Kurchenko hope - stewardess my clear star - song. The feat of the Soviet stewardess Nadezhda Kurchenko Nadya Kurchenko biography

October 15 will mark the 45th anniversary of the death of 19-year-old flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko, who at the cost of her own life tried to prevent the seizure of the Soviet passenger aircraft terrorists. The story of the heroic death of a young girl awaits you further.

This was the first time a passenger plane was hijacked on this scale. From him, in essence, began a long-term series of similar tragedies, which splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people.
And it all started like that.
An-24 took off from the Batumi airfield on October 15, 1970 at 12:30. The course is for Sukhumi. There were 46 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The scheduled flight time is 25-30 minutes.
But life broke both the schedule and the schedule.
On the 4th minute of the flight, the plane deviated sharply from the course. Radio operators asked for the board - there was no response. Communication with the control tower was interrupted. The plane was leaving in the direction of close Turkey.
Military and rescue boats went out to sea. Their captains received an order: to follow at full speed to the place of a possible disaster.
The board did not respond to any of the requests. A few more minutes - and the An-24 left air space THE USSR. And in the sky over the Turkish coastal airfield Trabzon, two missiles flashed - red, then green. It was the emergency landing signal. The plane touched the concrete pier of a foreign air harbor. Telegraph agencies all over the world immediately reported: a Soviet passenger plane had been hijacked. The flight attendant was killed, there are wounded. Everything.

Remembers Georgy Chakhrakia - the commander of the An-24 crew, No. 46256, who performed a flight on the Batumi-Sukhumi route on October 15, 1970 - I remember everything. I remember thoroughly.
Such things are not forgotten, - On that day I said to Nadya: “We agreed that in life you would consider us your brothers. So why aren't you being frank with us? I know that soon I will have to take a walk at the wedding ... ”- the pilot recalls with sadness. - The girl raised her blue eyes, smiled and said: “Yes, probably on November holidays". I was delighted and, shaking the wings of the plane, shouted at the top of my voice: “Guys! On holidays we go to the wedding! "... And an hour later I knew that there would be no wedding ...
Today, 45 years later, I intend to once again - at least briefly - recount the events of those days and again talk about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism. To tell about the overwhelming reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to sacrifice, courage, and courage of a person. To tell about this first of all to the people of the new generation, the new computer consciousness, to tell how it was, because my generation remembers and knows this story, and most importantly - Nadia Kurchenko - and without reminders. And young people should know why many streets, schools, Mountain peaks and even airplanes bear her name.
... After takeoff, greetings and instructions to the passengers, the flight attendant returned to her work room, a narrow compartment. She opened a bottle of Borjomi and, letting the water shoot with sparkling tiny cannonballs, filled four plastic cups for the crew. Putting them on a tray, I entered the cockpit.
The crew was always glad to have a beautiful, young, extremely friendly girl in the cockpit. Probably, she felt this attitude towards herself and, of course, was happy too. Perhaps, in this hour of her death, she thought with warmth and gratitude about each of these guys, who easily accepted her into their professional and friendly circle. They treated her like a younger sister with care and trust.
Of course, Nadia was in a wonderful mood - everyone who saw her in the last minutes of her pure, happy life said.
After getting the crew drunk, she returned to her compartment. At that moment, the call rang: the flight attendant was called by one of the passengers. She walked over. The passenger said:
- Tell the commander urgently, - and handed her an envelope.

At 12.40. Five minutes after takeoff (at an altitude of about 800 meters), the man and the guy sitting in the front seats called the stewardess and gave her an envelope: "Tell the crew commander!" The envelope contained a typewritten Order No. 9:
1. I order to fly along the indicated route.
2. Cut off radio communication.
3. For failure to comply with the order - Death.
(Free Europe) P.K.Z.Ts.
General (Krylov)
There was a stamp on the sheet, on which it was written in Lithuanian: "... rajono valdybos kooperatyvas" ("cooperative of the management ... of the district"). the man was dressed in the dress uniform of a Soviet officer.
Nadia took the envelope. Their gazes must have met. She must have been surprised at the tone of the words. But she did not find out anything, but stepped to the luggage compartment door - further on was the door of the pilot's cabin. Probably, Nadia's feelings were written on her face - most likely. And the sensitivity of the wolf, alas, surpasses any other. And, probably, thanks to this sensitivity, the terrorist saw in Nadia's eyes hostility, subconscious suspicion, a shadow of danger. This turned out to be enough for a sick imagination to announce the alarm: failure, sentence, exposure. Self-control refused: he literally ejected from the chair and rushed after Nadya.
She only managed to take a step towards the cockpit when he opened the door to her compartment, which she had just closed.
- You can't come here! she screamed.
But he approached like the shadow of a beast. She understood: the enemy was in front of her. In the next second he understood, too: she would break all plans.
Nadia screamed again.
And at the same instant, slamming the cockpit door, she turned to face the enraged bandit and prepared to attack. He, as well as the members of the crew, heard her words - no doubt. What was left to do? Nadia made a decision: not to let the attacker into the cockpit at any cost. Any!
He could be a maniac and shoot the crew. He could kill the crew and passengers. He could ... She did not know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: jumping to her, he tried to knock her down. Resting her hands on the wall, Nadia held on and continued to resist.
The first bullet hit her in the thigh. She pressed even more tightly against the pilot's door. The terrorist tried to squeeze her throat. Nadia - knock the weapon out of his right hand. A stray bullet went into the ceiling. Nadya fought back with her feet, hands, even her head.
The crew assessed the situation instantly. The commander abruptly interrupted the right turn, in which they were at the moment of the attack, and immediately overwhelmed the roaring car to the left, and then to the right. In the next second, the plane went steeply upward: the pilots tried to knock down the attacker, believing that his experience in this matter was not great, and Nadia would hold out.
The passengers were still with belts - after all, the board did not go out, the plane was only gaining altitude.
In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cockpit and hearing the first shot, several people instantly unfastened their seat belts and jumped out of their seats. Two of them were closest to the place where the criminal was sitting, and the first to feel the trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kaishanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were outstripped by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cockpit. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. A bullet whizzed over the heads of the shocked passengers.
- Don `t move! he yelled. - Do not move!
The pilots began to throw from one position to another with even greater harshness. Young shot again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and exited through. Depressurization did not threaten the aircraft yet - the height was insignificant.
Opening the cockpit, she shouted to the crew with all her might:
- Attack! He's armed!
The next moment after the second shot, the young man opened his gray cloak and people saw grenades - they were tied to their belt.
- This is for you! he shouted. - If anyone else gets up - we will blow up the plane!
It was obvious that this was not an empty threat - if they failed, they had nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, despite the evolution of the aircraft, the elder remained on his feet and, with bestial fury, tried to tear Nadia away from the cockpit door. He needed a commander. He needed a crew. He needed a plane.
Struck by the incredible resistance of Nadia, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloody fragile girl, without aiming, without thinking for a second, he fired point-blank and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of the narrow passage, burst into the cockpit. Behind him - his geek with a sawn-off shotgun.
Then there was the massacre. Their shots were muffled by their own cries:
- To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet coast - blow up the plane!

Bullets flew from the cockpit. One walked through my hair, - says Leningrader Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov. He and his wife were passengers on an ill-fated flight in 1970. - I saw: the bandits had pistols, a hunting rifle, one grenade from the elder was hanging on his chest. The plane threw left and right - the pilots probably hoped that the criminals would not stand on their feet.
Shooting continued in the cockpit. There then 18 holes will be counted, and a total of 24 bullets were fired. One of them hit the commander in the spine:
Georgy Chakhrakia - My legs have become unstable. Through efforts, I turned around and saw a terrible picture, Nadia was lying motionless on the floor in the door of our cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Fadeev was lying nearby. And behind us stood a man and, shaking a grenade, shouted: “Keep the seashore on the left! Heading south! Do not enter the clouds! Obey, otherwise we'll blow up the plane! "
The offender did not stand on ceremony. Tore off the radio communication headphones from the pilots. Trampled over the lying bodies. Flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan was wounded in the chest. The co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was also shot, but he was lucky - the bullet got stuck in the steel tube of the seat back. When navigator Valery Fadeev came to his senses (his lungs were shot), the bandit swore and kicked the seriously wounded man.
Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov - I told my wife: "We are flying towards Turkey!" - and was scared that when approaching the border we could be shot down. The wife also remarked: “The sea is under us. You feel good. You can swim, but I can't! " And I thought, “What a stupid death! I went through the whole war, signed on the Reichstag - and on you! "
The pilots still managed to turn on the SOS signal.
Giorgi Chakhrakia - I told the bandits: “I am wounded, my legs are paralyzed. I can only control my hands. The co-pilot must help me. ”And the bandit replied:“ Everything happens in war. We may perish. " Even the thought flashed to send "Annushka" to the rocks - to die ourselves and finish off these bastards. But there are forty-four people in the cabin, including seventeen women and one child.
I said to the co-pilot: “If I lose consciousness, navigate the ship at the request of the bandits and put it down. We must save the plane and passengers! We tried to land on Soviet territory, in Kobuleti, where there was a military airfield. But the hijacker, when he saw where I was directing the car, warned that he would shoot me and blow up the ship. I made a decision to cross the border. And in five minutes we crossed it at low altitude.
... The airfield in Trabzon was found visually. This was not difficult for the pilots.
Giorgi Chakhrakia - We made a circle and launched green rockets, making it clear to free the strip. We entered from the side of the mountains and sat down so that, if something happened, we would land on the sea. We were immediately cordoned off. The co-pilot opened the front doors and the Turks entered. In the cockpit, the bandits surrendered. All this time, until the locals showed up, we were at gunpoint ...
Leaving the passenger compartment after the passengers, the senior bandit knocked on the car with his fist: "This plane is now ours!"
The Turks provided medical assistance to all crew members. They immediately offered those wishing to stay in Turkey, but none of the 49 Soviet citizens agreed.
The next day, all the passengers and the body of Nadya Kurchenko were taken to the Soviet Union. A little later, the stolen An-24 was overtaken.
For courage and heroism, Nadezhda Kurchenko was awarded the military order of the Red Banner, a passenger plane, an asteroid, schools, streets and so on were named after Nadia. But it should be said, apparently, about something else.
The scale of state and public action associated with the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Foreign Ministry conducted negotiations with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.
It followed: to allocate an air corridor for the return of the hijacked aircraft; an air corridor for transporting injured crew members and passengers in need of urgent medical attention from Trabzon hospitals; of course, and those who did not suffer physically, but ended up in a foreign land not of their own free will; an air corridor was required for a special flight from Trabzon to Sukhumi with Nadia's body. Her mother had already flown to Sukhumi from Udmurtia.

