It
is rather unfair to call Eduard Kuznetsov, his then wife Sylvia Zalmanson, and
their fourteen fellow Refuseniks hijackers. They would have been perfectly
willing to buy tickets to the West, if the Soviets had granted them exit visas.
Nor were they holding guns on frightened flight attendants. They just intended
to “borrow” a small 12-seat, wing-and-a-prayer Antonov An-2 commuter plane. The
escape attempt did not go according to plan, but neither did the resulting show
trial. Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov documents her parents’ remarkable true story in
Operation Wedding (trailer here), which screens
during the 2018 Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema.
The
idea was relatively simple, but not simple enough. Posing as a wedding party,
Kuznetsov and company bought all the tickets on a puddle-jumping flight originating
in “Leningrad.” They would just tie up the flight crew—leaving them tucked into
sleeping bags so they wouldn’t get cold, mind you—and then just fly themselves
to the West. Unfortunately, the KGB was onto them from the start, so they never
even set foot on the plane.
Of
course, the mighty Socialist system had to make an example of the Refuseniks the
state media quickly dubbed “terrorists,” so they convened a show trial that
would duly sentence Kuznetsov and their pilot Mark Dymshits to death, which it
most certainly did. However, the accused did not act like the broken old
revolutionaries of the original Moscow Show Trials. They stuck to their guns,
denouncing the injustice of the Soviet system, particularly its restrictive immigration
laws (just for the record, these applied to people trying to get out, which is
a much different proposition than trying to control who comes in). Zalmanson
was particularly eloquent, so she became an international symbol of Soviet oppression.
Obviously,
Kuznetsov’s scheduled execution was not carried out, since he discusses the dramatic
chain of events in great depth with his documentarian daughter. It is a pretty incredible
chronicle, in which perhaps history’s greatest odd couple, Golda Meir and
Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who was not dead yet) worked in tandem to embarrass
the Soviets.
Zalmanson
was such a bipartisan cause célèbre throughout the West, it is frankly a bit
scary how quickly and completely she has receded from the pubic consciousness. That
is why Operation Wedding is such a
necessary film right now. In fact, Russian filmmakers are still trying to
rewrite the history of this incident through the lens of Soviet revisionism.
Fortunately,
Zalmanson-Kuznetsov has plenty of documentation to back up the accounts of her
parents. She also has KGB defector Oleg Kalugin on-camera, happily confirming
all the dirty conducted by his former agency. It definitely sets the record
straight, but there are also moments of real drama, as when Zalmanson revisits the
KGB prison where she spent years as a prisoner of conscience, including several
months in solitary confinement—all in a quite economical sixty-two minutes. As
a filmmaker, Zalmanson-Kuznetsov’s approach is understandably straight forward,
but she shows a bit of style nonetheless,
including some subtly clever transitions.
History
really does repeat itself. If the Dymshits-Kuznetsov escape attempt sounds
familiar, it is because a group of Georgia dissidents tried something similar
in 1983, but it was more like a conventional hijacking, which gave Eduard
Schevardnadze and his Kremlin masters license to crush them mercilessly (as
dramatized in the recent film Hostages).
Clearly,
the experience of Refuseniks like Zalmanson and Kuznetsov has timely
implications for the neo-Soviet era of Putin. It is also a reminder of how
different our politics looked in the early 1970s. Yet, it is also just amazing story.
Very highly recommended, Operation
Wedding screens this Wednesday (8/8), as part of Queens Museum Block 5,
during the Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema.
