Fittingly enough, last Thursday was Border Guard Day in the Soviet Union, a national celebration that honors the troops protecting the country's sprawling frontiers. Tourists and Muscovites strolling through Red Square that evening looked up to see a small single-engine plane coming in low from the south. It circled the great plaza, barely clearing the red brick walls of the Kremlin and buzzing the Lenin Mausoleum before finally touching down. At about 7:30 p.m. the little craft came to rest on the cobblestones behind onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral. Bystanders scattered. Police gaped in astonishment. Official black sedans sped to the spot.
Out of the plane, a blue-and-white Cessna Skyhawk 172, stepped Mathias Rust, 19, a computer operator and amateur pilot from Hamburg, West Germany. While the authorities debated what to do with him, Rust coolly signed autographs for the crowd, adding the words HAMBURG-MOSCOW. Shortly afterward he was taken away by police. Said a 24-year-old Muscovite who saw the pilot step from his craft: "People did not know what had happened. Something this unusual does not happen every day."
Unusual indeed. Rust's feat was one of the oddest milestones in the history of aviation. Aircraft are rarely allowed to overfly -- much less touch down in -- the tightly guarded center of Moscow, which is ringed by an antiballistic missile system that is usually described as formidable. Moreover, Rust had managed to fly unmolested from Helsinki across more than 400 miles of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. Said a Western diplomat in Moscow: "This puts a hole right through one of the great myths of this place, the myth of invincibility and impenetrability." A Soviet official put it more bluntly, "There are going to be more than red faces among the military over this."
Sure enough, what began as a zany stunt swiftly escalated into a major crisis for the Soviet military command. Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who returned to Moscow on Friday from East Berlin, where he and Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov had been attending a Warsaw Pact summit, acted decisively. The next day Gorbachev convened an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the Kremlin. After that session, the Politburo fired Sokolov, 75, and Marshal of Aviation Alexander Koldunov, 63, who headed the nation's air- defense system. Sokolov was replaced as the top Soviet military leader by General of the Army Dmitri Yazov, 64, a former commander of the Far East military district who had recently been named Deputy Defense Minister for personnel. No replacement was immediately announced for Koldunov.