Nadezhda's mother Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko tells: - I immediately asked that Nadya be buried in our Udmurtia. But I was not allowed. They said that from a political point of view, this should not be done.
And for twenty years I went to Sukhumi every year at the expense of the Ministry civil aviation... In 1989, my grandson and I came for the last time, and there the war began. Abkhazians fought with Georgians, and the grave was neglected. We walked to Nadya on foot, we were shooting nearby - all kinds of things happened ... And then I cheekily wrote a letter addressed to Gorbachev: “If you don’t help transport Nadia, I’ll go and hang myself on her grave!” A year later, the daughter was reburied at the city cemetery in Glazov. They wanted to bury it separately, on Kalinin Street, and rename the street in honor of Nadia. But I didn’t allow it. She died for the people. And I want her to lie with people ..

Immediately after the hijacking, scant TASS reports appeared in the USSR:
“On October 15, the plane of the civil air fleet“ An-24 ”made a regular flight from the city of Batumi to Sukhumi. Two armed bandits, using weapons against the crew of the plane, forced the plane to change its route and land on the territory of Turkey in the city of Trabzon. During a fight with the bandits, a flight attendant of the plane was killed, who was trying to block the bandits' way to the pilot's cabin. Two pilots were injured. The passengers on the plane are unharmed. The Soviet government appealed to the Turkish authorities with a request to extradite the murderous criminals to be brought to the Soviet court, as well as to return the plane and Soviet citizens who were on board the An-24 plane.
The “tassovka” that appeared the next day, October 17, announced that the plane's crew and passengers had been returned to their homeland. True, the navigator of the plane, who underwent the operation, who was seriously wounded in the chest, remained in the Trabzon hospital. The names of the hijackers were not named: “As for the two criminals who carried out an armed attack on the crew of the plane, as a result of which the flight attendant N.V. Kurchenko was killed, two crew members and one passenger were wounded, the Turkish government announced that they were arrested and the prosecutor's office was given an instruction to conduct an urgent investigation of the circumstances of the case ”.

The general public became aware of the personalities of the air pirates only on November 5 after the press conference of the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko.
Brazinskas Pranas Stasio born in 1924 and Brazinskas Algirdas born in 1955
Pranas Brazinskas was born in 1924 in the Trakai region of Lithuania.
According to the biography written by Brazinskas in 1949, the "forest brothers" shot through the window the chairman of the council and fatally wounded P. Brazinskas' father who happened to be nearby. With the help of local authorities, P. Brazinskas bought a house in Vievis and in 1952 became the head of the warehouse of household goods of the Vevis cooperative. In 1955 P. Brazinskas was sentenced to 1 year of correctional labor for theft and speculation in building materials. In January 1965, by decision of the Supreme Court, he was again sentenced to 5 years, but in June he was released early. After divorcing his first wife, he left for Central Asia.
He was engaged in speculation (in Lithuania he bought car parts, carpets, silk and linen fabrics and sent them in parcels to Central Asia, for each parcel he made a profit of 400-500 rubles), quickly saved up money. In 1968, he brought his thirteen-year-old son Algirdas to Kokand, and two years later he left his second wife.
On October 7-13, 1970, having visited Vilnius for the last time, P. Brazinskas and his son took their luggage - it is not known where the acquired weapons, accumulated dollars (according to the KGB, more than 6,000 dollars) and flew to the Transcaucasia.

In October 1970, the USSR demanded that Turkey immediately extradite the criminals, but this demand was not met. The Turks decided to judge the hijackers themselves. The Trabzon Court of First Instance did not recognize the attack as deliberate. In his defense, Pranas claimed that they had hijacked the plane in the face of death, allegedly threatening him for participating in the “Lithuanian Resistance”. And they sentenced 45-year-old Pranas Brazinskas to eight years in prison, and his 13-year-old son Algirdas to two. In May 1974, his father fell under the amnesty law and Brazinskas Sr.'s imprisonment was replaced with house arrest. In the same year, the father and son allegedly escaped from house arrest and turned to the American Embassy in Turkey with a request to grant them political asylum in the United States. Having received a refusal, the Brazinskas again surrendered to the Turkish police, where they were kept for a couple of weeks and ... finally released. Then they flew to Canada via Italy and Venezuela. During a stopover in New York, the Brazinskas got off the plane and were "detained" by the US Migration and Naturalization Service. They were never granted the status of political refugees, but to begin with, they were provided with a residence permit, and in 1983 both were given American passports. Algirdas officially became Albert Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White.
Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko - Seeking to extradite the Brazinskas, I even went to a meeting with Reagan at the American embassy. I was told that they were looking for my father because he lives illegally in the United States. And the son received American citizenship. And he cannot be punished. Nadia was killed in 1970, and the law on the extradition of bandits, wherever they were, was allegedly passed in 1974. And there will be no return ...
The Brazinskas settled in the town of Santa Monica in California, where they worked as ordinary painters. In America, the Lithuanian community in the Lithuanian community was wary, they were openly afraid of them. An attempt to organize a fundraiser for a fund of their own failed. In the United States, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their "exploits" in which they tried to justify the hijacking and hijacking of the plane as "the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation." To whitewash himself, P. Brazinskas stated that he had hit the flight attendant by accident, in a "shootout with the crew." Even later, A. Brazinskas claimed that the flight attendant had died during a "shootout with KGB agents" However, the support of the Brazinskas by Lithuanian organizations gradually faded away, everyone forgot about them. Real life in the US was very different from what they expected. The criminals lived miserably, under old age Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and unbearable.
In early February 2002, the 911 call in Santa Monica, California rang. The caller hung up immediately. The police identified the address they were calling from and arrived at 900 21st Street. The door for the police was opened by Albert Victor White, 46, and led the law enforcers to the cold corpse of his 77-year-old father. On whose head forensic experts later counted eight blows from a dumbbell. In Santa Monica, murder is rare - it was the city's first violent death that year.
JACK ALEX. attorney for Brazinskas Jr.
“I am a Lithuanian myself, and his wife Virginia hired me to protect Albert Victor White. There is a fairly large Lithuanian diaspora here in California, and don't think that we Lithuanians support the hijacking of the 1970 plane in any way.
- Pranas was a terrible person, it happened, in fits of rage, he chased the neighboring children with weapons.
- Algirdas is a normal and sane person. At the time of the capture, he was only 15 years old, and he hardly knew what he was doing. He spent his whole life in the shadow of his father's dubious charisma, and now, through his own fault, he will rot in prison.
- It was necessary self-defense. The father pointed a pistol at him, threatening to shoot his son if he left him. But Algirdas knocked out his weapon and hit the old man on the head several times.
- The jury considered that, having knocked out the pistol, Algirdas could not have killed the old man, since he was very weak. Another thing against Algirdas was the fact that he called the police only a day after the incident - all this time he was next to the corpse.
- Algirdas was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years in prison under the article "premeditated murder of the second degree"
- I know that this does not sound like a lawyer, but let me express my condolences to Algirdas. When I last saw him, he was terribly depressed. The father terrorized his son as best he could, and when the tyrant finally died, Algirdas, a man in his prime, will rot for many years in prison. Apparently, this is fate ...

Nadezhda Vladimirovna Kurchenko (1950-1970)
Born on December 29, 1950 in the village of Novo-Poltava, Klyuchevsky district Altai Territory... She graduated from a boarding school in the village of Ponino, Glazovsky district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhum air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970 trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. After 20 years, her grave was transferred to the city cemetery of Glazov. Awarded (posthumously) the Order of the Red Banner. The name of Nadezhda Kurchenko was given to one of the peaks of the Gissar ridge, a tanker of the Russian fleet and a small planet.

This was the first case in the USSR of the hijacking of a passenger aircraft of this scale. With him, in essence, began a long-term series of similar tragedies, which splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people.

And it all started like that.

An-24 took to the skies from the Batumi airfield on October 15, 1970 at 12:30. The course is for Sukhumi. There were 46 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The scheduled flight time is 25-30 minutes.

But life broke both the schedule and the schedule.

On the 4th minute of the flight, the plane deviated sharply from the course. Radio operators asked for the board - there was no response. Communication with the control tower was interrupted. The plane was leaving in the direction of close Turkey.

Military and rescue boats went out to sea. Their captains received an order: to follow at full speed to the place of a possible disaster.

