The Dymshits–Kuznetsov aircraft hijacking affair, also known as The First Leningrad Trial or Operation Wedding (, or Дело группы Дымшица-Кузнецова) (Leningrad Process), was an attempt to take an empty civilian aircraft on 15 June 1970 by a group of 16 Soviet

refusenik Refusenik (, ; alternatively spelled refusnik) was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and oth ...

s in order to escape to the

West West is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some Romance langu ...

. Even though the attempt was unsuccessful, it was a notable event in the course of the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

because it drew international attention to

human rights Human rights are universally recognized Morality, moral principles or Social norm, norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both Municipal law, national and international laws. These rights are considered ...

violations in the Soviet Union and resulted in the temporary loosening of emigration restrictions.

Background

In the wake of the

1967 Arab–Israeli War The Six-Day War, also known as the June War, 1967 Arab–Israeli War or Third Arab–Israeli War, was fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab world, Arab states, primarily United Arab Republic, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan from 5 to 10June ...

, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. A large number of Soviet Jews applied for exit visas to leave the Soviet Union. The process of applying for an exit visa often cost applicants their jobs, which in turn made them vulnerable to charges of social parasitism, a criminal offense. While some were allowed to leave, many were refused permission to emigrate, either immediately or after their cases had languished for years in ''OVIR'' (ОВиР, "Отдел Виз и Регистрации", "Otdel Viz i Registratsii", English: Office of Visas and Registration), the MVD (Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs) department responsible for exit visas. In many instances, the reason given for denial was that these persons had been given access, at some point in their careers, to information vital to Soviet national security and could not be allowed to leave.The Right to Emigrate, cont.
Beyond the Pale. The History of Jews in Russia. Exhibit by

Incident

In 1970, a group of sixteen

Refusenik Refusenik (, ; alternatively spelled refusnik) was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and oth ...

s (14 of them Jewish) were organized by

dissident A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 2 ...

Edward Kuznetsov, who had previously served a seven-year term in prison for publishing ''Phoenix-61'', a

samizdat Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual rep ...

poetry collection. The group plotted to buy all the seats on a small 12-seater

Antonov An-2 The Antonov An-2 (USAF/DoD reporting name Type 22, NATO reporting name Colt) is a Soviet Union, Soviet mass-produced single-engine biplane utility/agricultural aircraft designed and manufactured by the Antonov Design Bureau beginning in 1947. I ...

(colloquially known as "кукурузник," ''kukuruznik'') making a local flight from

Leningrad Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

to Priozersk, under the guise of a trip to a wedding. They then planned to throw out the pilots before takeoff from an intermediate stop and fly to Sweden. Their final goal was Israel. One of the participants, Mark Dymshits, was a former military pilot, who had experience flying the An-2s. The group called the plan "Operation Wedding". The plan was set in motion in June 1970. On the morning of 15 June, the group arrived together in Smolny Airport near Leningrad, only to be arrested by the

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

Aftermath

The accused were charged with

high treason Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its d ...

, punishable by death under Article 64 of the

penal code A criminal code or penal code is a document that compiles all, or a significant amount of, a particular jurisdiction's criminal law. Typically a criminal code will contain Crime, offences that are recognised in the jurisdiction, penalties that ...

of the

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR), previously known as the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia,Declaration of Rights of the labo ...

(RSFSR). In a trial that took place from 15 to 24 December 1970, Mark Dymshits (age: 43) and Eduard Kuznetsov (age: 31) received death sentences.Mozorov, Boris (Ed.) (1999).
Documents on Soviet Jewish Emigration
London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass. p. 90, note 3. The prison sentences received by nine other participants were as follows: Sylva Zalmanson (age: 25; then Kuznetsov's wife, and the only woman on trial), 10 years; Yosef Mendelevitch (age: 23) and Yuri Fedorov, 15 years; Oleksii Murzhenko (age: 28), 14 years; Arie (Leib) Hanoch (age: 25), 13 years; Anatoli Altmann (age: 28), 12 years; Boris Penson (age: 23), 10 years; Israel Zalmanson (age: 21), 8 years; and Mendel Bodnya (age: 32), 4 years. Wolf Zalmanson (age: 31), brother of Sylva and Israel Zalmanson, who was a lieutenant in the Soviet army, was tried separately by a military tribunal and, on 2 January 1971, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. After international protests, the Judicial Commission for Criminal Cases of the RSFSR Supreme Court in Moscow considered an appeal of the cases. The capital sentences of Dymshits and Kuznetsov were commuted to 15 years in prison, while the prison terms for several other defendants were reduced by two to five years. Strong international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to significantly increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960 through 1970, only 4,000 people had (legally) emigrated from the USSR; after the trial, in the period from 1971 to 1980, 347,100 people received a visa to leave the USSR, of whom 245,951 were Jews. upright=1.5, Jewish emigration from USSR, before and after the First Leningrad Trial In August 1974, Sylva Zalmanson was released as part of an Israeli secret Soviet prisoner exchange with the spy Yuri Linov that took place in Berlin, after which she immigrated to Israel, arriving in September. In the following years she advocated for the release of her husband, Edward Kuznetsov, and other dissidents. Kuznetsov was finally released on 27 April 1979, and joined his wife in Israel. Mark Dymshits was released at the same time, along with three other prominent Soviet dissidents, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Valentin Moroz, and

Georgy Vins Georgi Petrovich Vins (; 4 August 1928 – 11 January 1998) was a Russian Baptist pastor persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his involvement in a network of independent Baptist churches. Following an agreement between Soviet leader Leonid Br ...

. The release of the five dissidents came after long negotiations as part of a prisoner exchange for two Soviet foreign

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as t ...

officers, Rudolf Chernyaev and Valdik Enger. The Soviet operatives, who were employed at the time at the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

Secretariat, had been sentenced in a U.S. federal court to 50 years in prison, in October 1978, following their arrest in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

the previous May, while collecting an agent's report from a secret cache (a co-conspirator, Vladimir Zinyakin, an attaché of the Soviet mission to the UN, had

diplomatic immunity Diplomatic immunity is a principle of international law by which certain foreign government officials are recognized as having legal immunity from the jurisdiction of another country.

, and was not charged). After immigrating to Israel, Kuznetsov headed the news department of "

Radio Liberty Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a media organization broadcasting news and analyses in 27 languages to 23 countries across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Headquartered in Prague since 1995, RFE/RL ...

" (1983–1990), and was the chief editor of the largest Israeli Russian-language newspaper, ''Вести'' (1990–1999), the most popular Russian-language newspaper outside of Russia. "The Committee to Free the Leningrad Three," headed by Colorado State Senator Tilman Bishop, was instrumental in organizing

grassroots A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to imp ...

and diplomatic campaigns to release the remaining prisoners. In February 1981, Mendelevitch was released and joined his family in Israel. He urged continuance of the campaign to free two members of the group, Fedorov and Murzhenko: "The fact that both are non-Jewish is the worst example of Soviet discrimination and must not pass without protest." On 15 June 1984, Murzhenko (1942-1999) was released, only to be rearrested for "parole violation" and sentenced to another two years; he was released June 4, 1987 and immigrated to the USA Feb. 29, 1988. In June 1985, after serving 15 years, Yuri Fedorov was released under the 101st kilometre settlement restriction. He was denied an exit visa until 1988, when he left for the United States. In 1998, he founded The Gratitude Fund in order to commemorate the Soviet dissidents "who waged a war against Soviet power and sacrificed their personal freedom and their lives for democracy." In 2016, '' Operation Wedding'', a documentary about the hijacking directed by Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov (the daughter of Kuznetsov and Sylva Zalmanson, two participants in the plot) was released.

Notes

*
ИНАКОМЫСЛИЯ В СССР'' (The History of Dissident Movement in the USSR)
by Ludmila Alekseyeva. Vilnius, 1992 (Russian)
"The Leningrad trial of the 'hijackers'," ''A Chronicle of Current Events'' (17.6), 31 December 1970
and compare
"The Aeroplane affair", ''A Chronicle of Current Events'' (20.1), 2 July 1971

References

External links