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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

Mathias Rust is another, more famous, unauthorized border-crosser. Thirty years ago, in May 1987, the then-18-year-old West German took off from Helsinki in his rented Cessna and due to various happenstances was allowed to not only enter the Soviet airspace unchallenged, but to fly all the way to Moscow and land next to the Red Square.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

Much less known, and much more tragic, is the story of two Finnish teenage boys who, in 1946, set sail from Helsinki in their small boat. Their intention was to voyage to Stockholm to meet some relatives, but as a result of extremely bad luck and post-war Soviet paranoia ended up in a forced-labor camp in Siberia.

http://beaufortmagazine.fi/2014/08/seven-years-sailing/

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I was just researching Mathias Rust since he was mentioned in the Cessna 172 article[0] trending on HN right now.

Wikipedia says he stabbed a nurse shortly after his return, but was lacking details. A quick search turned up a couple news articles.[1][2] Notable excerpts include:

"According to police, Rust pulled an 18-year-old student nurse into a hospital changing room and, after locking the door behind them, attempted to kiss her.

When she resisted, she was stabbed twice in the stomach, police said."

He received only two and a half years in prison for that. The woman he stabbed nearly died. What the fuck.

"Mr. Rust had testified that he might have been drugged throughout his captivity in the Soviet Union, where he had been jailed for more than a year after landing a borrowed plane in Red Square in May 1987."

Having just read an article on the U.S.'s psychochemical warfare program[3] in the 1950s and 60s, and considering the Soviets had similar programs, I suppose it's possible he was drugged in a manner that had long-term effects. It'd make sense for the Soviets to render him violent in an attempt to destroy what amounted to a Western folk hero at the time.

That said, he was already out of his mind to attempt penetrating Soviet airspace in a Cessna 172, so an incident involving spontaneous violence isn't exactly surprising.

Either way, I found the whole thing extremely bizarre.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13792309

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-24/news/mn-176_1_moscow-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/20/world/red-square-pilot-con...

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delir...

Rust was an introverted nerd, thats why he flew naively to Russia. It was just luck that he wasn't shot down. Strangely, his journey was though beneficial for Perestroika, as Gorbachev used the embarrassing incident to clean house and retire opponents in the military.

> He received only two and a half years in prison for that. The woman he stabbed nearly died. What the fuck.

I looked it up: At that time public opinion pivoted against him. His parents had sold his story to a magazine for a larger sum, which was seen as greedy and improper journalism, and he himself made very naive/weird statements in interviews (e.g. his claim about the russians drugging him). The media wanted him to be a hero and an attractive daredevil pilot, but he turned out to just be a boring weirdo. A socially inept and awkward 20 year old.

Regarding the knife attack he claimed that the girl rebuked his advances by calling him (I am paraphrasing the German here) "a loser, that he never will succeed and will ever be a loser, and the russia thing was just a stunt to make himself important". Rust said something snapped in him. A psychological examination saw this as triggering his neurosis. The court followed this and I guess judged the media stress as mitigating factor for his affect action. (The girl denied saying that to him and indeed only survived because the stabbing was in a hospital.)

After prison Rust had an odd life. He was in Asia and abroad, he had two failed marriages there, he claimed to have been a professional Poker player and having won a small fortune with poker, which allowed him to be financially independent, but then he was caught trying to steal an expensive cashmere pullover in a store, something about check fraud, something about a Yoga school he wanted to open...

http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/kreml-flieger-mathias-rust-...

Rust seems fairly lucid in this interview: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cold-war-is-back-peace...

Rust enabled Gorbachev to enact the biggest military purge since Stalin, which helped bring the Cold War to an end. Wires which would have made his landing impossible had been taken down. I'm surprised conspiracy theorists have not claimed it was planned by the Soviet leadership.

Unlikely to have been planned but 'never waste a crisis'.

I think there are definitely lots of people in Russia who claim that.

This bizarre excerpt certainly piqued my curiosity:

>The boys decided to set up camp on a nearby island, but in the middle of the night they woke to a scream. It sounded like a woman’s cry. “We were sure it was a maniac or something. You could hear cries from different directions.” The boys decided to leave the island in the middle of the night.

Wish I knew what that was all about! Too bad we don't know what island they stopped on. Are there animals whose calls sound like a woman's screams?

Edit: Some Googling tells me they may have been hearing a group of red foxes.

Yep. Goes right up your back.

Yeah, foxes was what I thought. Their screams can be pretty terrifying.

> Are there animals whose calls sound like a woman's screams?

Rabbits and coyotes can make sounds that'll make you wonder what you just heard and if someone is in distress.

Mountain lion queens, too. Sounds like a murder in progress and carries for miles.

Not relevant to the area, but I've heard peacock calls that sounded a lot like a scream for help before.

I've heard the following chain of speculative explanations:

-- Overreaction in Korean Air 007 1983's incident let to under-reaction in Mathias Rust's case, which led to overreaction again in the following case: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/14/world/2-american-balloonis....

I am pretty sure the reality is much more complex though.

> post-war Soviet paranoia

Pre-war, during the purge, they would be executed for sure. Still can't believe how lucky they were to stay alive in 1946

Marinus van der Lubbe, the man who set the Reichstag fire, at one point tried to cross on foot from the Netherlands into the Soviet Union. He had a varied life story, full of bizarre ideas and aborted plans, that I stumbled on here: https://joepwritesthehistoryofberlin.wordpress.com/2013/06/0...

Such a tragic story! I had never heard of Newcomb Mott. I wonder if Rust knew about him?

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