The board did not respond to any of the requests. A few more minutes - and the An-24 left the airspace of the USSR. And in the sky over the Turkish coastal airfield Trabzon, two missiles flashed - red, then green. It was the emergency landing signal. The plane touched the concrete pier of a foreign air harbor. Telegraph agencies all over the world immediately reported: a Soviet passenger plane had been hijacked. The flight attendant was killed, there are wounded. Everything.

BLACK ENVELOPE

I flew to the place of emergency in a few hours. He flew, not knowing either the circumstances of the drama or the name of the murdered flight attendant. Everything had to be found out on the spot.

Today, 45 years later, I intend to once again - at least briefly - recount the events of those days and again talk about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism. To tell about the overwhelming reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to sacrifice, courage, and courage of a person. To tell about this, first of all, to people of a new generation, a new computer consciousness, to tell how it was, because my generation remembers and knows this story, and most importantly - Nadia Kurchenko - and without reminders. And young people should know why many streets, schools, mountain peaks and even an airplane bear her name.

After takeoff, greetings and instructions to the passengers, the flight attendant returned to her work space, a narrow compartment. She opened a bottle of Borjomi and, letting the water shoot with sparkling tiny cannonballs, filled four plastic cups for the crew. Putting them on a tray, I entered the cockpit.

The crew was always glad to have a beautiful, young, extremely friendly girl in the cockpit. Probably, she felt this attitude towards herself and, of course, was happy too. Perhaps, in this hour of her death, she thought with warmth and gratitude about each of these guys, who easily accepted her into their professional and friendly circle. They treated her like a younger sister with care and trust.

Of course, Nadia was in a wonderful mood - everyone who saw her in the last minutes of her pure, happy life said.

After getting the crew drunk, she returned to her compartment. At that moment, the call rang: the flight attendant was called by one of the passengers. She walked over. The passenger said:

Tell the commander urgently, - and handed her an envelope.

"ATTACK! HE IS ARMED!"

Nadia took the envelope. Their gazes must have met. She must have been surprised at the tone of the words. But she did not find out anything, but stepped to the luggage compartment door - further on was the door of the pilot's cabin. Probably, Nadia's feelings were written on her face - most likely. And the sensitivity of the wolf, alas, surpasses any other. And, probably, thanks to this sensitivity, the terrorist saw in Nadia's eyes hostility, subconscious suspicion, a shadow of danger. This turned out to be enough for a sick imagination to announce the alarm: failure, sentence, exposure. Self-control refused: he literally ejected from the chair and rushed after Nadya.

She only managed to take a step towards the cockpit when he opened the door to her compartment, which she had just closed.

You can't come here! she screamed.

But he approached like the shadow of a beast. She understood: the enemy was in front of her. In the next second he understood, too: she would break all plans.

Nadia screamed again:

Return to your seat. You can't come here!

But he took out a weapon - his nerves were burnt to ashes. Nadia did not know his intentions. But I understood: he is absolutely dangerous. Dangerous for the crew, dangerous for the passengers.

She clearly saw the revolver.

Opening the cockpit, she shouted to the crew with all her might:

Attack! He's armed!

And at the same instant, slamming the cockpit door, she turned to face the enraged bandit and prepared to attack. He, as well as the members of the crew, heard her words - no doubt.

What was left to do? Nadia made a decision: not to let the attacker into the cockpit at any cost. Any!

BATTLE AT THE LAST BORDERLINE

He could be a maniac and shoot the crew. He could kill the crew and passengers. He could ... She did not know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: jumping to her, he tried to knock her down. Resting her hands on the wall, Nadia held on and continued to resist.

The first bullet hit her in the thigh. She pressed even more tightly against the pilot's door. The terrorist tried to squeeze her throat. Nadia - knock the weapon out of his right hand. A stray bullet went into the ceiling. Nadya fought back with her feet, hands, even her head.

The crew assessed the situation instantly. The commander abruptly interrupted the right turn, in which they were at the moment of the attack, and immediately overwhelmed the roaring car to the left, and then to the right. In the next second, the plane went steeply upward: the pilots tried to knock down the attacker, believing that his experience in this matter was not great, and Nadia would hold out.

The passengers were still with belts - after all, the board did not go out, the plane was only gaining altitude.

The young man opened the gray cloak, and the passengers saw the grenades - they were tied to the belt. "This is for you!" He shouted. "If anyone else gets up, we will split the plane!"

In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cockpit and hearing the first shot, several people instantly unfastened their seat belts and jumped out of their seats. Two of them were closest to the place where the criminal was sitting, and the first to feel the trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kaishanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were outstripped by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cockpit. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. A bullet whizzed over the heads of the shocked passengers.

Don `t move! he yelled. - Do not move!

The pilots began to throw the plane from one position to another with even greater sharpness. Young shot again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and exited through. Depressurization did not threaten the aircraft yet - the height was insignificant.

The next moment after the second shot, the young man opened his gray cloak and people saw grenades - they were tied to their belt.

This is for you! he shouted. - If anyone else gets up - split the plane!

It was obvious that this was not an empty threat - if they failed, they had nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, despite the evolution of the aircraft, the elder remained on his feet and, with bestial fury, tried to tear Nadia away from the cockpit door. He needed a commander. He needed a crew. He needed a plane.

Struck by the incredible resistance of Nadia, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloody fragile girl, without aiming, without thinking for a second, he fired point-blank and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of the narrow passage, burst into the cockpit. Behind him - his geek with a sawn-off shotgun.

To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet coast - blow up the plane!

42 BULLETS ON CREW

Another bullet pierced the back of the commander, Grigory Chakhrakiy. In order to preserve at least a little blood in the body, so as not to lose consciousness and not drop the steering wheel from his hands, Grigory pressed himself against the back of the command chair with all his might. The next shot - the bullet paralyzes the right hand of navigator Valery Fadeev and hits the chest. There is a communication microphone in his hand, Fadeev loses consciousness, no one can unclench his hand with the microphone - each of the crew members is already wounded, Nadia is dead.

There is no way out: the plane must not fall into the sea - there are 46 passengers in the cabin, there are children. The co-pilot sees: the commander still loses consciousness. Shavidze takes control - he drives the car as in a nightmare: in a cabin drenched in the blood of friends, among screaming criminals, under the threat of a shotgun and a revolver, under the threat of grenades.

When a coastal Turkish airfield is shown in a gray dream of reality, it fires emergency missiles into the sky. And the plane, pierced by forty-two bullets, falls on foreign hard ground ...

A LOOK THROUGH THE YEARS

WHILE HOPE IS ALIVE ...

For courage and heroism, Nadezhda Kurchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a passenger plane, an asteroid, schools, streets and so on were named after Nadia. But it should be said, apparently, about something else.

The scale of state and public action associated with the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Foreign Ministry conducted negotiations with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.

It followed: to allocate an air corridor for the return of the hijacked aircraft; an air corridor for transporting injured crew members and passengers in need of urgent medical attention from Trabzon hospitals; of course, and those who did not suffer physically, but ended up in a foreign land not of their own free will; an air corridor was required for a special flight from Trabzon to Sukhumi with Nadia's body. Her mother had already flown to Sukhumi from Udmurtia.

There were many worries. But all these dramatic actions could not smooth over the acute pain of loss - Nadia remained at the center of any conversations of a huge country, television and radio broadcasts, and newspapers.

Air Marshal, Minister of Civil Aviation of the USSR Boris Pavlovich Bugaev personally took part in the discussion of the issue of Nadia's funeral. Twice - due to circumstances - I talked on the phone with the minister, who listened to wishes, advice, requests to meet Nadya's mother in Sukhumi, to decide on a burial place, and other actions. Could there be something similar in our hectic days - a superpower minister's concern for the fate of a murdered flight attendant on a tiny off-site flight?

No. It couldn't. I, in any case, do not believe in it.

In "Komsomolskaya Pravda", where I worked then (and was the first and only journalist from Moscow at the scene of the tragedy), in the first two weeks alone, after even the censored reports, over 12 thousand letters and telegrams came from shocked readers who mourned Nadia and admired her courage !

There was such a country. And there were such people. Is it possible today?

On the day of Nadya's funeral, over her coffin littered with flowers and over the heads of thousands of people following her coffin through the city streets, all the planes leaving for the flight flapped their wings, showing tribute to their defender, her young colleague, her heroine. In each of these planes, the flight attendants with tears in their eyes told their passengers:

Look down while the city is visible. These are people saying goodbye to our friend. With our Nadia.

Do you believe that we are all the same?

Nadia's mother, Henrietta Ivanovna, with whom I stood at Nadia's coffin and who dryly and lifelessly repeated, looking at her daughter's strikingly beautiful face: “Now you don’t laugh at me, you’re serious,” gave me Nadia’s notes, notebooks, and papers. Among them I found the phrase of the 9th grade student Nadezhda Kurchenko: "I want to be a worthy daughter of the Motherland and I am ready to give my life for this, if need be."

Here in these words familiar to the ear, but written by the hand and heart of Nadia, I absolutely believe.

PAY

The bandits punished themselves

The terrorists were 46-year-old Lithuanian Pranas Brazinskas (pictured on the right), a former store manager from Vilnius, and his 13-year-old son Algirdas (left). The Turkish authorities refused to extradite the criminals to the USSR and themselves condemned them. The eldest received eight years, the youngest two. After some time, both were released under an amnesty, and the bandits fled to Venezuela, and from there to the United States: they got off in New York from a plane bound for Canada. The Lithuanian diaspora obtained permission to leave them in the country.

The Brazinskas settled in Santa Monica, California. In February 2002, 77-year-old Pranas had a falling out with his son, for which he received several fatal blows with a bat. Algirdas was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

1973 year. The ballad "My clear star" flew like a dove around the Soviet Union. No one doubted: the song is dedicated to a young flight attendant who remained forever in the sky. Killed three weeks before the wedding. And it is performed on behalf of her groom. A sad story is being replicated on the Internet to this day. However, this is just a beautiful legend ...

Composer Vladimir Semenov: "Many have sung and are singing this song. But it seems to me that Sasha Losev was and remains the best performer of it ..." ...

The tragic halo that the song acquired, after 22 years, covered its first performer with a black cloud. Shortly before his departure, Losev admitted that before he sang "My clear star" with one subtext, now - in memory of his early deceased son. And he summed up the sad conclusion: "In an inexplicable way, the main song in the program became the main one in life."

The main song "Zvezdochka" became the main song in the life of the composer Vladimir Semyonov. He was already 35 years old. Behind him is Astrakhan, an automobile and road technical school, a homemade electric guitar and hundreds of kilometers on a shattered bus that traveled with the concert brigades of the Astrakhan Philharmonic ...

“Of course, I remember the story of the hijacking of the plane, then they wrote a lot about Nadia's feat,” Semyonov says. “But, I must admit, I didn't think about anything like that when I took out a small collection of poems by the Vologda poetess Olga Fokina from the store shelf. 13 pages, printed on thin newsprint. I started flipping through them and suddenly came across the words "People have different songs, but mine is one for centuries." Something caught me in these lines. "

A song was born, which Semenov showed to his friend, composer Sergei Dyachkov. He brought Semyonov to Stas Namin, who directed the vocal and instrumental ensemble. They recorded a small disc consisting of three compositions - Oscar Feltsman's songs "Flowers have eyes", Sergei Dyachkov's songs "Don't need" and Vladimir Semyonov's ballad "My clear star". She scattered across the country with a circulation of almost 7 million copies!

“After all the hassle - rehearsals, recordings - my wife and I went to rest in Sochi,” composer Vladimir Semyonov recalls today. voice of Sasha Losev: "People have different songs, but mine is one for centuries!"

The Vologda poet Olga Fokina wrote these lines several years before the tragedy aboard the An-24. Lines about your own, very personal. Her famous countryman, writer Fyodor Abramov said that Olga "is very close to life, she always has no fiction, not letters, not words in her poems - poems are generated by life itself ... they captivate, enchant you with sincerity, purity and spontaneity of feelings" ...

All the things that Nadia Kurchenko remembered and forever remained in the people's memory.

October 15 marks the 47th anniversary of the death of 19-year-old flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko, who at the cost of her own life tried to prevent the seizure of a Soviet passenger plane by terrorists. The story of the heroic death of a young girl awaits you further.

This was the first hijacking of a passenger plane of this magnitude. In essence, it was the beginning of a long-term series of similar tragedies that splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people. And it all began like this: An-24 took off from the Batumi airfield on October 15, 1970 at 12:30. The course is for Sukhumi. There were 46 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The scheduled flight time is 25-30 minutes. But life broke both the schedule and the schedule. On the 4th minute of the flight, it deviated sharply from the course. Radio operators asked for the board - there was no response. Communication with the control tower was interrupted. went to the side of near Turkey. Military and rescue boats left the sea. Their captains received an order: to follow at full speed to the place of a possible disaster.

2. The board did not respond to any of the requests. A few more minutes - and the An-24 left the airspace of the USSR. And in the sky above the Turkish coastal airfield of Trabzon, two rockets flashed - red, then green. It was the emergency landing signal. touched the concrete pier of a foreign air harbor. Telegraph agencies all over the world immediately reported: a Soviet passenger plane had been hijacked. The flight attendant was killed, there are wounded. That’s all. Georgy Chakhrakia, the commander of the An-24 crew, No. 46256, who was performing a flight on the Batumi-Sukhumi route on October 15, 1970: “I remember everything. I remember thoroughly. Such things are not forgotten. On that day, I said to Nadya: “We agreed that in life you would consider us your brothers. So why aren't you being frank with us? I know that soon I will have to take a walk at the wedding ... ”- the pilot recalls with sadness. - raised her blue eyes, smiled and said: "Yes, probably for the November holidays." I was delighted and, shaking the wings of the plane, shouted at the top of my voice: “Guys! We are going to the wedding for the holidays! ”… And in an hour I knew that there would be no wedding… Today, 45 years later, I intend to reiterate - at least briefly - the events of those days and again tell about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism ... To tell about the overwhelming reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to sacrifice, courage, and courage of a person. To tell about this first of all to the people of the new generation, the new computer consciousness, to tell how it was, because my generation remembers and knows this story, and most importantly - Nadia Kurchenko - and without reminders. And young people should know why many streets, schools, mountain peaks and even an airplane bear her name. ”… After takeoff, greetings and instructions to the passengers, the flight attendant returned to her working room, a narrow compartment. She opened a bottle of Borjomi and, letting the water shoot with sparkling tiny cannonballs, filled four plastic cups for the crew. Putting them on a tray, I entered the cockpit. The crew was always glad to be in the cockpit of a beautiful, young, extremely friendly girl. Probably, she felt this attitude towards herself and, of course, was happy too. Perhaps, in this hour of her death, she thought with warmth and gratitude about each of these guys, who easily accepted her into their professional and friendly circle. They treated her like a younger sister, with care and trust. Of course, Nadia was in a wonderful mood - everyone who saw her in the last minutes of her pure, happy life said.

3. After getting the crew drunk, she returned to her compartment. Five minutes after takeoff (at an altitude of about 800 meters), the man and the guy sitting in the front seats called the flight attendant and gave her an envelope: "Tell the crew commander!" The envelope contained the "Order No. 9" printed on a typewriter: 1. I order you to fly along the indicated route.
2. Terminate radio communication.
3. For failure to comply with the order - death.
(Free Europe) P.K.Z.Ts.
General (Krylov) There was a stamp on the sheet, on which it was written in Lithuanian: "... rajono valdybos kooperatyvas" ("cooperative management ... of the district"). The man was dressed in the dress uniform of a Soviet officer. Nadia took the envelope. Their gazes must have met. She must have been surprised at the tone of the words. But she did not find out anything, but stepped to the luggage compartment door - further on was the door of the pilot's cabin. Probably, Nadia's feelings were written on her face - most likely. And the sensitivity of the wolf, alas, surpasses any other. And probably, it was precisely due to this sensitivity that the terrorist saw in Nadia's eyes hostility, subconscious suspicion, a shadow of danger. This turned out to be enough for a sick imagination to announce the alarm: failure, sentence, exposure. Self-control refused: he literally ejected from the chair and rushed after Nadya. She had only managed to take a step towards the cockpit when he flung open the door of her compartment, which she had just closed. she cried, but he was approaching like the shadow of a beast. She understood: the enemy was in front of her. In the next second he understood, too: she would break all plans. Nadia screamed again. And at the same instant, slamming the cockpit door, she turned to face the enraged bandit and prepared to attack. He, as well as the members of the crew, heard her words - no doubt. What was left to do? Nadia made a decision: not to let the attacker into the cockpit at any cost. Anyone! He could be a maniac and shoot the crew. He could kill the crew and passengers. He could ... She didn't know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: jumping to her, he tried to knock her down. Resting her hands on the wall, Nadia held on and continued to resist. The first bullet hit her in the thigh. She pressed even more tightly against the pilot's door. The terrorist tried to squeeze her throat. Nadia - knock the weapon out of his right hand. A stray bullet went into the ceiling. Nadia fought back with her legs, arms, even her head. The crew assessed the situation instantly. The commander abruptly interrupted the right turn, in which the plane was at the moment of the attack, and immediately swung the roaring car to the left, and then to the right. In the next second, the plane went steeply upward: the pilots tried to knock down the attacker, believing that his experience in this matter was not great, and Nadia would hold out. Passengers were still wearing belts - after all, the display did not go out, the plane was only gaining altitude. In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cockpit and hearing the first shot, several people instantly unfastened their belts and jumped out of their seats. Two of them were closest to the place where the criminal was sitting, and the first to feel the trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kaishanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were outstripped by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cockpit. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. The bullet whizzed over the heads of the shocked passengers. he yelled. “Don't move!” The pilots began to throw the plane from one position to another with even greater sharpness. Young shot again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and exited through. Depressurization did not threaten the aircraft yet - the height was insignificant. Opening the cockpit, Nadia shouted to the crew with all her might: - Attack! He is armed! ”The next moment after the second shot, the young man opened his gray cloak, and people saw the grenades - they were tied to the belt.“ This is for you! he shouted. “If anyone else gets up, we'll blow up the plane!” It was obvious that this was not an empty threat - in case of failure, they had nothing to lose. Meanwhile, despite the evolution of the aircraft, the elder remained on his feet and, with bestial fury, tried to tear Nadia away from the cockpit door. He needed a commander. He needed a crew. He needed a plane.

