2 - Drawing Borders in the Sky: Pirates and Damsels in Distress of Aerial Hijackings in Soviet Press, Literature, and Film

Summary

On November 2, 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that a man was convicted for bludgeoning to death his seventy-seven-year-old father in Santa Monica, California. For many people in Russia there was poetic justice in this dénouement. The father and son were Pranas and Algirdas Brazinskas, the infamous pair who thirty-two years earlier successfully hijacked an Aeroflot flight 224 to Turkey. About ten minutes into the flight, Pranas passed a note to the flight attendant, Nadezhda (Nadya) Kurchenko, demanding that the plane land in Turkey. This is how the flight's copilot Suliko Shavidze described his experience to the newspaper Izvestiia: “Nadya ran into the cockpit, screamed, ‘Assault!’ and attempted to close the door. We heard a shot. Nadya fell down, and a man of about fifty broke into the cockpit. He held a shotgun and shouted ‘Turkey, Turkey!’” A passenger, Tamara Skorzhevskaya, relates the events from the passenger cabin:

When the first man ran after the stewardess, a younger man of about twenty got up from one of the front seats. He took out a shotgun from under his raincoat and shouted, ‘Do not get up or we will blow up the plane!’ and he showed the grenades attached to his belt. The bandit went into the compartment for flight attendants and shut the door. Everything happened very fast. People did not immediately understand what was happening. Having recovered from the momentary confusion, [two] passengers … jumped from their seats. They ran toward the cockpit and tried to open the door. At this moment a shot was heard; the bullet went through the door and, having grazed one of the passengers, traveled over the heads of the others. Then the plane started to fall down and from side to side. These were terrifying minutes.

The copilot continues:

When [captain] Chakhrakia began to turn the plane from side to side, … the bandit shot him. Badly wounded, Chakhrakia lost consciousness. The bandit had a very advantageous position. He stood behind our backs and controlled our every move. If something was wrong, he would open fire. When the navigating officer Valery Fadeev tried to turn around, he shot him.