Keep in mind, this was during the cold war, and the plane could have carried a (small) nuke. It would have been a suicide mission, but it would have decapitated the USSR.
“On 24 November 1989, while doing his obligatory community service (Zivildienst) as an orderly in a West German hospital, Rust stabbed a female co-worker who had rejected him.”
William E. Odom, former director of the U.S. National Security Agency and author of The Collapse of the Soviet Military, says that Rust’s flight irreparably damaged the reputation of the Soviet military. This enabled Gorbachev to remove many of the strongest opponents to his reforms. Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the commander of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov were dismissed along with hundreds of other officers. This was the biggest turnover in the Soviet military since Stalin’s purges 50 years earlier.
I get that a bunch of officers getting removed at once is going to draw some comparisons but it still seems weird to mention it in the same breath as the Great Purge
Militaries can end up with very entrenched officer corps. It may not have been as brutal as the Great Purge, but it likely had similarly massive effects on the institutions of the Soviet military.
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