4. Struck by the incredible resistance of Nadia, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloody fragile girl, without aiming, without thinking for a second, he fired point-blank and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of the narrow passage, burst into the cockpit. Behind him - his geek with a sawn-off shotgun. Then there was a massacre. Their shots were muffled by their own shouts: - To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet coast and blow up the plane! ”Bullets were flying from the cockpit. One walked through my hair, - says Leningrader Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov. He and his wife were passengers on an ill-fated flight in 1970. - I saw: the bandits had pistols, a hunting rifle, one grenade from the elder was hanging on his chest. The plane threw left and right - the pilots probably hoped that the criminals would not stand on their feet. ”The shooting continued in the cockpit. There then 18 holes will be counted, and a total of 24 bullets were fired. One of them hit the commander in the spine. Georgy Chakhrakia: “My legs were taken away. Through efforts, I turned around and saw a terrible picture: Nadya was lying motionless on the floor in the door of our cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Fadeev was lying nearby. And behind us stood a man and, shaking a grenade, shouted: “Keep the seashore on the left! Heading south! Do not enter the clouds! Obey, otherwise we will blow up the plane! ”” The offender did not stand on ceremony. Tore off the radio communication headphones from the pilots. Trampled over the lying bodies. Flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan was wounded in the chest. The co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was also shot, but he was lucky - the bullet got stuck in the steel tube of the seat back. When navigator Valery Fadeev came to his senses (his lungs were shot), the bandit swore and kicked the seriously wounded one. Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov: “I said to my wife:“ We are flying towards Turkey! ” - and was scared that when approaching the border we could be shot down. she also remarked: “The sea is under us. You feel good. You can swim, but I can't! ” And I thought, “What a stupid death! I went through the whole war, signed on the Reichstag - and on you! ”“ The pilots still managed to turn on the SOS signal. Giorgi Chakhrakia: “I told the bandits:“ I am wounded, my legs are paralyzed. I can only control my hands. The co-pilot has to help me. ” And the bandit replied: “Everything happens in war. We may perish ”. Even the thought flashed to send "Annushka" to the rocks - to die ourselves and finish off these bastards. But there are 44 people in the cabin, including 17 women and one child. I said to the co-pilot: “If I lose consciousness, navigate the ship at the request of the bandits and land. We must save the plane and passengers! “We tried to land on Soviet territory, in Kobuleti, where there was a military airfield. But the hijacker, when he saw where I was directing the car, warned that he would shoot me and blow up the ship. I made a decision to cross the border. And in five minutes we crossed it at low altitude. ”... The airfield in Trabzon was found visually. This was not difficult for the pilots. Giorgi Chakhrakia: “We made a circle and launched green rockets, making it clear to free the strip. We entered from the side of the mountains and sat down so that, should something happen, land on the sea. We were immediately cordoned off. The co-pilot opened the front doors and the Turks entered. In the cockpit, the bandits surrendered. All this time, until the locals showed up, we were at gunpoint ... "Leaving the passenger compartment after the passengers, the senior bandit knocked on the car with his fist:" This plane is now ours! " The Turks provided medical assistance to all crew members. They immediately offered those wishing to stay in Turkey, but none of the 49 Soviet citizens agreed. The next day, all the passengers and the body of Nadya Kurchenko were taken to the Soviet Union. A little later, the stolen An-24 was overtaken. For courage and heroism, Nadezhda Kurchenko was awarded the military order of the Red Banner, a passenger plane, an asteroid, schools, streets and so on were named after Nadia. But it should be said, apparently, about something else: the scale of state and public action associated with the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Foreign Ministry conducted negotiations with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.

5. It followed: to allocate an air corridor for the return of the hijacked aircraft; an air corridor for transporting injured crew members and passengers in need of urgent medical attention from Trabzon hospitals; of course, and those who did not suffer physically, but ended up in a foreign land not of their own free will; an air corridor was required for a special flight from Trabzon to Sukhumi with Nadia's body. Her mother had already flown to Sukhumi from Udmurtia. Nadezhda's mother, Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko, said: “I immediately asked that Nadia be buried here in Udmurtia. But I was not allowed. They said that from a political point of view, this should not be done.

6. And for twenty years I went to Sukhumi every year at the expense of the Ministry of Civil Aviation. In 1989, my grandson and I came for the last time, and there the war began. Abkhazians fought with Georgians, and the grave was neglected. We walked to Nadya on foot, we were shooting nearby - everything was ... And then I cheekily wrote a letter addressed to Gorbachev: “If you don’t help transport Nadia, I will go and hang myself on her grave!” A year later, the daughter was reburied at the city cemetery in Glazov. They wanted to bury it separately, on Kalinin Street, and rename the street in honor of Nadia. But I didn’t allow it. She died for the people. And I want her to lie with the people. "Immediately after the hijacking in the USSR, there are scant TASS reports:" On October 15, an An-24 civilian air fleet made a regular flight from the city of Batumi to Sukhumi. Two armed bandits, using weapons against the crew of the plane, forced the plane to change its route and land on the territory of Turkey in the city of Trabzon. During a fight with the bandits, a flight attendant of the plane was killed, who was trying to block the bandits' way to the pilot's cabin. Two pilots were injured. The passengers on the plane are unharmed. The Soviet government appealed to the Turkish authorities with a request to extradite the murderer criminals to be brought to the Soviet court, as well as to return the plane and Soviet citizens who were on board the An-24 plane. "

7. The “tassovka” that appeared the next day, October 17, announced that the aircraft crew and passengers had been returned to their homeland. True, the navigator of the plane, who underwent the operation, who was seriously wounded in the chest, remained in the Trabzon hospital. The names of the hijackers are not disclosed. “As for the two criminals who carried out an armed attack on the crew of the plane, as a result of which the flight attendant N.V. was killed. Kurchenko, two crew members and one passenger were injured, then the Turkish government announced that they were arrested and the prosecutor's office was instructed to urgently investigate the circumstances of the case.

8. The general public became aware of the personalities of the air pirates only on November 5, after the press conference of the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko. Brazinskas Pranas Stasio born in 1924 and Brazinskas Algirdas born in 1955 Pranas Brazinskas was born in 1924 in the Trakai region of Lithuania. According to the biography, written by Brazinskas in 1949, the "forest brothers" shot through the window the chairman of the council and fatally wounded P. Brazinskas' father, who happened to be nearby. With the help of the local authorities P. Brazinskas bought a house in Vievis and in 1952 became the manager of the warehouse of household goods of the Vevis cooperative. In 1955 P. Brazinskas was sentenced to 1 year of correctional labor for theft and speculation in building materials. In January 1965, by decision of the Supreme Court, he was again sentenced to 5 years, but in June he was released early. Having divorced his first wife, he left for Central Asia, engaged in speculation (in Lithuania, he bought car parts, carpets, silk and linen fabrics and sent them in parcels to Central Asia, for each parcel he made a profit of 400-500 rubles), quickly saved up money. In 1968, he brought his thirteen-year-old son Algirdas to Kokand, and two years later left his second wife. 7-13 October 1970, having visited Vilnius for the last time, P. Brazinskas and his son took their luggage - it is not known where the acquired weapons, accumulated dollars (according to the KGB, more than $ 6,000) - and flew to the Transcaucasia. In October 1970, the USSR demanded that Turkey immediately extradite the criminals, but this demand was not met. The Turks decided to judge the hijackers themselves. The Trabzon Court of First Instance did not recognize the attack as deliberate. In his defense, Pranas stated that they hijacked the plane in the face of death, allegedly threatening him for his participation in the “Lithuanian Resistance.” They sentenced 45-year-old Pranas Brazinskas to eight years in prison, and his 15-year-old son Algirdas to two. In May 1974, his father fell under the amnesty law, and Brazinskas Sr.'s imprisonment was changed to house arrest. In the same year, the father and son allegedly escaped from house arrest and turned to the American Embassy in Turkey with a request to grant them political asylum in the United States. Having received a refusal, the Brazinskas again surrendered into the hands of the Turkish police, where they were kept for a couple of weeks and ... finally released. Then they flew to Canada via Italy and Venezuela. During a stopover in New York, the Brazinskas got off the plane and were "detained" by the US Migration and Naturalization Service. They were never granted the status of political refugees, but to begin with, they were provided with a residence permit, and in 1983 both were given American passports. Algirdas officially became Albert Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White.

9. Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko: “In an effort to extradite the Brazinskas, I even went to meet with Reagan at the American embassy. I was told that they were looking for my father because he lives illegally in the United States. And the son received American citizenship. And he cannot be punished. Nadia was killed in 1970, and the law on the extradition of bandits, wherever they were, was allegedly passed in 1974. And there will be no return ... ”The Brazinskas settled in the town of Santa Monica in California, where they worked as ordinary painters. In America, in the Lithuanian community, the attitude towards the Brazinskas was wary, they were openly afraid of them. An attempt to organize a fundraiser for a fund of their own failed. In the United States, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their "exploits", in which they tried to justify the hijacking and hijacking of the plane "by the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation." To whitewash himself, P. Brazinskas stated that he had hit a flight attendant by accident, in a "shootout with the crew." Even later, A. Brazinskas claimed that the flight attendant had died during a "shootout with KGB agents." However, the support of the Brazinskas by Lithuanian organizations gradually faded away, everyone forgot about them. Real life in the United States was very different from what they expected. The criminals lived poorly, and in his old age Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and unbearable. In early February 2002, the 911 service in the California city of Santa Monica rang. The caller hung up immediately. The police identified the address they were calling from and arrived at 900 21st Street. The door to the police was opened by Albert Victor White, 46, and led the law enforcers to the cold corpse of his 77-year-old father, on whose head forensic experts later counted eight dumbbell blows. In Santa Monica, they rarely kill - it was the first violent death in the city that year. Jack Alex, lawyer for Brazinskas Jr.: “I am a Lithuanian myself, and Virginia hired me to defend Albert Victor White. Here in California, there is a fairly large Lithuanian diaspora, and don't think that we Lithuanians support the hijacking of the 1970 plane in any way.
- Pranas was a terrible person, it happened, in fits of rage, he chased the neighboring children with weapons.
- Algirdas is a normal and sane person. At the time of the capture, he was only 15 years old, and he hardly knew what he was doing. He spent his whole life in the shadow of his father's dubious charisma, and now, through his own fault, he will rot in prison.
- It was necessary self-defense. The father pointed a pistol at him, threatening to shoot his son if he left him. But Algirdas knocked out his weapon and hit the old man on the head several times.
- The jury considered that, having knocked out the pistol, Algirdas could not have killed the old man, since he was very weak. Another thing against Algirdas was the fact that he called the police only a day after the incident - all this time he was next to the corpse.
- Algirdas was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years in prison under the article "Intentional second degree murder."
- I know that this does not sound like a lawyer, but let me express my condolences to Algirdas. When I last saw him, he was terribly depressed. The father terrorized his son as best he could, and now, when the tyrant finally died, Algirdas, a man in his prime, will rot for many years in prison. Apparently, this is fate ... Nadezhda Vladimirovna Kurchenko (1950-1970). She was born on December 29, 1950 in the village of Novo-Poltava in the Klyuchevsky district of the Altai Territory. She graduated from a boarding school in the village of Ponino, Glazovsky district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhum air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970 trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. After 20 years, her grave was transferred to the city cemetery of Glazov. Awarded (posthumously) the Order of the Red Banner. The name of Nadezhda Kurchenko was given to one of the peaks of the Gissar ridge, a tanker of the Russian fleet and a small planet.

Nadezhda Kurchrnko Career: Citizens
Birth: Russia, 12/29/1950
At the end of November 1968, Nadezhda Kurchenko came to work in the Sukhumi air squadron, and less than two years later, the entry "Exclude from the list of personnel due to death in the line of duty" appeared in her personal file.

At the end of November 1968, Nadezhda Kurchenko came to work in the Sukhumi air squadron, and less than two years later, the entry "Exclude from the list of personnel due to death in the line of duty" appeared in her personal file. Today we want to tell you about the most famous and at the same time the most mysterious case of the hijacking of a Soviet plane.

HALT NUMBER ONE

At the end " velvet season"- On October 15, 1970, the An-24 airliner departed from the border city of Batumi by flight N244 to Sukhumi and Krasnodar. There were 46 passengers, embracing 17 women and one child. were to become witnesses and participants in the drama associated with the first successful hijacking of a Soviet aircraft.

A few minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 800 meters, two passengers - father and son Brazinskasa called a flight attendant and handed a note to the pilots demanding to change the route and fly to Turkey. The girl rushed into the cockpit and shouted: "Attack!" The criminals rushed after her. "No one to get up! - shouted the youngest of the hijackers. - Otherwise, we will blow up the airliner!" At that very moment, shots sounded in the cabin, the only one of which ended the existence of 19-year-old Nadezhda Kurchenko, whose wedding was scheduled smoothly in three months ...

The first pilot, Giorgi Chakhrakia, was hit by a bullet in the spine, and his legs were lost. Overcoming the pain, he turned around and saw a terrible picture: Nadia was lying motionless in the door of the pilot's cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Valery Fadeev was shot in the lung, and flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan was wounded in the chest. Co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was the luckiest one - a stupid bullet got stuck in an iron pipe in the back of his seat. Behind the pilots stood Brazinskas senior and, shaking a grenade, shouted: "Keep the seashore to the left. Heading south. Do not enter the clouds!"

The pilot tried to fool the terrorists and seat the An-24 at the military airfield in Kobuleti. But the hijacker once again warned that he would blow up the car (later it turned out that Brazinskas was bluffing because the grenade was a training grenade). Soon the captured aircraft crossed the Soviet-Turkish border, and after another 30 minutes it was over the airfield in Trabzon. The plane circled over the runway and launched green rockets, asking for an emergency landing. Immediately after the landing, the hijackers surrendered to the Turkish authorities.

By the way, passengers and crew members were asked to stay in Turkey, but no one agreed to this. The next day, on a deliberately sent plane, all the people and the body of the deceased girl were taken to the USSR. A little later, the Turks returned the hijacked An-24. After a major overhaul, board N46256 with a photograph of Nadia Kurchenko in the cabin flew in Uzbekistan for a long time.

GOD'S JUDGMENT

Then, in October 1970, the USSR demanded that Turkey immediately extradite the criminals, but this request was not fulfilled. The Turks decided to judge the hijackers themselves and sentenced 45-year-old Pranas Brazinskas to eight years in prison, and his 13-year-old son Algirdas to two. In 1974, a general amnesty took place in this country and the imprisonment of Brazinskas Sr. was replaced with ... house arrest in a luxury villa in Istanbul. According to one of the former high-ranking KGB officers, in the depths of this department, an operation was developed and prepared to destroy both aerial terrorists, which failed due to the removal of the Brazinskas from Turkey by the US special services.

The farce with the "flight" of criminals to America was framed as follows: dad and son allegedly escaped from house arrest and turned to the American embassy in Turkey with a request to grant them political asylum in the United States. Having received a refusal, the Brazinskas once again surrendered into the hands of the Turkish police, where they were kept for a couple of weeks and ... they were completely released. Then, through Italy and Venezuela, they calmly flew to Canada. During a stopover in New York, the Brazinskas got off the plane and were "detained" by the US Migration and Naturalization Service. They were never given the status of political refugees, but for a start they were provided with a residence permit, and in 1983 both were given American passports.

Back in 1976, Algirdas officially became Albert Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White. They settled in the town of Santa Monica in California, where they worked as ordinary painters. In the United States, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their "exploits", in which they tried to justify the hijacking and hijacking of the plane "by the struggle to separate Lithuania from the Soviet occupation." According to the testimony of the Los Angeles Times, in the Lithuanian community of America, the attitude to the Brazinskas was wary, they were openly afraid. An attempt to establish a fundraiser for a fund of their own failed - in practice, none of the Lithuanian immigrants gave them a dollar.

In his old age, Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and bilious, and therefore quarrels often began to arise in the two-room apartment, which he shared with his son. During one of these quarrels, the 45-year-old son beat his 77-year-old dad to death with a baseball bat. In early November this year, a Santa Monica jury already found him guilty of the crime, and currently Albert Victor White faces at least 16 years in prison.

KEY QUESTION

The most significant interrogative motive, to the fact that after 33 years after the tragedy, no reliable reaction was received, sounds like this: "How did the flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko die, and what is the true number of victims of the hijacking?" According to information that was leaked to the press at a short time, 18 holes were counted in the hull of the captured aircraft, and a total of 24 shots were fired on board. The fire was so intense that one of the women who witnessed those events is still convinced that Brazinskas Sr. was firing from a machine gun. Meanwhile, it is exactly known that the hijackers had only the sawn-off shotguns of hunting rifles. If we spread from the fact that there were no other barrels on the plane, it turns out that the Brazinskas had to reload their sawn-off shotguns at least 12 times. It is not clear why the criminals had to act so full of shots, if the most powerful means of pressure on the crew was undoubtedly the danger of detonating a grenade?

Maybe the version of this event, which was announced at the trial in Turkey at a short time, is not so absurd? It boils down to the fact that there were two armed civilian guards on board the Soviet plane. According to the Brazinskas, these two were the first to open the fire and it was their bullets that killed the flight attendant. No, I do not want to justify the hijackers at all - they actually committed a grave offense, which led to the tragedy. But if you analyze it logically, why did the Brazinskas need to incapacitate all five crew members, embracing both pilots (recall that they were shot through the backs of their seats), if the criminals themselves did not have the skills to drive an airplane?

It can be assumed that the An-24 crew actually ended up under heavy fire from those who shot at the hijackers, since at that very moment the Brazinskas were at the door of the pilot's cabin. But in this case, new questions arise: "What kind of" guards "were they, because the architecture for escorting border flights by armed people was created in the USSR only at the beginning of 1971? only four, and all of them were members of the An-24 crew), were those guards injured or killed? And, in the end, why did the hijackers turn out to be more skillful shooters than specially trained professionals? as a "human shield" or was it easy to force the guards to lay down their weapons by threatening to detonate the same grenade? " Unfortunately, we will not find an answer to all these questions until the real circumstances of the hijacking of the An-24 are made public. Probably, the chronicle of this event officially announced in the USSR did not contain any mention of the guards in order to avoid accusations of low professionalism of the workers of the Soviet power structures.

ARITHMETICS OF LIFE

Contrary to popular belief, flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko was not the first Aeroflot employee to die in the hijacking of aircraft. This happened for the first time on June 3, 1969, when three terrorists tried to hijack an Il-14 en route from Leningrad to Tallinn, and at the same time killed a flight mechanic who had entered into a fight with them. Well, the last of these tragedies occurred on March 16, 2001. Four Chechens, armed with one hatchet and knife, captured a Russian Tu-154 flying from Istanbul to Moscow, and forced the crew to land in Medina ( Saudi Arabia). During the assault on the plane, two terrorists, the only passenger and a flight attendant, were killed by bullets fired by Saudi special forces soldiers.

Throughout the history of Soviet and Russian civil aviation, 91 attempts and 26 successful hijackings of passenger aircraft have been recorded. In the course of these 117 incidents, 111 passengers and crew members were killed and another 17 terrorists were shot dead. This means that for every hijacker killed, there are on average 6-7 innocent victims. Isn't the cost too high for the strength of the "locks" on our air borders? ...

P.S. I express my deep gratitude for the assistance in the preparation of this material to Nadia's younger sister - Ekaterina Vladimirovna Kurchenko

Nadezhda Kurchenko

She was born on December 29, 1950 in the village of Novo-Poltava in the Klyuchevsky district of the Altai Territory. She graduated from a boarding school in the village of Ponino, Glazovsky district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhum air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970 trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. After 20 years, her grave was transferred to the city cemetery of Glazov. Awarded (posthumously) the Order of the Red Banner. The name of Nadezhda Kurchenko was assigned to one of the peaks of the Gissar ridge, a tanker of the Russian fleet and a minor planet in the constellation Capricorn.

Unfortunately, moreover, in the "Encyclopedia of the Udmurt Republic" infa about Nadya contains a lot of errors: the month of her birth and the path of the last flight are incorrectly given - it is indicated in the opposite direction. It is also stated there, just as in November 1968, the young lady became a flight attendant, although in fact, until her 18th birthday, she worked in the accounting department of the squadron. And nothing is said either about the mountain peak or about the tanker named after Nadia. Here we have with you, if I may say so, "Encyclopedia".

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Nadezhda Kolba Nadezhda Kolba

Vice Governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Your comments

Olesya I liked it very much, very touching! 20 november 18:49

October 15 will mark the 45th anniversary of the death of 19-year-old flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko, who at the cost of her own life tried to prevent the seizure of a Soviet passenger plane by terrorists. In our review - the story of the heroic death of a young girl.

This was the first time a passenger plane was hijacked on this scale. From him, in essence, began a long-term series of similar tragedies, which splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people.
And it all started like that.

An-24 took to the skies from the Batumi airfield on October 15, 1970 at 12:30. The course is for Sukhumi. There were 46 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The scheduled flight time is 25-30 minutes.
But life broke both the schedule and the schedule.

On the 4th minute of the flight, the plane deviated sharply from the course. Radio operators asked for the board - there was no response. Communication with the control tower was interrupted. The plane was leaving in the direction of close Turkey.
Military and rescue boats went out to sea. Their captains received an order: to follow at full speed to the place of a possible disaster.

The board did not respond to any of the requests. A few more minutes - and the An-24 left the airspace of the USSR. And in the sky over the Turkish coastal airfield Trabzon, two missiles flashed - red, then green. It was the emergency landing signal. The plane touched the concrete pier of a foreign air harbor. Telegraph agencies all over the world immediately reported: a Soviet passenger plane had been hijacked. The flight attendant was killed, there are wounded. Everything.

Remembers Georgy Chakhrakia - the commander of the An-24 crew, No. 46256, who performed a flight on the Batumi-Sukhumi route on October 15, 1970 - I remember everything. I remember thoroughly.

Such things are not forgotten, - On that day I said to Nadya: “We agreed that in life you would consider us your brothers. So why aren't you being frank with us? I know that soon I will have to take a walk at the wedding ... ”- the pilot recalls with sadness. - The girl raised her blue eyes, smiled and said: "Yes, probably for the November holidays." I was delighted and, shaking the wings of the plane, shouted at the top of my voice: “Guys! On holidays we go to the wedding! "... And an hour later I knew that there would be no wedding ...

Today, 45 years later, I intend to once again - at least briefly - recount the events of those days and again talk about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism. To tell about the overwhelming reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to sacrifice, courage, and courage of a person. To tell about this first of all to the people of the new generation, the new computer consciousness, to tell how it was, because my generation remembers and knows this story, and most importantly - Nadia Kurchenko - and without reminders. And young people should know why many streets, schools, mountain peaks and even an airplane bear her name.

After takeoff, greetings and instructions to the passengers, the flight attendant returned to her work space, a narrow compartment. She opened a bottle of Borjomi and, letting the water shoot with sparkling tiny cannonballs, filled four plastic cups for the crew. Putting them on a tray, I entered the cockpit.

The crew was always glad to have a beautiful, young, extremely friendly girl in the cockpit. Probably, she felt this attitude towards herself and, of course, was happy too. Perhaps, in this hour of her death, she thought with warmth and gratitude about each of these guys, who easily accepted her into their professional and friendly circle. They treated her like a younger sister with care and trust.

Of course, Nadia was in a wonderful mood - everyone who saw her in the last minutes of her pure, happy life said.

After getting the crew drunk, she returned to her compartment. At that moment, the call rang: the flight attendant was called by one of the passengers. She walked over. The passenger said:
- Tell the commander urgently, - and handed her an envelope.

At 12.40. Five minutes after takeoff (at an altitude of about 800 meters), the man and the guy sitting in the front seats called the stewardess and gave her an envelope: "Tell the crew commander!" The envelope contained a typewritten Order No. 9:
1. I order to fly along the indicated route.
2. Cut off radio communication.
3. For failure to comply with the order - Death.
(Free Europe) P.K.Z.Ts.
General (Krylov)
There was a stamp on the sheet, on which it was written in Lithuanian: "... rajono valdybos kooperatyvas" ("cooperative of the management ... of the district"). the man was dressed in the dress uniform of a Soviet officer.

Nadia took the envelope. Their gazes must have met. She must have been surprised at the tone of the words. But she did not find out anything, but stepped to the luggage compartment door - further on was the door of the pilot's cabin. Probably, Nadia's feelings were written on her face - most likely. And the sensitivity of the wolf, alas, surpasses any other. And, probably, thanks to this sensitivity, the terrorist saw in Nadia's eyes hostility, subconscious suspicion, a shadow of danger. This turned out to be enough for a sick imagination to announce the alarm: failure, sentence, exposure. Self-control refused: he literally ejected from the chair and rushed after Nadya.

She only managed to take a step towards the cockpit when he opened the door to her compartment, which she had just closed.
- You can't come here! she screamed.
But he approached like the shadow of a beast. She understood: the enemy was in front of her. In the next second he understood, too: she would break all plans.

Nadia screamed again.
And at the same instant, slamming the cockpit door, she turned to face the enraged bandit and prepared to attack. He, as well as the crew members, heard her words - no doubt. What was there to do? Nadia made a decision: not to let the attacker into the cockpit at any cost. Any!
He could be a maniac and shoot the crew. He could kill the crew and passengers. He could ... She did not know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: jumping to her, he tried to knock her down. Resting her hands on the wall, Nadia held on and continued to resist.

The first bullet hit her in the thigh. She pressed even more tightly against the pilot's door. The terrorist tried to squeeze her throat. Nadia - knock the weapon out of his right hand. A stray bullet went into the ceiling. Nadya fought back with her feet, hands, even her head.

The crew assessed the situation instantly. The commander abruptly interrupted the right turn, in which they were at the moment of the attack, and immediately overwhelmed the roaring car to the left, and then to the right. In the next second, the plane went steeply upward: the pilots tried to knock down the attacker, believing that his experience in this matter was not great, and Nadia would hold out.

The passengers were still with belts - after all, the board did not go out, the plane was only gaining altitude.
In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cockpit and hearing the first shot, several people instantly unfastened their seat belts and jumped out of their seats. Two of them were closest to the place where the criminal was sitting, and the first to feel the trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kaishanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were outstripped by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cockpit. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. A bullet whizzed over the heads of the shocked passengers.

Don `t move! he yelled. - Do not move!
The pilots began to throw the plane from one position to another with even greater sharpness. Young shot again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and exited through. Depressurization did not threaten the aircraft yet - the height was insignificant.

Opening the cockpit, she shouted to the crew with all her might:
- Attack! He's armed!
The next moment after the second shot, the young man opened his gray cloak and people saw grenades - they were tied to their belt.
- This is for you! he shouted. - If anyone else gets up - we will blow up the plane!
It was obvious that this was not an empty threat - if they failed, they had nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, despite the evolution of the aircraft, the elder remained on his feet and, with bestial fury, tried to tear Nadia away from the cockpit door. He needed a commander. He needed a crew. He needed a plane.
Struck by the incredible resistance of Nadia, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloody fragile girl, without aiming, without thinking for a second, he fired point-blank and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of the narrow passage, burst into the cockpit. Behind him - his geek with a sawn-off shotgun.
Then there was the massacre. Their shots were muffled by their own cries:
- To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet coast - blow up the plane!

Bullets flew from the cockpit. One walked through my hair, - says Leningrader Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov. He and his wife were passengers on an ill-fated flight in 1970. - I saw: the bandits had pistols, a hunting rifle, one grenade from the elder was hanging on his chest. The plane threw left and right - the pilots probably hoped that the criminals would not stand on their feet.

Shooting continued in the cockpit. There then 18 holes will be counted, and a total of 24 bullets were fired. One of them hit the commander in the spine:
Georgy Chakhrakia - My legs have become unstable. Through efforts, I turned around and saw a terrible picture, Nadia was lying motionless on the floor in the door of our cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Fadeev was lying nearby. And behind us stood a man and, shaking a grenade, shouted: “Keep the seashore on the left! Heading south! Do not enter the clouds! Obey, otherwise we'll blow up the plane! "

The offender did not stand on ceremony. Tore off the radio communication headphones from the pilots. Trampled over the lying bodies. Flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan was wounded in the chest. The co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was also shot, but he was lucky - the bullet got stuck in the steel tube of the seat back. When navigator Valery Fadeev came to his senses (his lungs were shot), the bandit swore and kicked the seriously wounded man.
Vladimir Gavrilovich Merenkov - I told my wife: "We are flying towards Turkey!" - and was scared that when approaching the border we could be shot down. The wife also remarked: “The sea is under us. You feel good. You can swim, but I can't! " And I thought, “What a stupid death! I went through the whole war, signed on the Reichstag - and on you! "

The pilots still managed to turn on the SOS signal.
Giorgi Chakhrakia - I told the bandits: “I am wounded, my legs are paralyzed. I can only control my hands. The co-pilot must help me. ”And the bandit replied:“ Everything happens in war. We may perish. " Even the thought flashed to send "Annushka" to the rocks - to die ourselves and finish off these bastards. But there are forty-four people in the cabin, including seventeen women and one child.
I said to the co-pilot: “If I lose consciousness, navigate the ship at the request of the bandits and put it down. We must save the plane and passengers! We tried to land on Soviet territory, in Kobuleti, where there was a military airfield. But the hijacker, when he saw where I was directing the car, warned that he would shoot me and blow up the ship. I made a decision to cross the border. And in five minutes we crossed it at low altitude.
... The airfield in Trabzon was found visually. This was not difficult for the pilots.

