00:05Matías Rüst takes a walk along a remainder of the Berlin Wall in what was once known as the Death
00:10Strip.
00:12At a time when the Berlin Wall was very much still standing, Rüst, now 44, breached one of the world's
00:18most impregnable borders.
00:22Twenty-five years ago, Rüst illegally landed a small plane in the middle of Moscow.
00:28Equipped with only a map of the city, the 19-year-old managed to steer his light aircraft towards Red
00:33Square.
00:37I flew over three times at low altitude to try to drive people away from my landing spot.
00:43That didn't work, so I landed on the bridge next to Red Square.
00:49Rust was quickly surrounded by curious locals.
00:52It took the police some time to come.
00:54Rust says he was extremely nervous during the landing, but the Muscovites made him feel welcome.
01:01The mood there was carefree.
01:03I was lucky that a 15- or 16-year-old boy was there who spoke some English so I
01:07could communicate.
01:09They asked me where I'd come from. I said, from Germany.
01:12They thought I meant the East. When I said West Germany, they were surprised.
01:17I said I'd done it for peace, and I wanted to speak to Gorbachev and build an imaginary bridge between
01:22East and West.
01:26But what would cause a 19-year-old to do such a thing?
01:30Rust said he was inspired by a German comic book series featuring a space-travelling hero called Perry Roden.
01:37Instead of a spaceship, he had his plane.
01:41He wanted to save the world, because in his opinion, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev couldn't
01:49manage it.
01:51When their disarmament summit in Reykjavik failed to achieve results, Rust felt obliged to act.
01:57He flew from Iceland via Helsinki to the Soviet Union, right through the Iron Curtain.
02:06The incident was reported on Soviet TV.
02:09The coverage left out the fact that Soviet air defense had tracked the flight without stopping it.
02:14In the middle of the Cold War, the landing was highly provocative.
02:23It gave us a shock, because it was a German, and he'd violated Soviet airspace, broken laws and international regulations.
02:31It could have turned into a bilateral crisis.
02:34Then there was a trial. That was unpleasant.
02:41In the end, diplomacy won out. Rust received a moderate sentence in Soviet terms, four years in a labor camp.
02:48It was obvious that he wasn't any threat.
02:52I'm either a spy, nor a businessman, nor an adventurer.
02:55I came here, or rather I flew here, for my own private reasons.
03:02Wolfgang Akunov acted as Rust's interpreter in court. It was the most spectacular case of his career.
03:11Right from the start, it resembled a show trial. It was semi-serious.
03:16My impression of Rust was that he was a young man who knew that he wasn't facing any really serious
03:22punishment.
03:28Rust was never transferred to a labor camp. After 14 months in a Moscow prison, he was pardoned and allowed
03:35to return to Germany.
03:40Mikhail Gorbachev used the military's failure to prevent Rust's landing as an excuse to fire senior officials opposed to his
03:47reforms.
03:48They included the defense minister and numerous generals. Today, Rust claims part of the credit.
03:56That was what motivated me. I wanted to help strengthen his position.
04:01I feared that if he didn't have a foreign policy success in the near future, his opponents would drive him
04:06out of office.
04:09That would have meant that Germany would never have been reunited.
04:17Many observers would dismiss those claims as presumptuous.
04:21Although Gorbachev did exploit Rust's landing to promote his program of reforms, historians say Perestroika would probably have succeeded anyway.
04:30There would likely have been another incident that would have allowed Gorbachev to remove key military figures from power.
04:37The Rust landing just happened to come at an opportune moment.
04:41Gorbachev acted quickly to exploit it tactically and strategically, to expose the military leadership and depose numerous generals.
04:50In later years, Rust's fortunes took a dive. He was convicted of attempted manslaughter, shoplifting and fraud.
04:57Rust says he's now working as a financial analyst.
05:01The landing benefited me personally because it showed me that if you're really committed to a particular goal, you can
05:07achieve it.
05:09But the incident could have turned out much worse for Rust. The young aviator was extremely lucky that he survived
05:15unscathed to tell the tale.
05:17The�.
05:21The strif.
05:22The Strif.
05:23The Strif.
05:23The Strif.
05:23Gracias.
