No Exit

A hijack attempt is foiled

The five men and three or four women who boarded Aeroflot Flight 6833 to Leningrad were members of a wedding party, though elopement seemed more on their minds. Not long after the plane left the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, about 85 miles from the Turkish border, the group ordered the pilot to fly to Turkey. Instead, the captain alerted ground control and flew in circles around the airport at Tbilisi before finally touching down there. Throughout the afternoon and night, the plane sat on the tarmac while the hijackers demanded that it be refueled. Meanwhile, a crack antiterrorist squad was brought in from Moscow. On the following morning, the security forces stormed the plane and the hijackers, reportedly the children of prominent Georgian officials, eventually surrendered. By the time the smoke had cleared, a crew member, a flight mechanic, an air hostess, at least three of the unknown number of passengers and one of the hijackers lay dead.

The episode was the most violent hijacking in Soviet aviation history, though by no means the first. Since 1970,14 cases of air piracy have been reported in the Soviet Union. In 1973, after a rash of hijack attempts, authorities declared that plane seizures resulting in loss of life were punishable by death. Neither that penalty nor the rigorous security checks to be found at every Soviet airport were sufficient to deter the Georgian wedding party. Alarmed Soviet officials launched a high-level investigation into the case. No mention of the event appeared in the Soviet national press.

TASS, the Soviet news agency, showed no such reluctance in publicizing the fate of a Moscow store manager. Yuri Sokolov, former director of the Gastronom No. 1, Moscow's finest food store, was renowned for being able to supply his customers with such rare or rationed delicacies as caviar, smoked sturgeon, coffee and Indian tea. As caterer to the capital's elite, Sokolov lived in high style and had friends close to Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Sokolov was arrested last year for accepting bribes. Some of the caterer's influential acquaintances appealed in his behalf, to no avail. After Brezhnev's death on Nov. 10, 1982, his successor Yuri Andropov launched a campaign against high-level corruption. Last week TASS announced that Sokolov had been sentenced to death and that four of his assistants were given long prison terms. Stiff penalties for corruption are not infrequent in the Soviet Union, but before Andropov's crackdown they were rarely imposed on someone as well connected as Sokolov. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.