(New York Times) Gal Beckerman - Forty years ago this month, Yosef Mendelevich, a young Soviet Jew, camped with a group of friends outside the Smolny airport near Leningrad. The next morning, they planned to commandeer a 12-seat airplane, fly it to Sweden and, once there, declare their purpose: to move to Israel, a dream they had long been denied. Mendelevich felt sure they would get caught, but to his mind, a group suicide was preferable to a life of waiting for an exit visa that would never arrive. Even a botched attempt, he figured, would at least attract the eyes of the world. The next day, as the plotters walked onto the tarmac, they were caught. The KGB had known of their plan for months, and the two leaders were sentenced to death. But the planned hijacking, and the Soviet government's overreaction to it, opened the first significant rip in the Iron Curtain, one through which hundreds of thousands would eventually flee. The essential weakness of the Soviet Union was exposed: to survive, the regime had to imprison its own population.
2010-06-18 09:20:58Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive