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World Service,3 mins

Operation Wedding: the hijack plot that changed the USSR

Weekend

Available for over a year

In 1970, a group of 16 mainly Jewish dissidents bought all the tickets for a small internal flight in the Soviet Union, under the guise of travelling to a wedding. In fact, they intended to hijack the plane and escape to the West, but they were caught by the KGB. They included the husband and wife Eduard Kuznetsov and Sylva Zalmanson. A new documentary film about the story, called Operation Wedding, has been made by their daughter, Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov. Julian Worricker asked her why her parents tried to flee the Soviet Union: (Photo: The Soviet plane dissidents intended to hijack. Credit: Armands Blumberg, IBA )

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