Operation Wedding

What do you do when your country won’t let you leave? One group of defectors from the Soviet Union hatched a desperate plan: they’d pretend they were on their way to a wedding, then they’d hijack their plane and fly it out of the country.

Content note: This episode discusses antisemitism in the Soviet Union and the Zionist movement.

Featured image: Mark Dymshits, Sylva Zalmanson, and Edward Kuznetsov in front of a crowd of supporters in New York in 1979. (Image source)

Yosef Mendelevitch at an event for the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. (Image source)

Yosef Mendelevitch disembarks a plane at Ben-Gurion Airport after his release from prison. (Image source)

Sylva Zalmanson in 1977. After her own release from prison, she continued to campaign for the release of her family and friends. (Image source)

Edward Kuznetsov in 2016, from the documentary Operation Wedding. (Image source)

A poster for the documentary film Operation Wedding, made by Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, the daughter of Eduard Kuznetsov and Sylva Zalmanson. (Image source)

An Antonov An-2, the type of plane the group intended to hijack. (Image source)

A trailer for Operation Wedding.

Sources

• Anti-Jewish Pogroms
• Alfred A. Greenbaum, “Soviet Jewry during the Lenin-Stalin Period.” Soviet Studies 16, No 4 (April, 1965).
• Bozena Szyanok, “The Anti-Jewish Policy of the USSR in the Last Decade of Stalin’s Rule and Its Impact on the East European Countries With Special Reference to Poland”, Russian History 29 No 2/4 (Summer-fall-winter 2002)
• Rootless Cosmopolitans : : Literature of the Soviet-Jewish Diaspora
• Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor’s Plot
• Prague Trial Throws Jews in Communist Countries into Mortal Fear
• Советские антисионистские карикатуры
• CAUTION: ZIONISM! Essays on the Ideology, Organisation and Practice of Zionism
• A history of the Jews in the modern world
• The Origins and Development of Soviet Anti-Semitism: An Analysis
• Israeli Filmmaker Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov’s “Operation Wedding”
• Declaration and ‘Last Will’ of the Leningrad Hijackers
• New York Times archived article
• Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1960)
• Soviet Law
• SUPREME SOVIET OF THE USSR, ACT CONCERNING THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM OF THE USSR, AND OF THE UNION AND THE AUTONOMOUS REPUBLICS. AUGUST 16, 1938
• Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts
• Second Trial in Leningrad Is Said to Be Postponed
• 4 Soviet Jews Convicted in ’70 Are Said to Testify at Trial of 9
• New York Times archived article
• Leningrad Jew Says 8 Held Are Innocent
• Colorado legislators’ efforts to help free Soviet Dissidents on display
• We Soviet Jews Lived Through State-Sponsored Anti-Zionism. We Know How It Is Weaponized.