Soviet Union Welcome to Moscow

By John Greenwald

Fittingly enough, last Thursday was Border Guard Day in the Soviet Union, a national celebration that honors the troops protecting the country's sprawling frontiers. Tourists and Muscovites strolling through Red Square that evening looked up to see a small single-engine plane coming in low from the south. It circled the great plaza, barely clearing the red brick walls of the Kremlin and buzzing the Lenin Mausoleum before finally touching down. At about 7:30 p.m. the little craft came to rest on the cobblestones behind onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral. Bystanders scattered. Police gaped in astonishment. Official black sedans sped to the spot.

Out of the plane, a blue-and-white Cessna Skyhawk 172, stepped Mathias Rust, 19, a computer operator and amateur pilot from Hamburg, West Germany. While the authorities debated what to do with him, Rust coolly signed autographs for the crowd, adding the words HAMBURG-MOSCOW. Shortly afterward he was taken away by police. Said a 24-year-old Muscovite who saw the pilot step from his craft: "People did not know what had happened. Something this unusual does not happen every day."

Unusual indeed. Rust's feat was one of the oddest milestones in the history of aviation. Aircraft are rarely allowed to overfly -- much less touch down in -- the tightly guarded center of Moscow, which is ringed by an antiballistic missile system that is usually described as formidable. Moreover, Rust had managed to fly unmolested from Helsinki across more than 400 miles of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. Said a Western diplomat in Moscow: "This puts a hole right through one of the great myths of this place, the myth of invincibility and impenetrability." A Soviet official put it more bluntly, "There are going to be more than red faces among the military over this."

Sure enough, what began as a zany stunt swiftly escalated into a major crisis for the Soviet military command. Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who returned to Moscow on Friday from East Berlin, where he and Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov had been attending a Warsaw Pact summit, acted decisively. The next day Gorbachev convened an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the Kremlin. After that session, the Politburo fired Sokolov, 75, and Marshal of Aviation Alexander Koldunov, 63, who headed the nation's air- defense system. Sokolov was replaced as the top Soviet military leader by General of the Army Dmitri Yazov, 64, a former commander of the Far East military district who had recently been named Deputy Defense Minister for personnel. No replacement was immediately announced for Koldunov.

The Soviets were uncharacteristically blunt about the dismissals. In a bulletin read on the evening news program Vremya, the official news agency, TASS, announced that Sokolov had been relieved in "connection with his retirement." TASS went on to report that the Politburo had learned that the plane had been "detected by radars of the antiaircraft defenses when it was approaching the state border of the U.S.S.R. Soviet fighter planes twice flew around the West German plane." But apparently no action was taken, which led the Politburo to conclude that the "antiaircraft-defenses command had shown intolerable unconcern and indecision about cutting short the flight without resorting to combat means. This fact attests to serious shortcomings in organizing the protection of the airspace of the country . . . and major dereliction of duty in the guidance of forces by the Ministry of Defense."

The incident was a stunning and ironic contrast to the September 1983 downing of a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet that had penetrated Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard the plane were killed when a Soviet fighter blasted the Korean jetliner with a missile near the island of Sakhalin. When reminded by reporters of KAL Flight 007 last week, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov responded angrily, "You criticize us for shooting down a plane, and now you criticize us for not shooting down a plane."

Last week's Red Square landing may have provided Gorbachev with precisely the pretext he needed to oust Sokolov. Western diplomats have speculated for months that Gorbachev wanted to replace the aging minister with a younger, more vigorous man. Said a Western official in Moscow: "The man at the top has to be responsible. That is the military way."

At the center of the furor was the unlikely figure of Rust, a novice pilot who has held a private license for only a year. Friends said the 6-ft.-tall teenager had set out from Hamburg on May 13 on his first long-distance solo flight. Operating a plane rented from Aero Club Hamburg and fitted with extra fuel tanks, Rust filed a flight plan for Reykjavik, Iceland, some 1,300 miles and twelve hours away. He said his goal was to log as quickly as possible the 150 flying hours required for a commercial license.

After leaving Hamburg, Rust flew to the West German island of Sylt in the North Sea, the Shetland Islands off northern Scotland, Reykjavik and eventually on to Helsinki. Officials at Helsinki's Vantaa International Airport reported that Rust took off at 12:21 p.m. last Thursday after filing a flight plan for Stockholm. Air traffic controllers tracked the plane as it headed west. But 20 minutes into the flight, Rust's Cessna turned abruptly southeast, toward the Soviet Union, and then disappeared from Finnish radar screens. Rust was not heard from again until he arrived in Moscow after a flight of some six hours.

What was Rust up to? The Hamburg-based newspaper Bild quoted him as telling Soviet police, "I just wanted to talk with Russians." According to the newspaper, Rust said he had been shadowed by Soviet fighters along the way, and he offered an explanation for his unauthorized route through the Soviet Union: "If I had asked for a regular flight path, I wouldn't have had enough fuel to get to Moscow."

When a public opinion institute conducted a snap poll of more than 2,000 West Germans for their reaction to Rust's flight, 79% said they were "tickled" by the exploit. West German officials were considerably more somber. At week's end, said an aide to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the government had not received "so much as a police blotter" report from the Soviet Union about the incident. Officials were worried not only about the fate of Rust but also about the impact of his stunt on Soviet-West German relations. One senior Bonn diplomat called the timing of Rust's flight particularly unfortunate "against the background of the present arms discussions and everything else at stake in the world at the moment."

The gloom lifted a bit after Moscow privately informed Bonn that West German officials would be allowed to visit Rust this Tuesday. It offered hope that the Soviets will not cancel a state visit by West German President Richard von Weizsacker scheduled for July.

The Red Square landing provided an eerie echo of a February 1974 incident in which a disgruntled U.S. Army private stole a helicopter from Fort Meade, Md., and landed it safely on the South Lawn of the White House. Then, as now, officials were shocked at the ease with which an unidentified craft was able to penetrate vital and heavily defended airspace. Initially, the Soviet press drew parallels between the two incidents, as if to minimize their seriousness. But TASS reported that during the emergency Politburo meeting the Soviet leadership took a far harsher view, and Soviet newscasters said an investigation would be conducted that could lead to the prosecution of some military personnel.

The landing on the White House lawn may have had little long-term impact on U.S. policy of any sort. But Mathias Rust's 16-day joyride, having already shaken the Soviet defense establishment, could have some enduring consequences for the Kremlin -- and the West.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn