In 1987, an 18-year-old amateur pilot flew a rented Cessna from Helsinki and landed next to Red Square — humiliating the entire Soviet air defense system.
On May 28, 1987, Matthias Rust — an 18-year-old West German with about 50 hours of flying experience — took off from Helsinki, told air traffic control he was heading to Stockholm, then disabled his radio and turned east toward Moscow instead.
The Soviet air defense system, designed to intercept supersonic bombers, had no idea what to do with a single slow propeller plane. Three surface-to-air missile battalions tracked him but couldn't get authorization to fire. A MiG-23 pilot requested permission to shoot him down near Gdov and was denied. Radar operators kept mistaking his slow, low-flying Cessna for friendly helicopters and training aircraft.
A layer of bureaucratic confusion made it worse: the military had recently reorganized its air defense districts, creating coordination gaps. Search-and-rescue flights for Rust's 'missing' plane (Finland had launched a search when he vanished) were adding more radar clutter. And that morning, Moscow maintenance crews had happened to remove the trolleybus wires usually strung across the bridge where Rust would ultimately land.
Rust circled over Moscow for a while, initially planning to land inside the Kremlin itself. He decided against it — fearing the KGB would deny the whole thing — and instead landed on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near St. Basil's Cathedral. Curious Muscovites gathered around the plane and asked for autographs before he was arrested two hours later.
The political fallout was enormous. Gorbachev used the incident to purge the Soviet military of hardliners who opposed his reforms: the Minister of Defence was fired, the commander of Soviet Air Forces was dismissed, and hundreds of additional officers were removed — the largest military purge since Stalin. Moscow residents sarcastically renamed Red Square 'Sheremetyevo-3,' after the city's airports.
Rust was convicted of hooliganism and aviation violations and sentenced to four years in a Soviet labor camp. He served 14 months before being pardoned as a goodwill gesture during the Reagan-Gorbachev arms talks. His family sold the story rights to a German magazine for 100,000 Deutsche Marks. His plane is now in a Berlin museum.