Better death than life in the USSR: 43 years ago, a waitress escaped from a Soviet cruise ship and sailed for 40 minutes to Australia

In January 1979, USSR citizen Liliana Gasinskaya, being a waitress on the Soviet cruise ship Leonid Sobinov, while the ship was parked in the port of Sydney in only a red bikini, crawled through the porthole, jumped into the water and swam for 40 minutes to the Australian coast, reports Sibreal.

Photo: Shutterstock

She was 18 years old, 14 of which she dreamed of escaping from the USSR.

Escape from the USSR was a dangerous undertaking that few dared to undertake. Even if they successfully crossed the border, the fugitives had no guarantee that the authorities of another country would provide them with asylum and not return them to their homeland, where such an act would result in a criminal sentence or forced “treatment” in a psychiatric hospital.

Along the entire perimeter of its land borders, the Soviet Union was separated from the rest of the world by an intimidating wall of barbed wire, the sight of which made the expression “socialist camp” rethink.

In addition to the land border, there was also a sea border, sometimes frozen, as, for example, in the Baltic Sea, and allowing you to cross it on ice. Every Soviet schoolboy knew that it was in this way that Lenin once managed to get into Finland. An example, although inspiring, did not work well in Soviet times, because there was an agreement between Finland and the USSR on the extradition of defectors. Consequently, when trying to escape by sea, it was worth thinking about countries that were more distant and warmer.

The most famous swimmer for freedom was Stanislav (Slava) Kurilov, who jumped in 1974 from a cruise ship that was on the route Vladivostok - Equator - Vladivostok without calling at foreign ports.

“...I looked at my watch: there was very little time left. It was so good to sit among friends and not think about anything. “It’s time,” I told myself. The liner is off the northern tip of the island. You have half an hour. I got up from the table. -Where are you going? Sit with us! “I didn’t want to come up with some kind of lie at such an important moment for myself. “I won’t be back soon,” I said quietly but clearly and went to the exit without waiting for further questions.

In half an hour, when the liner passes near the island of Siargao, I will step over the side, across the border of the state.

I climbed to the upper bridge and peered at the horizon to the west. No lights. There is no moon. There are no stars. And I don't have a compass.

– Does it really matter now? – I thought. “The die is cast.”

From the book “Alone in the Ocean” by Slava Kurilov

“Any other person would have thought: maybe it’s better to postpone the jump. But Slava, on the contrary, calculated that the huge ocean waves give him an additional chance of not breaking when hitting the water. From the upper deck to the water there were 14 meters. The storm wave could add or subtract 6 meters of height. If we get lucky. It was not clear whether it would be plus 6 meters or minus 6. But this did not frighten Slava, but made her happy. It was within his power to calculate the jump,” said Elena Gendeleva-Kurilova. – On Lake Baikal, on Olkhon Island, Slava practiced yoga 12 hours a day. I gave her all my free time. If I needed to be distracted by work, I worked as hard as I could, but at least 4 hours a day. And in 1973, shortly before his escape, Slava had very intensive practices. He discovered new levels of yoga. I completely immersed myself in it. This is one of the reasons why he was an incredibly physically strong and resilient person."

For three days Kurilov sailed alone in the ocean and, having overcome a hundred kilometers, he safely reached the Philippine island of Siargao.

Kurilov's outstanding sporting achievement was perhaps not the most desperate attempt to break out of the USSR. In June 1962, professional swimmer Pyotr Patrushev (1942–2016) managed to escape from the USSR and gain freedom by swimming across a section of the Black Sea from the border resort town of Batumi to Turkey without any special equipment. The story of his escape from the USSR was included in the secret textbooks of many intelligence services around the world. The authorities of the Soviet Union sentenced Patrushev to death in absentia. The memoirs of Pyotr Patrushev are called “Sentenced to Death”​.

“I just turned twenty years old. I was a brash, stubborn, independent and fairly well-read young man; I wanted to travel, study languages, read literature that was closed to us; was interested in history, philosophy, psychology, medicine; practiced yoga, hypnosis and psychotechnics; I tried to write. I was not happy with the hopelessness in which we all lived then; I wasn’t attracted by the prospect of being crippled in the army... It was perhaps due to the fact that I grew up in Siberia and was used to choosing my own path...

The first spotlight came on. It whipped the sea like the tentacle of a giant octopus. I dived deep, feeling the pressure build up in my ears. All my training, testing on the beach seemed to have evaporated. Now I was left alone with the danger, without any safety net. He floated to the surface panting. If you react like this to every spotlight, you won't get far. I reminded myself to just lay flat just under the surface of the water like a jellyfish, to conserve my strength and not be discovered.

