Mathias' Wild Ride to Moscow

In May 1987, Mathias Rust had himself one hell of a flight. The 18-year-old West German was a member of a youth flying club in Hamburg, and he took off from nearby Uetersen in a rented Cessna F172P and headed for the Faroe Islands north of Great Britain. He had removed a few seats inside the plane to make room for auxiliary fuel tanks, so he knew he could make it. He’d also packed a small suitcase, some maps, a sleeping bag, a life vest, and 15 quarts of engine oil — not to mention a motorcycle helmet, in case something bad happened to his plane. He hopped from the Faros and made a nice tour around Northern Europe, going from Iceland to Norway and then stopping in Helsinki, Finland, to refuel. But Helsinki wasn’t the ultimate destination of Rust’s trip. He was heading east, straight through the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union with a plan to land in Moscow’s Red Square.

Rust had grand plans for his journey. He was tired of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union and its dangerous nuclear stalemate, and he wanted his trip to create an “imaginary bridge” between the world powers. He had been planning his flight for a while, and intended his earlier stops in the Faroes and Iceland as practice for his illegal entry into Russia. Taking off from Helsinki, he told air traffic control that he was heading west toward Stockholm. He thanked them and said goodbye. Then he turned off all of his communications equipment and veered east as Finnish authorities frantically tried to contact him.

After he crossed over Estonia and turned toward Moscow, he appeared on the radar of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. They pinged him with an IFF signal, and when he didn’t respond, they tagged him Combat Number 8255, designating his flight a possibly enemy incursion. SAM battalions and interceptor units were mobilized, and within fifteen minutes a MiG-23 spotted Rust and asked for permission to engage. Rust saw the MiG appear beside him - huge compared to his aircraft. “I remember how my heart felt, beating very fast,” he said later. “This was exactly the moment when you start to ask yourself: Is this when they shoot you down?” They was so close that Rust could see the Russian’s face as the two eyed each other. The Russian pilot waited a long time for an answer from command, and was eventually told to leave the little Cessna alone. He retracted the MiG’s flaps, performed a couple loops around Rust, and disappeared.

Thus began a four-hour clown show in the ranks of the Soviet military. As Rust continued toward the Russian capital at low altitude, the fighter jets lost sight of him. He had time to land and change clothes near a small town called Staraya, and after he took to the air again the Soviet air defenses spotted him several times but couldn’t maintain contact. In an effort to make things easier for management, the Russians had split up their defense responsibilities among several districts, and then larded on a mess of bureaucratic red tape that made communication difficult and stripped incentive for assertive action. The defense net in one of the zones Mathias passed through couldn’t identify IFF signals, and so labeled every plane on radar as “friendly.” Another zone was busy responding to a plane crash, and they confused Rust’s aircraft with a rescue helicopter even after several sightings. Reports bounced around the command as the Cessna approached Moscow, but Rust had come so far that no one wanted to be assertive about the intruder since they might be punished for not acting sooner. The flight was flagged as a local training aircraft breaking regulations. It was assigned the lowest priority for air defense, and ignored.

When Rust arrived in Moscow, he intended to put on a show. He had thought about landing inside the Kremlin, but this could allow the Russians to quietly arrest him behind those high walls and hide the incident from the public. Red Square was a more suitable spot, and he circled around to see if he could make it work. But there were too many people milling about the area, and Rust was on a mission of peace — he didn’t want to run anyone over. So he ended up landing on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, right by St. Basil’s Cathedral, as onlookers gathered to see what was going on. As he came down, he saw an old Volga car ahead of him. “I moved to the left to pass him,” Rust said, “and as I did I looked and saw this old man with this look on his face like he could not believe what he was seeing. I just hoped he wouldn’t panic and lose control of the car and hit me.”

Rust landed safely, then guided his plane along the road past the Cathedral. When he got out of the Cessna, instead of being swarmed by soldiers and KGB agents, he was greeted by excited Russians who asked him for autographs. Some thought the aircraft might be part of a movie production, or even Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbechev’s private plane. A woman gave Rust a piece of bread as a sign of friendship. A Soviet Army cadet politely suggested to him that he should have just applied for a visa and made an appointment to see Gorbechev.

It took the authorities nearly two hours to get to the scene. KGB agents first focused on the crowd, grabbing cameras and notebooks and asking people what they had seen. A truck full of soldiers rolled up and dispersed the onlookers. Eventually three men arrived in a black car and politely asked Rust for his passport, and made sure he wasn’t carrying any weapons. They placed him under arrest and drove him away.

Mathias Rust was tried later that year, and he was sentenced to four years in a work camp for his violation of Soviet air space. He ended up serving less than a year inside a temporary detention facility in Moscow before he was released back to West Germany as a gesture of Soviet goodwill during negotiations for a nuclear weapons treaty. Rust had written a 20-page manifesto to Gorbechev on how to further world peace, but it’s unknown if Gorbechev ever read it. “I thought my chances of actually getting to Moscow were about 50-50,” Rust said after returning home. He pointed out that in the 1983 the Soviets had blown Korean Airlines Flight 007 out of the sky when it violated Soviet airspace, killing everyone onboard. “But I was convinced I was doing the right thing,” he said. “I just had to dare to do it.”

He never flew a plane again.

In a way, Rust accomplished his goal — the Cold War would be over a few years after his flight — but it wasn’t his youthful idealism or his message of peace that did it. He had revealed the decay in the Soviet Union’s systems in a way that everyone could see. The Red Bear was brought down by an internal legitimacy crisis, and those are hard to stop once they get rolling. This was already under way in 1987, but a kid from the West making it all the way to Moscow and facing nothing but confusion and incompetence along the way was quite the flick of the Jenga tower.

The incident dealt a serious blow to the reputation of the Soviet armed forces, and in response Gorbechev bulldozed all military opposition to his reform agenda and sacked thousands of officers. It was the largest purge of the ranks since Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, but it didn’t stop the collapse in respect for — and fear of — the Soviet military and its bureaucratic sand castles.

Regimes don’t fall when they’re at their most tyrannical. They fall when they appear weak, stupid, and ineffective. Joseph Stalin, among the most tyrannical leaders of all time and possibly the most powerful man who ever lived, had no serious challenge to his rule of the Soviet Union once he had the reins. Ancien France’s Louis XVI and Tsarist Russia’s Nicholas II, on the other hand, were rather gentle rulers in the context of their time and place, and their regimes collapsed after serial displays of incompetence and challenges that went without strong response. They helmed gigantic brutish systems, but the gears were breaking down, and they couldn’t mount a defense once a critical mass had smelled the blood in the water.

“Slowly, then all at once,” said Ernest Hemingway when asked how he went bankrupt. So it goes with imperial regimes.