Giorgi Chakhrakia - We made a circle and launched green rockets, making it clear to free the strip. We entered from the side of the mountains and sat down so that, if something happened, we would land on the sea. We were immediately cordoned off. The co-pilot opened the front doors and the Turks entered. In the cockpit, the bandits surrendered. All this time, until the locals showed up, we were at gunpoint ...
Leaving the passenger compartment after the passengers, the senior bandit knocked on the car with his fist: "This plane is now ours!"
The Turks provided medical assistance to all crew members. They immediately offered those wishing to stay in Turkey, but none of the 49 Soviet citizens agreed.
The next day, all the passengers and the body of Nadya Kurchenko were taken to the Soviet Union. A little later, the stolen An-24 was overtaken.

For courage and heroism, Nadezhda Kurchenko was awarded the military order of the Red Banner, a passenger plane, an asteroid, schools, streets and so on were named after Nadia. But it should be said, apparently, about something else.
The scale of state and public action associated with the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Foreign Ministry conducted negotiations with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.

It followed: to allocate an air corridor for the return of the hijacked aircraft; an air corridor for transporting injured crew members and passengers in need of urgent medical attention from Trabzon hospitals; of course, and those who did not suffer physically, but ended up in a foreign land not of their own free will; an air corridor was required for a special flight from Trabzon to Sukhumi with Nadia's body. Her mother had already flown to Sukhumi from Udmurtia.

Nadezhda's mother Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko tells: - I immediately asked that Nadya be buried in our Udmurtia. But I was not allowed. They said that from a political point of view, this should not be done.

And for twenty years I went to Sukhumi every year at the expense of the Ministry of Civil Aviation. In 1989, my grandson and I came for the last time, and there the war began. Abkhazians fought with Georgians, and the grave was neglected. We walked to Nadya on foot, we were shooting nearby - all kinds of things happened ... And then I cheekily wrote a letter addressed to Gorbachev: “If you don’t help transport Nadia, I’ll go and hang myself on her grave!” A year later, the daughter was reburied at the city cemetery in Glazov. They wanted to bury it separately, on Kalinin Street, and rename the street in honor of Nadia. But I didn’t allow it. She died for the people. And I want her to lie with people ..

Immediately after the hijacking, scant TASS reports appeared in the USSR:
“On October 15, the plane of the civil air fleet“ An-24 ”made a regular flight from the city of Batumi to Sukhumi. Two armed bandits, using weapons against the crew of the plane, forced the plane to change its route and land on the territory of Turkey in the city of Trabzon. During a fight with the bandits, a flight attendant of the plane was killed, who was trying to block the bandits' way to the pilot's cabin. Two pilots were injured. The passengers on the plane are unharmed. The Soviet government appealed to the Turkish authorities with a request to extradite the murderous criminals to be brought to the Soviet court, as well as to return the plane and Soviet citizens who were on board the An-24 plane.

The “tassovka” that appeared the next day, October 17, announced that the plane's crew and passengers had been returned to their homeland. True, the navigator of the plane, who underwent the operation, who was seriously wounded in the chest, remained in the Trabzon hospital. The names of the hijackers were not named: “As for the two criminals who carried out an armed attack on the crew of the plane, as a result of which the flight attendant N.V. Kurchenko was killed, two crew members and one passenger were wounded, the Turkish government announced that they were arrested and the prosecutor's office was given an instruction to conduct an urgent investigation of the circumstances of the case ”.

The general public became aware of the personalities of the air pirates only on November 5 after the press conference of the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko.
Brazinskas Pranas Stasio born in 1924 and Brazinskas Algirdas born in 1955
Pranas Brazinskas was born in 1924 in the Trakai region of Lithuania.

According to the biography written by Brazinskas in 1949, the "forest brothers" shot through the window the chairman of the council and fatally wounded P. Brazinskas' father who happened to be nearby. With the help of local authorities, P. Brazinskas bought a house in Vievis and in 1952 became the head of the warehouse of household goods of the Vevis cooperative. In 1955 P. Brazinskas was sentenced to 1 year of correctional labor for theft and speculation in building materials. In January 1965, by decision of the Supreme Court, he was again sentenced to 5 years, but in June he was released early. Having divorced his first wife, he left for Central Asia.

He was engaged in speculation (in Lithuania he bought car parts, carpets, silk and linen fabrics and sent them in parcels to Central Asia, for each parcel he made a profit of 400-500 rubles), quickly saved up money. In 1968, he brought his thirteen-year-old son Algirdas to Kokand, and two years later he left his second wife.

On October 7-13, 1970, having visited Vilnius for the last time, P. Brazinskas and his son took their luggage - it is not known where the acquired weapons, accumulated dollars (according to the KGB, more than 6,000 dollars) and flew to the Transcaucasia.

In October 1970, the USSR demanded that Turkey immediately extradite the criminals, but this demand was not met. The Turks decided to judge the hijackers themselves. The Trabzon Court of First Instance did not recognize the attack as deliberate. In his defense, Pranas claimed that they had hijacked the plane in the face of death allegedly threatening him for participating in the “Lithuanian Resistance.” And they sentenced 45-year-old Pranas Brazinskas to eight years in prison, and his 13-year-old son Algirdas to two. In May 1974, his father fell under the amnesty law and Brazinskas Sr.'s imprisonment was replaced with house arrest. In the same year, the father and son allegedly escaped from house arrest and turned to the American Embassy in Turkey with a request to grant them political asylum in the United States.

Having received a refusal, the Brazinskas again surrendered to the Turkish police, where they were kept for a couple of weeks and ... finally released. Then they flew to Canada via Italy and Venezuela. During a stopover in New York, the Brazinskas got off the plane and were "detained" by the US Migration and Naturalization Service. They were never granted the status of political refugees, but to begin with, they were provided with a residence permit, and in 1983 both were given American passports. Algirdas officially became Albert Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White.

Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko - Seeking to extradite the Brazinskas, I even went to a meeting with Reagan at the American embassy. I was told that they were looking for my father because he lives illegally in the United States. And the son received American citizenship. And he cannot be punished. Nadia was killed in 1970, and the law on the extradition of bandits, wherever they were, was allegedly passed in 1974. And there will be no return ...
The Brazinskas settled in the town of Santa Monica in California, where they worked as ordinary painters. In America, the Lithuanian community in the Lithuanian community was wary, they were openly afraid of them. An attempt to organize a fundraiser for a fund of their own failed.

In the United States, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their "exploits" in which they tried to justify the hijacking and hijacking of the plane as "the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation." To whitewash himself, P. Brazinskas stated that he had hit the flight attendant by accident, in a "shootout with the crew." Even later, A. Brazinskas claimed that the flight attendant had died during a "shootout with KGB agents" However, the support of the Brazinskas by Lithuanian organizations gradually faded away, everyone forgot about them. Real life in the United States was very different from what they expected. The criminals lived miserably, under old age Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and unbearable.

In early February 2002, the 911 call in Santa Monica, California rang. The caller hung up immediately. The police identified the address they were calling from and arrived at 900 21st Street. The door for the police was opened by Albert Victor White, 46, and led the law enforcers to the cold corpse of his 77-year-old father. On whose head forensic experts later counted eight blows from a dumbbell. In Santa Monica, murder is rare - it was the city's first violent death that year.

JACK ALEX. attorney for Brazinskas Jr.
“I am a Lithuanian myself, and his wife Virginia hired me to protect Albert Victor White. There is a fairly large Lithuanian diaspora here in California, and don't think that we Lithuanians support the hijacking of the 1970 plane in any way.
- Pranas was a terrible person, it happened, in fits of rage, he chased the neighboring children with weapons.
- Algirdas is a normal and sane person. At the time of the capture, he was only 15 years old, and he hardly knew what he was doing. He spent his whole life in the shadow of his father's dubious charisma, and now, through his own fault, he will rot in prison.
- It was necessary self-defense. The father pointed a pistol at him, threatening to shoot his son if he left him. But Algirdas knocked out his weapon and hit the old man on the head several times.
- The jury considered that, having knocked out the pistol, Algirdas could not have killed the old man, since he was very weak. Another thing against Algirdas was the fact that he called the police only a day after the incident - all this time he was next to the corpse.
- Algirdas was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years in prison under the article "premeditated murder of the second degree"
- I know that this does not sound like a lawyer, but let me express my condolences to Algirdas. When I last saw him, he was terribly depressed. The father terrorized his son as best he could, and when the tyrant finally died, Algirdas, a man in his prime, will rot for many years in prison. Apparently, this is fate ...

Nadezhda Vladimirovna Kurchenko (1950-1970)
She was born on December 29, 1950 in the village of Novo-Poltava in the Klyuchevsky district of the Altai Territory. She graduated from a boarding school in the village of Ponino, Glazovsky district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhum air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970 trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. After 20 years, her grave was transferred to the city cemetery of Glazov. Awarded (posthumously) the Order of the Red Banner. The name of Nadezhda Kurchenko was given to one of the peaks of the Gissar ridge, a tanker of the Russian fleet and a small planet.

Continuing the theme of aviation tragedies - a story about Amari -. Pilots who died during the Soviet era were buried there in Estonia.