Almost immediately the spotlight passed over me again. I dove, not as deep this time. “Medusa,” I repeated to myself, “jellyfish.” In the intervals between dives, I swam quickly, alternating free style and movement on my back ... "

From the memoirs of Pyotr Patrushev “Sentenced to execution”

In 1970, 25-year-old Daina Palena from Riga, who worked as a waitress on a Soviet herring trawler in the Atlantic Ocean, was poisoned by sleeping pills to get to the United States. When the ship was 150 kilometers from New York, the woman took a life-threatening dose of pills and fell into a coma, forcing the captain to issue a distress signal. In critical condition, Daina was taken by helicopter to an American hospital, and, barely recovering herself in a hospital bed, announced that she was asking for political asylum. Her willingness to risk her life for freedom made a strong impression on the representatives of the immigration service. Three weeks after being discharged, Dina received a US residence permit. What happened to her next, no one knows. Briefly attracting the attention of the press, she disappeared into obscurity, leading an unremarkable life somewhere in New Jersey.

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A much more vivid story happened in the life of another refugee from the Soviet ship, Ukrainian Liliana Gasinskaya.

Naked truth from the USSR

It was a hot summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Late in the evening of January 14, 1979, an 18-year-old girl, undressed and dressed in a red bikini, opened the porthole of her cabin on the ship Leonid Sobinov, moored in Sydney Harbor, decisively jumped into the water and swam to the Australian coast. All her things, documents, money remained in the cabin. On the table lay a branded notebook of the Black Sea Shipping Company with several English words written in Liliana’s hand:

refuge - refuge, shelter (shelter)

political

ask - ask

Gasinskaya’s disappearance at Sobinov was discovered only in the morning, when Liliana did not show up for her shift. The girl was not a tourist, she worked as a waitress, or, according to other sources, as an elevator operator, on a cruise ship that took wealthy Western passengers around the islands of Polynesia, calling at the ports of Australia and New Zealand. The Soviet ship, along with its crew and service personnel, was leased to a British travel agency that organizes exotic leisure trips. Thus, the Black Sea Shipping Company, to which the ship was assigned, earned foreign currency for the USSR.

Before setting off on a long voyage, all crew members (including waitresses) underwent a thorough check by the KGB. Any dubious fact of the biography, such as the presence of relatives abroad, was considered the basis for refusing to obtain an exit visa. Liliana Gasinskaya was lucky with her biography - there was nothing remarkable in it. The girl was born in a small town in the Luhansk region, graduated from the Odessa vocational school of maritime tourist service, and was not noticed in anything suspicious, except for the usual girlish frivolity.

However, already during the cruise in the southern seas, the Sobinov’s political officer began to receive “signals”: ​​Gasinskaya was behaving immodestly, flirting with foreigners and even trying to retire with a young English tourist in his cabin. Mutual denunciations of team members were encouraged by representatives of the “authorities” who accompanied Soviet citizens in the “abroad” and monitored their moral character and political reliability.

It seems that the Odessa vocational school graduate lacked either one or the other. When the Sobinov first landed on the Australian coast and the crew was given leave after a long voyage, Liliana made an attempt to quietly break away from the group. But vigilant teammates, warned in advance by the political officer, took the girl “in tow” and returned her on board against her wishes. After this incident, it was decided, out of harm’s way, to quickly send the problematic waitress back to her homeland with the first Soviet ship that met on the way of the Leonid Sobinov.

The solution is ideologically correct and the only possible one in a situation threatening a political scandal. But Liliana herself resolutely did not want to return home. After waiting for the night and taking advantage of the fact that all the crew members gathered for a party in the wardroom, she jumped overboard in her red swimsuit ... and went down in history. Until now, any search query girl in red bikini leads to Liliana Gasinskaya, the heroine of the sexiest escape from the USSR.

At a press conference held in Sydney a couple of days later, Liliana told reporters about how she swam to the shore for 40 minutes, how she was afraid of sinking or becoming a victim of a shark, but the fear of returning to the USSR and the prospect of being “not allowed to travel abroad” for the rest of her life. “were even stronger because she hates communism with all her heart and dreams of living in the West. And she had been preparing to escape since she was 14 years old, and that’s why she went to the maritime service school. “I’ll kill myself if they try to send me home!” – Liliana stated decisively. The passionate speech of the young beauty touched the whole of Australia. The Australian government simply had no choice but to provide Gasinskaya with asylum.

In the absence of any documents whatsoever, the red bikini became for the girl a pass to the free world.
Meanwhile, a Komsomol meeting was taking place on board the Leonid Sobinov, closed to the press, but no less emotional than the press conference of the fugitive waitress.

