Video: The most famous Soviet terrorists: how a family of musicians hijacked a plane
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Hijacking in the USSR was an event out of the ordinary, especially since the terrorists turned out to be a large Ovechkin familyorganizing Music band with a fabulous name "Seven Simeons" … A jazz band of seven brothers, their mother and younger brothers and sisters planned to fly to London and earn money there, but as a result, half of them died, the rest went to jail, and the people on that flight were injured. Who were they really - victims of totalitarianism, dreaming of freedom, or brutal murderers, ready to go to their goal over the corpses?
The Ovechkin family had 11 children; their father died 4 years before the incident. Seven brothers from an early age were fond of music. In 1983, they turned to a teacher at the Irkutsk Art School for help to help create a family jazz ensemble.
The Seven Simeonov group quickly gained popularity both in Irkutsk and throughout the Union - after participating in the Jazz-85 festival, they became frequent guests of TV programs and even heroes of a documentary film. In 1987, the jazz band was invited to tour Japan. Having visited abroad, the mother of the family, Ninel Ovechkina, realized that outside the USSR, their ensemble would have achieved much greater success and material well-being. So the plan of escape from the country matured.
On March 8, 1988, all family members, except for the older sister Lyudmila, who did not know about their plans, boarded the Tu-154 aircraft, which was flying Irkutsk - Kurgan - Leningrad. The Ovechkins allegedly flew on tour, so they had musical instruments with them. “Simeonov” was known and was not carefully inspected. Children between the ages of 9 and 32 and their mother carried on board two sawn-off shotguns, one hundred rounds of ammunition and improvised explosives hidden in tool cases.
When the Ovechkins made their demands, the crew resorted to a trick - they were told about the necessary refueling in Finland. In fact, the plane was landed at a military airfield near the Soviet-Finnish border. There a group of capture was already waiting for them. During the assault, a flight attendant and 3 passengers were shot dead, 36 more were injured. The four older brothers committed suicide, having killed their mother before that at her own request. The plane was blown up and burned to the ground.
The surviving members of the Ovechkin family were tried. The elder brother Igor received 8 years of imprisonment, the older sister Olga - 6, the underage children ended up in an orphanage, and then Lyudmila took them under her care. After serving half the term, Igor and Olga were released.
In 1999, the film "Mama" was released, in which the facts of the Ovechkin's biography are interpreted very freely. Igor Ovechkin was outraged by this interpretation: “And we will file a lawsuit against Evstigneev. Nobody even asked for our opinion. Everyone learned from the newspapers. The authors of "Mama" did not understand anything about what had happened."
The fate of the surviving Ovechkin, who had served a long time for what they had done, was really hard. Olga, being pregnant on the day of the hijacking of the plane, gave birth to a daughter in the colony. Sergei Ovechkin, who was only 9 years old in 1988, did not fully understand what happened then. They did not tell him about the plans, but he paid for the hijacking on an equal basis with the others. It is not easy to live with such a surname in Irkutsk.
The Ovechkins claim that Oleg was the instigator, and the 52-year-old mother found out about everything on the plane. The children are still sure that their mother raised them correctly - she taught them to work from morning till night, not to feel sorry for themselves. But they did not regret other people either.
Unfortunately, the hijacking of the plane was not an isolated incident, a similar story ended tragically for Soviet flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko, who died in the sky from a terrorist bullet
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