The feat of the Soviet flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko. Kurchenko's last flight of hope

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

This was the first case of a passenger aircraft being hijacked on such a scale (hijacking). With him, in essence, began a long-term series of similar tragedies that splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people.
And it all started like this.

The An-24 took off from the Batumi airfield on October 15, 1970 at 12:30 p.m. Heading to Sukhumi. There were 46 passengers and 5 crew members on board the plane. Flight time according to schedule is 25-30 minutes.
But life has ruined both the schedule and the schedule.

At the 4th minute of the flight, the plane sharply deviated from its course. The radio operators asked for the board, but there was no response. Communication with the control tower was interrupted. The plane was leaving towards nearby Turkey.
Military and rescue boats went out to sea. Their captains received orders: to proceed at full speed to the site of a possible disaster.

The board did not respond to any of the requests. A few more minutes - and the An-24 left USSR airspace. And in the sky above the Turkish coastal airfield of Trabzon, two rockets flashed - red, then green. It was an emergency landing signal. The plane touched the alien's concrete pier air harbor. Telegraph agencies around the world immediately reported: a Soviet passenger plane had been hijacked. The flight attendant was killed and some were wounded. All.

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

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

Today, 45 years later, I intend to again - at least briefly - outline the events of those days and again talk about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism. To talk about the stunning reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to the sacrifice, courage, courage of man. Tell about this, first of all, to the people of the new generation, the new computer consciousness, tell how it was, because my generation remembers and knows this story, and most importantly - Nadya Kurchenko - and without reminders. And it would be useful for young people to know why many streets, schools, Mountain peaks and even the plane bears her name.

After takeoff, greetings and instructions to passengers, the flight attendant returned to her work area, a narrow compartment. She opened a bottle of Borjomi and, letting the water shoot out sparkling tiny cannonballs, filled four plastic cups for the crew. Having placed them on the tray, she entered the cabin.

The crew was always glad to have a beautiful, young, extremely friendly girl in the cockpit. She probably felt this attitude towards herself and, of course, she was happy too. Perhaps, even in this dying hour, 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 little sister, with care and trust.

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

After giving the crew a drink, she returned to her compartment. At that moment the bell rang: one of the passengers called the flight attendant. She came up. 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), a man and a guy sitting in the front seats called the flight attendant and gave her an envelope: “Tell the crew commander!” The envelope contained “Order No. 9” typed on a typewriter:
1. I order you to fly along the specified route.
2. Stop radio communication.
3. For failure to comply with an order - Death.
(Free Europe) P.K.Z.Ts.
General (Krylov)
There was a stamp on the sheet, on which was written in Lithuanian: “... rajono valdybos kooperatyvas” (“cooperative management... of the district”). the man was dressed in the dress uniform of a Soviet officer.

Nadya took the envelope. Their gazes must have met. She was probably surprised by the tone in which these words were spoken. But she didn’t find out anything, but stepped towards the luggage compartment door - then there was the pilot’s cabin door. Probably, Nadya's feelings were written on her face - most likely. And the sensitivity of the wolf, alas, surpasses any other. And, probably, it was precisely thanks to this sensitivity that the terrorist saw hostility, subconscious suspicion, a shadow of danger in Nadya’s eyes. This was enough for the sick imagination to sound the alarm: failure, verdict, exposure. His self-control failed: he literally ejected from his chair and rushed after Nadya.

She only managed to take a step towards the pilot's cabin 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 an animal. She realized: there was an enemy in front of her. The next second, he also realized: she would ruin all plans.

Nadya screamed again.
And at the same moment, slamming the cabin door, she turned to face the bandit, furious with this course of affairs, and prepared to attack. He, like the crew members, heard her words - without a doubt. What could he do? Nadya made a decision: not to let the attacker into the cockpit at any cost. Any!
He could have been a maniac and shot the crew. It could have killed the crew and passengers. He could... She didn't know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: by jumping towards her, he tried to knock her off her feet. Pressing her hands against the wall, Nadya held on and continued to resist.

The first bullet hit her in the thigh. She pressed herself even tighter against the pilot's door. The terrorist tried to squeeze her throat. Nadya - knock the weapon out of his right hand. A stray bullet hit 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 rolled the roaring car to the left, and then to the right. The next second the plane went steeply upward: the pilots tried to knock down the attacker, believing that he had little experience in this matter, but Nadya would hold on.

The passengers were still wearing seat belts - after all, the display did not go out, the plane was just gaining altitude.
In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cabin 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 were the first to sense trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kayshanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were ahead of them by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cabin. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawn-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. The bullet whistled 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. The young man fired again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and went straight through. Depressurization aircraft not yet threatening - the height was insignificant.

Opening the cockpit, she shouted to the crew with all her might:
- Attack! He's armed!
The moment after the second shot, the young man opened his gray cloak and people saw grenades - they were tied to his 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 - if they failed, they had nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, despite the evolution of the plane, the elder remained on his feet and with bestial fury tried to tear Nadya away from the door of the pilot's cabin. He needed a commander. He needed a crew. He needed a plane.
Struck by Nadya’s incredible resistance, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloodied, fragile girl, he, without aiming, without thinking for a second, fired at point-blank range and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of a narrow passage, burst into the cabin. Behind him is his geek with a sawed-off shotgun.
What followed was a massacre. Their shots were drowned out by their own cries:
- To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet shore - we'll blow up the plane!

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

The shooting continued in the cockpit. There they would later count 18 holes, and a total of 24 bullets were fired. One of them hit the commander in the spine:
Georgiy Chakhrakiya - My legs have become paralyzed. Through my efforts, I turned around and saw a terrible picture: Nadya lay motionless on the floor in the doorway of our cabin and was bleeding. Nearby lay navigator Fadeev. And behind us stood a man and, shaking a grenade, shouted: “Keep the seashore on the left! Heading south! Don't enter the clouds! Listen, or we’ll blow up the plane!”

The criminal did not stand on ceremony. He tore off the pilots' radio headphones. He trampled on lying bodies. Flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan was wounded in the chest. The co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was also shot at, but he was lucky - the bullet got stuck in the steel pipe 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’re flying towards Turkey!” - and I was afraid that when approaching the border we might be shot down. The wife also remarked: “Below us is the sea. 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.
Georgy Chakhrakiya - I told the bandits: “I’m wounded, my legs are paralyzed. I can only control it with my hands. The co-pilot must help me,” and the bandit replied: “Everything happens in war. We might die." The thought even flashed of sending “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 told the co-pilot: “If I lose consciousness, fly the ship at the request of the bandits and land it. 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 driving the car, warned that he would shoot me and blow up the ship. I decided to cross the border. And five minutes later we crossed it at low altitude.
...The airfield in Trabzon was found visually. This was not difficult for the pilots.

Georgiy Chakhrakiya - We made a circle and fired green rockets, signaling to clear the runway. We came in from the mountains and sat down so that if something happened, we would land on the sea. We were immediately surrounded. The co-pilot opened the front doors and the Turks entered. In the cabin, the bandits surrendered. All this time, until the locals showed up, we were held at gunpoint...
Coming out of the cabin 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 who wanted to stay in Turkey, but not one of the 49 Soviet citizens agreed.
The next day, all passengers and the body of Nadya Kurchenko were taken to the Soviet Union. A little later they overtook the hijacked An-24.

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 Nadya. But it should be said, apparently, about something else.
The scale of government and public actions related to the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs negotiated with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.

It was necessary to: allocate an air corridor for the return of the hijacked plane; an air corridor to transport wounded crew members and those passengers in need of urgent medical attention from Trabzon hospitals; of course, those who were not physically harmed, but found themselves in a foreign land not of their own free will; an air corridor was required for a special flight from Trabzon to Sukhumi with Nadya’s body. Her mother was already flying to Sukhumi from Udmurtia.

Nadezhda’s mother Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko says: “I immediately asked that Nadya be buried here in Udmurtia. But I was not allowed. They said that from a political point of view this cannot 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 to last time, and then the war began. The Abkhazians fought with the Georgians, and the grave was neglected. We walked to Nadya on foot, there was shooting nearby - all sorts of things happened... And then I impudently wrote a letter addressed to Gorbachev: “If you don’t help transport Nadya, I will go and hang myself at her grave!” A year later, the daughter was reburied in the city cemetery in Glazov. They wanted to bury her separately, on Kalinin Street, and rename the street in honor of Nadya. But I didn't allow it. She died for the people. And I want her to lie with people...

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

The “shuffle” 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 was seriously wounded in the chest, remained in the Trabzon hospital and underwent surgery. The names of the hijackers are not known: “As for the two criminals who committed an armed attack on the crew of the plane, as a result of which flight attendant N.V. Kurchenko was killed, two crew members and one passenger were injured, the Turkish government stated that they were arrested and the prosecutor’s office was given an order to conduct an urgent investigation into the circumstances of the case.”

The identities of the air pirates became known to the general public only on November 5 after a press conference by 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 and killed the chairman of the council and mortally wounded P. Brazinskas’s father, who happened to be nearby. With the help of local authorities, P. Brazinskas purchased a house in Vievis and in 1952 became the manager of the household goods warehouse of the Vievis 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 was released early in June. 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 parcels to Central Asia, for each parcel he made a profit of 400-500 rubles), quickly accumulated 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 unknown where they purchased weapons, accumulated dollars (according to the KGB, more than 6,000 dollars) and flew to Transcaucasia.

Having received a refusal, the Brazinskas again surrendered into the hands of the Turkish police, where they were kept for another couple of weeks and... finally released. They then 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 first they were given residence permits, and in 1983 they were both given American passports. Algirdas officially became Albert-Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White.

In the USA, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their “exploits”, in which they tried to justify the seizure and hijacking of the plane as “the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation.” To clear himself, P. Brazinskas stated that he hit the flight attendant by accident, in a “shootout with the crew.” Even later, A. Brazinskas claimed that the flight attendant died during a “shootout with KGB agents.” However, support for 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 a miserable life; in his old age, Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and unbearable.

In early February 2002, the 911 service in the Californian city of Santa Monica received a call. The caller immediately hung up. Police located the address where the call was coming from and arrived at the 900 block of 21st Street. 46-year-old Albert Victor White opened the door to the police and led the officers to the cold corpse of his 77-year-old father. On whose head forensic experts later counted eight blows from a dumbbell. Murders are rare in Santa Monica—it was the city's first violent death that year.

Jack ALEX. Brazinskas Jr.'s lawyer
- I am Lithuanian myself, and his wife Virginia hired me to defend Albert Victor White. There is quite a large Lithuanian diaspora here in California, and don't think that we Lithuanians are in any way supportive of the 1970 plane hijacking
- Pranas was a scary person; sometimes, in fits of rage, he would chase the neighbor kids with a weapon.
- Algirdas is a normal and sensible person. At the time of his capture, he was only 15 years old, and he hardly knew what he was doing. He spent his entire 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 gun at him, threatening to shoot his son if he left him. But Algirdas knocked the weapon away from him and hit the old man on the head several times.
- The jury considered that, having knocked out the pistol, Algirdas might not have killed the old man, since he was very weak. Another thing that played 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 this doesn’t sound like a lawyer, but let me express my condolences to Algirdas. The last time I saw him, he was terribly depressed. The father terrorized his son as best he could, and when the tyrant finally passed away, Algirdas, a man in the prime of his life, would rot in prison for many more years. 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, Glazov district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhumi air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970, while trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. 20 years later, her grave was moved to the Glazov city cemetery. 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 Russian fleet and a small planet.

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

She was 19 years old. A beautiful girl stood in the way of armed bandits who hijacked an Aeroflot plane on October 15, 1970. This was the first time. Until this moment in the USSR there was no...

She was 19 years old. A beautiful girl stood in the way of armed bandits who hijacked an Aeroflot plane on October 15, 1970. This was the first time. Until this moment, there had been no aircraft hijackings in the USSR. Or have we never heard anything about them?

AN-24 took off from Batumi and began to move towards Sukhumi. An ordinary, unremarkable flight. Such flights were almost bus flights. Thirty minutes and landing. But it turned out that the course did not coincide with the plans of the bandits.

Radars recorded a sharp deviation from course towards Turkey. The plane was silent. Captains at sea were ordered to proceed to the possible crash site of the airliner. It never occurred to anyone that the plane had been hijacked.

A few minutes later, the instruments recorded that the plane had crossed the state border of the USSR. The crew fired a designated emergency landing signal from a flare gun.

The chassis rolled across foreign territory. Half an hour later, the whole world heard the message: the hijacking of a Soviet Union aircraft. A flight attendant was killed and passengers were injured.

...The girl Nadya was getting married. The wedding dress and white shoes are already ready. The wedding is scheduled for three weeks. And the commander is invited with the crew. An hour after takeoff, the commander realized that the wedding would not take place.

In the last hour of her young life, she was friendly and smiling. The spill was poured into Borjomi cups and carried into the cockpit. As always. The crew loved this modest girl.

Perhaps she was thinking about these people who would soon come to her wedding? She loved her job, she loved making people smile. After giving the crew a drink, she heard the flight attendant call.

The passenger handed over a piece of paper and ordered it to be urgently handed over to the crew. Printed on the sheet are requirements to change course and turn off radio communications with the ground. Otherwise the plane will be blown up.

The man who handed over the envelope was in full officer's uniform. They met their gazes, but the wolf's sensitivity is always higher than any other. He saw hostility in the young girl's eyes.

The shadow of danger threw him out of his chair after Nadya. Opening the compartment door, he realized that now this girl would ruin his plans. The shadow of the beast loomed over her. Nadya screamed. She was heard in the cockpit of the plane, and she decided to engage in battle with the enemy.

The young girl could not even imagine what the invader would do. Maniac? Mentally abnormal? He could... She couldn't let him into the cabin. Jumping, the bandit tries to knock her down. Nadya resisted. The bandit was ready for anything.

First shot. Nadya is wounded in the thigh. Nadya pressed her back against the cockpit, and he tried to grab her by the throat. She tries to knock the gun out, but...Second shot. Past. The girl resisted as best she could - she kicked and fought.

The commander quickly realized what was happening behind the door. He began to roll the plane in different directions, hoping to overturn the attacker. But the flight attendant will resist, she’s experienced. People are still wearing their seat belts.

The passenger rushed to help, but the second bandit jumped up and fired a gun into the passage. The passengers realized that there was no point in moving. And the pilot kept throwing the car from side to side.

Another shot at the plane's skin. The altitude was insignificant, and depressurization did not threaten the aircraft. Nadya screamed: “Attack! He's armed!" The invader opened his cloak. There were grenades hanging from his belt.

The plane will be blown up if they don't go abroad. He furiously tore at Nadezhda, who was clinging to the door. Some kind of gimmick doesn't let me into the cabin. The third shot - and the fragile, tender blue-eyed girl falls forever.

No one stands between the bandit and the pilot. Nadya fell. And the massacre began. They shot in the cockpit, although the pilots were needed for the aircraft to continue its journey to a foreign country.

Eighteen holes were in the plane's cabin after landing. Commander Chakhrakiya was wounded in the spine. A terrifying picture behind me. Dead Nadya and a seriously wounded navigator. The wounded flight mechanic Babayan groans.

Only co-pilot Shavidze was lucky. His bullets got stuck in the back of the chair. And the bandit was yelling, as if he was encouraging himself. Among the wild shouting, only the word Türkiye can be heard!

The passengers were ready to die. Criminals too. They kicked the fallen wounded, the chief of them told the commander that everything happens. Perhaps they will die. They can be shot down by Turkish air defenses.

A few minutes later the aircraft crossed the state border of the USSR. The activated SOS signal went off. They weren't shot down. They fired green rockets to clear the runway of Trabzon airfield.

The plane rolled along the wrong runway. It was immediately surrounded by Turkish security forces. The bandits immediately surrendered to the authorities of the Turkish Republic. Urgent assistance was provided to all victims.

In broken Russian they offered political asylum to those who wanted it. There were no takers. The next day, all passengers left Turkey. The body of young Nadya Kurchenkov was also sent to the USSR.

The generation of the seventies remembers the stunning news about the death of a flight attendant who covered the entire male crew of the plane with her body. Her name was given to the school where she studied, and in several cities there are streets with a sign where her last name is written.

Peak of a mountain range, small planet in deep space. There is even a personalized plane. For her courageous deed, the young girl was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Battle.

What happened to the hijackers? They were arrested and tried in Turkey, refusing to extradite them to the USSR authorities. Despite the rather severe punishment, they were granted an amnesty. And they were soon released.

Judging by subsequent events, Brazinskas Pranas and Algirdas - father and son - wanted to leave for America. But America refused the request for political asylum. The USA did not want a quarrel with the USSR.

Then the bandits bought tickets to Canada. The stopover in New York became the reason for their detention by immigration authorities. They were unable to obtain political status. But they were given American passports.

Father and son did not achieve success in America. They lived on unemployment benefits and lived in poverty. Algirdas, already a very old father, beat dumbbells. The head of the deceased turned into mush. The jury sentenced him to twenty years in prison.

Song with a story =My clear little star...=

Since childhood, I have really loved the song “My Clear Star” performed by VIA Flowers!! Some time ago, I came across an article about this song. Which said that the poem, which was subsequently set to music, was dedicated to the Soviet flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko.

I was very impressed by this story and I think it deserves our attention.

It was the end" velvet season" An An-24 aircraft with 46 passengers on board took off from the city of Batumi on flight N244 to Batumi-Sukhumi-Krasnodar. People vacationing in the Caucasus did not yet know that in the next 24 hours they were to become witnesses and participants in the drama associated with the first successful hijacking of a passenger plane abroad in the history of the USSR.

A few minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 800 meters, two passengers - Father and son Brazinskas - called the flight attendant and, threatening with an explosion, demanded to land in Turkey. In those years, the door to the pilot's cabin was not locked on airplanes, and there were no special officers on duty in the cabin either. Nadya tried to block the bandits’ path to the cockpit. She rushed into the cabin and shouted: “Attack!”

The terrorists' first shots killed the flight attendant who blocked their way and burst into the cabin. The terrorists fired in all directions. Later, 18 holes were counted in the casing. Several bullets were fired towards the cabin; none of the passengers were injured. The first pilot, Georgiy Chakhrakia, was hit in the spine by a bullet, and his legs were paralyzed.

Overcoming the pain, he turned around and saw a terrible picture: Nadya lay motionless in the door of the pilot’s cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Valery Fadeev was shot in the lung, and flight mechanic Oganes Babayan was wounded in the chest. Co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was luckiest of all - the bullet got stuck in a steel pipe in the back of his seat. Behind the pilots stood Brazinskas Sr., shaking a grenade and shouting: “Keep the seashore on the left. Head south.

Do not enter the clouds!" The pilot tried to deceive the terrorists and land the An-24 at a military airfield in Kobuleti. But the hijacker once again warned that he would blow up the car (it later turned out that Brazinskas was bluffing, since the grenade was a training grenade). Soon the captured board crossed the Soviet- the Turkish border, and after another half hour found himself over the airfield in Trabzon.

The plane circled the runway and fired green flares, asking it to be cleared for an emergency landing. Immediately after landing, the hijackers surrendered to Turkish authorities. The next day, on a specially sent plane, all the people and the body of the deceased girl were taken to the USSR. A little later, the Turks also returned the hijacked An-24. After a major overhaul, aircraft N46256 with a photograph of Nadya Kurchenko in the cabin flew in Uzbekistan for a long time.

The Brazilians were issued American passports in 1983. 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 USA, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their “exploits”, in which they tried to justify the seizure and hijacking of the plane by “the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Lithuanian community in America had a wary attitude towards the Brazinskas and were openly afraid of them. An attempt to organize a fundraiser for their own aid fund failed - almost none of the Lithuanian immigrants gave them a single dollar. In his old age, Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and bilious, and therefore quarrels began to arise frequently in the two-room apartment that he shared with his son.

During one of these quarrels, a 45-year-old son beat his 77-year-old father to death with a baseball bat and was convicted of murdering his father on domestic grounds. This tragedy received a very wide resonance at that time. In fact, this was not only the first successful act of air terrorism in the history of the USSR, but also the first case in the world when a crew member died during the hijacking of an aircraft. Much was written about the tragedy in newspapers around the world.

The death of the very young Nadya Kurchenko, whose wedding was scheduled in three months, shocked the country. One of them, the famous Vologda poetess Olga Fokina, wrote a poem in the early 70s entitled “People have different songs.” At one of the creative meetings, Fokina admitted that she was deeply struck by the tragic death of Nadezhda Kurchenko, which happened on the eve of Nadya’s wedding, that the verse was written with the thought of the deceased flight attendant and, as it were, on behalf of her young man, mourning the death of his bride, his star. ...

After some time, Olga Fokina’s poem caught the eye of the then aspiring composer, guitarist Vladimir Semenov. In 1971, he wrote the song “My Clear Little Star” with these verses. A musical group was created specifically to perform the song and record a record with it, which was called VIA "Flowers" (later "Stas Namin Group").

And the lead singer of “Tsvetov”, the late Alexander Losev, sang the song in an unusually lyrical and soulful manner. The song “My Clear Star,” which elevated VIA “Flowers” to the pop Olympus and made the ensemble super popular in the USSR, has not lost its popularity for almost 40 years and, thanks to its extraordinary lyricism, sincerity and sincerity, still lives in the hearts of many people.

The name of STAR, the deceased young flight attendant Nadya Kurchenko, who at the cost of her own life tried to save people from armed bandits, also lives in the memory of people... ETERNAL MEMORY TO HER! The name of Nadezhda Kurchenko was given to one of the peaks of the Gissar Range, a tanker of the Russian fleet and an asteroid.

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

And it all started like this.

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

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

Such things are not forgotten, - That day I said to Nadya: “We agreed that in life you would consider us your brothers. So why aren't you being honest with us? I know that soon I will have to go to a 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! We’re going to a wedding for the holidays!”... And within an hour I knew that there would be no wedding...

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

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

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

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 then the war began. The Abkhazians fought with the Georgians, and the grave was neglected. We walked to Nadya on foot, there was shooting nearby - all sorts of things happened... And then I impudently wrote a letter addressed to Gorbachev: “If you don’t help transport Nadya, I will go and hang myself at her grave!” A year later, the daughter was reburied in the city cemetery in Glazov. They wanted to bury her separately, on Kalinin Street, and rename the street in honor of Nadya. But I didn't allow it. She died for the people. And I want her to lie with people...

In October 1970, the USSR demanded that Turkey immediately extradite the criminals, but this demand was not fulfilled. The Turks decided to judge the hijackers themselves. The Trabzon Court of First Instance did not recognize the attack as intentional. In his justification, Pranas stated that they hijacked the plane in the face of death, which allegedly threatened 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, the father came under an amnesty law and Brazinskas Sr.’s prison sentence was replaced with house arrest. That same year, father and son allegedly escaped from house arrest and contacted 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 another couple of weeks and... finally released. They then 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 first they were given residence permits, and in 1983 they were both given American passports. Algirdas officially became Albert-Victor White, and Pranas became Frank White.

Henrietta Ivanovna Kurchenko - In seeking the extradition of the Brazinskas, I even went to a meeting with Reagan at the American embassy. They told me that they were looking for my father because he was living in the United States illegally. And the son received American citizenship. And he cannot be punished. Nadya was killed in 1970, and the law on the extradition of bandits, wherever they were, allegedly came out 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 had a wary attitude towards the Brazinskas, they were openly afraid of them. An attempt to organize a fundraiser for our own aid fund failed. In the USA, the Brazinskas wrote a book about their “exploits”, in which they tried to justify the seizure and hijacking of the plane as “the struggle for the liberation of Lithuania from Soviet occupation.” To clear himself, P. Brazinskas stated that he hit the flight attendant by accident, in a “shootout with the crew.” Even later, A. Brazinskas claimed that the flight attendant died during a “shootout with KGB agents.” However, support for 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 a miserable life; in his old age, Brazinskas Sr. became irritable and unbearable.