“It is bitter and annoying that a person like Gasinskaya was born in a Soviet country, for which Soviet people shed their blood and gave their lives in the name of a bright and beautiful life, for a happy and wonderful childhood for all of us, and in particular Gasinskaya. For peace on Earth, our parents shed blood and gave their lives. Gasinskaya’s treacherous act struck me, struck everyone who is on duty here far from their homeland, from their relatives,” reported the secretary of the Komsomol organization, Comrade. Yu. Mikolaichuk.

Having uttered all the ritual phrases required in this situation, the meeting participants unanimously decided to expel L. Gasinskaya from the ranks of the Komsomol as having stained herself with an anti-Soviet act. Expulsion from the Komsomol was a serious punishment and usually put an end to the career of a Soviet person, closing all social elevators for him, not to mention such bonuses as trips abroad. But the situation of Liliana Gasinskaya, convicted in absentia, was not at all usual. She had already irretrievably crossed the border, and while her former comrades hurled their curses at her, she was preparing for a completely different career, which Komsomol members behind the Iron Curtain could only dream of.

In 1979, the first issue of the Australian Penthouse was published. To launch an erotic magazine in a new region, a model was required - not just beautiful, but one that would evoke emotions among the local audience. Liliana's story was heard throughout the country, so the girl was ideal for the role of the number one star. And she did not disappoint her subscribers - for the sake of a photo shoot, she threw away her Soviet complexes along with a red bikini. This naked truth from the USSR turned out to be more seductive than any dissident revelations. At least if you compare circulations.

Even then, evil tongues said that the escape of Liliana Gasinskaya most of all turned out to be in the hands of the editors of the Australian Penthouse. And there is still no shortage of conspiracy theories about what happened in the port of Sydney that January night. The first person who accidentally discovered a Soviet fugitive on the shore turned out to be a journalist. And a forty-minute swim through a bay infested with sharks could even turn out to be Liliana’s fantasy.

According to some reports, the Leonid Sobinov was not at sea that night in the roadstead opposite Sydney, but was moored at the pier in the port. Whether it was true or not, now it’s difficult to say for sure, but the “debriefing” continues, and not so long ago in LiveJournal one “former sailor” wrote a post “Bastard in a red bikini,” dedicated to Gasinskaya’s escape:

“Does everyone understand what “standing on the roadstead” means? The ship anchors far from the shore and passengers are carried ashore by boats. Only a suicide would dare to sail through a busy bay at night, where boats, yachts, boats, etc. are darting about. But you don’t have to be afraid of sharks in the port; they are scared away by noise. And why swim if she was on leave that day on shore?

The fact is that I knew Seleznev, the senior mate of the captain of the ill-fated Sobinov; we worked together on another ship a year after Gasinskaya’s escape. He told me about this escape, I remember some details.

Her escape was well prepared with the help of newspapermen. Apparently, on one of her previous visits to Sydney, either she herself addressed herself somewhere, or the newspaper men deliberately caught her somewhere in a bar. They needed "roast duck" to increase the newspaper's circulation. In any case, her cabinmates noticed some of her strange statements and reported to the political officer... Pompolite ordered her to be locked in the cabin. But he didn’t take into account that the porthole of her cabin looked directly onto the pier, and not onto the water, and it was not high there. The ship was not at any roadstead! So the sob story about the swim across the bay is nonsense.

The newspaper men with whom she was supposed to meet did not wait for Lilya in the city at the appointed place and arrived by car at the port. She saw them and climbed out onto the pier in only a swimsuit, because she couldn’t fit in clothes, the portholes weren’t designed for that. The sailor on watch on the gangway saw this and began to whistle, calling his superiors, but she jumped into the car and was taken away.”

Just like the “old sailor,” the KGB Directorate for the Odessa Region suspected that not everything was so simple in this case and that someone had to help the girl escape from the ship. In search of Gasinskaya's accomplices, investigators questioned every member of the crew, from the captain to the waitresses who shared the cabin with Liliana. All those interrogated said approximately the same thing, they say, the girl was undisciplined, took liberties in communicating with foreigners, and, as we now understand, was “not ours,” not a Soviet person.

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However, by that time, after the photo shoot in the Penthouse, no one was going to deal with Gasinskaya’s moral character. The investigation was interested in more serious incriminating evidence. However, none of those who were on the Sobinov on that flight could be linked to a criminal case for fleeing abroad.

Nevertheless, the team was subjected to administrative repression. The crew was disbanded, officers and sailors were transferred down to ships that did not go beyond the Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria after Australia and Oceania - such was their punishment for losing their vigilance. A terrible punishment for those times.

Liliana Gasinskaya, having quite happily spent more than two decades in Australia and having been married twice (both times successfully), moved to England, where she currently lives avoiding communication with the press. Once upon a time, journalists played an important role in the fate of Liliana, but now she no longer needs their services.

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