the Soviet Union was beginning to lose power and could no longer really be considered the massive superpower that it was in the decades before. 2 years later, the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War came to an end.

Here is a video of his landing: (35 seconds)

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20609795