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, Glazov district of the Ukrainian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Since December 1968, she has been a flight attendant of the Sukhumi air squadron. She died on October 15, 1970, while trying to prevent terrorists from hijacking a plane. In 1970 she was buried in the center of Sukhumi. 20 years later, her grave was moved to the Glazov city cemetery. 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 a passenger aircraft being hijacked on such a scale (hijacking). With him, in essence, began a long-term series of similar tragedies that splattered the skies of the whole world with the blood of innocent people.

And it all started like this.

But life has ruined both the schedule and the schedule.

Military and rescue boats went out to sea. Their captains received orders: to proceed at full speed to the site of a possible disaster.

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

BLACK ENVELOPE

I was flying to the scene of the emergency a few hours later. I flew without 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 again - at least briefly - outline the events of those days and again talk about Nadya Kurchenko, her courage and her heroism. To talk about the stunning reaction of millions of people of the so-called stagnant time to the sacrifice, courage, courage of man. To tell about this, first of all, to 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 - Nadya Kurchenko - and without reminders. And it would be useful for young people to know why many streets, schools, mountain peaks and even an airplane bear her name.

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

After giving the crew a drink, she returned to her compartment. At that moment the bell rang: one of the passengers called the flight attendant. She came up. The passenger said:

Tell it urgently to the commander,” and handed her some kind of envelope.

"ATTACK! HE'S ARMED!"

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

You can't go here! - she screamed.

But he approached like the shadow of an animal. She realized: there was an enemy in front of her. The next second, he also realized: she would ruin all plans.

Nadya screamed again:

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

But he took out a weapon - his nerves burned to the ground. Nadya did not know his intentions. But I understood: he is absolutely dangerous. Dangerous for the crew, dangerous for the passengers.

She saw the revolver clearly.

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

Attack! He's armed!

And at the same moment, slamming the cabin door, she turned to face the bandit, furious with this course of affairs, and prepared to attack. He, like the crew members, heard her words - without a doubt.

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

BATTLE AT THE LAST FRONTIER

He could have been a maniac and shot the crew. It could have killed the crew and passengers. He could... She didn't know his actions, his intentions. And he knew: by jumping towards her, he tried to knock her off her feet. Pressing her hands against the wall, Nadya held on and continued to resist.

The passengers were still wearing seat belts - after all, the display did not go out, the plane was just gaining altitude.

The young man opened his gray cloak, and the passengers saw grenades - they were tied to his belt. “This is for you!” he shouted. “If anyone else gets up, we’ll split the plane!”

In the cabin, seeing a passenger rushing to the cabin 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 were the first to sense trouble. Galina Kiryak and Aslan Kayshanba, however, did not have time to take a step: they were ahead of them by the one who was sitting next to the one who had fled into the cabin. The young bandit - and he was much younger than the first, for they turned out to be father and son - pulled out a sawn-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. The bullet whistled 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. The young man fired again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and went straight through. Depressurization did not yet threaten the aircraft - the altitude was insignificant.

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

This is for you! - he shouted. “If anyone else gets up, we’ll split the plane!”

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

Struck by Nadya’s incredible resistance, enraged by his own powerlessness to cope with the wounded, bloodied, fragile girl, he, without aiming, without thinking for a second, fired at point-blank range and, throwing the desperate defender of the crew and passengers into the corner of a narrow passage, burst into the cabin. Behind him is his geek with a sawed-off shotgun.

To Turkey! To Turkey! Return to the Soviet shore - we'll blow up the plane!

42 BULLETS ON THE CREW

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

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

When a coastal Turkish airfield appears in the gray dream of reality, it fires emergency flares into the sky. And the plane, pierced by forty-two bullets, falls to someone else's hard ground...

A LOOK THROUGH THE YEARS

WHILE HOPE LIVES...

The scale of government and public actions related to the unprecedented event was enormous. Members of the State Commission and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs negotiated with the Turkish authorities for several days in a row without a single break.

There were a lot of worries. But all these dramatic actions could not smooth out the acute pain of loss - Nadya remained at the center of any conversation across the vast country, television and radio programs, and newspapers.

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

No. It couldn't. In any case, I don’t believe in it.

In Komsomolskaya Pravda, where I worked then (and was the first and only journalist from Moscow at the site of the tragedy), in the first two weeks alone, even after the reports distorted by censorship, over 12 thousand letters and telegrams arrived from shocked readers mourning Nadya and admiring her courage !

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

On the day of Nadya’s funeral, over her coffin littered with flowers and over the heads of thousands of people walking behind her coffin through the streets of the city, all the planes leaving for the flight swayed their wings, showing tribute to their protector, their young colleague, their heroine. On each of these planes, flight attendants tearfully told their passengers:

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

Do you believe that we are still the same?

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

I absolutely believe in these words, familiar to the ear, but written by Nadya’s hand and heart.

PAY

The bandits punished themselves

The terrorists turned out to be 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 convicted them themselves. The eldest received eight years, the youngest - two. After some time, both were released under an amnesty, and the bandits moved to Venezuela, and from there to the United States: they got off a plane in New York heading to 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 quarreled with his son, for which he received several fatal blows with a bat. Algirdas was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

1973 The ballad “My Clear Little Star” flew around the Soviet Union like a dove. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind: the song was dedicated to the young flight attendant who remained in the sky forever. Killed three weeks before the wedding. And it is performed on behalf of her groom. The sad story is still being replicated on the Internet. However, this is just beautiful legend...

Composer Vladimir Semenov: “Many people sang and continue to sing this song. But it seems to me that its best performer was and remains Sasha Losev...” Soloist of a student amateur ensemble, winner of a regional competition, where the main prize is the recording of his own record at the Melodiya company ...

The tragic aura that the song acquired, 22 years later, covered its first performer with a black cloud. Shortly before his departure, Losev admitted that before he sang “My Clear Little Star” with one subtext, now - in memory of his early deceased son. And he summed it up sadly: “Inexplicably, the main song in the program became the main song in life.”

“Zvezdochka” became the main song in the life of composer Vladimir Semyonov. He was already 35 years old. Behind me is Astrakhan, an automobile and road technical school, a homemade electric guitar and hundreds of kilometers on a tattered bus traveling with concert teams of the Astrakhan Philharmonic...

“Of course, I remember the story of the plane hijacking, then they wrote a lot about Nadya’s feat,” says Semenov. “But, to be honest, I didn’t think about anything like that when I took out a small collection of poems from the store shelf by the Vologda poetess Olga Fokina. Literally 12- 13 pages printed on thin newsprint. I started leafing through them and suddenly came across the words “People have different songs, but mine is the same for centuries.”

A song was born that Semenov showed to his friend, composer Sergei Dyachkov. He brought Semenov to Stas Namin, who led the vocal and instrumental ensemble. We recorded a small record consisting of three compositions - Oscar Feltsman's song "Flowers Have Eyes", Sergei Dyachkov's song "Don't" and Vladimir Semyonov's ballad "My Clear Star". It spread across the country with a circulation of almost 7 million copies!

“After all the hassle - rehearsals, recordings - I went with my wife to relax in Sochi,” recalls composer Vladimir Semenov today. “I was lying on the sand and suddenly I heard something familiar - somewhere in the distance a motor ship was passing, a huge, foreign tourist one, and from there I could hear Sasha Losev's voice: “People have different songs, but mine is one for centuries!”

Vologda poetess Olga Fokina wrote these lines several years before the tragedy on board the An-24. Lines about your own, very personal things. Her famous fellow countryman, writer Fyodor Abramov said that Olga “is very close to life, her poems are always not fiction, not letters, not words - poems are generated by life itself... they captivate, enchant you with sincerity, purity and spontaneity of feelings.” .

All the things that Nadya Kurchenko was remembered for and will forever remain in the people’s memory.

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