The hijacking of Aeroflot Flight 244: States and statelessness in the late cold war

Abstract

The plane carried holidaymakers returning from resorts on the Black Sea, families travelling to meet relatives, an enterprise manager making a connection for a flight to Moscow and a merchant marine reporting for duty. Aeroflot Flight 244, one of many regional flights operating within the Soviet Union, covered the socialist state's southern coast and was scheduled to run from Batumi to Sukhumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) before going on to the Russian city of Krasnodar. Among those boarding the plane in Batumi on 15 October 1970 were Pranas Brazinskas and his teenage son Algirdas, two Soviet Lithuanians who travelled widely across the USSR. The father earned his money shuttling between the Baltic republics and Central Asia, buying and reselling furniture, spare car parts and carpets. Although he had been born in independent Lithuania in 1924, he was, by most accounts, just another citizen in the vast, multiethnic Soviet state. While Lithuanian remained his native language, his Russian was good enough to find opportunities in the burgeoning informal economy; after he separated from his Lithuanian wife to marry a Ukrainian woman and relocated to Central Asia, Russian was the language he spoke at home. His son Algirdas, born in 1955, more than a decade after the Soviet Union's annexation of Lithuania, was educated in Soviet schools and knew little of life beyond Soviet borders.1.