Former prisoner of Zion, anti-Soviet dissident Eduard Kuznetsov dies at 85

Refusenik was one of the leaders of Operation Wedding, a failed attempt to hijack an empty civilian plane to escape Soviet Russia and head to Israel

Portrait of Soviet-born human rights activist and writer, Eduard Kuznetsov, in his home in Motza Illit, Israel, April 8, 2015. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
Portrait of Soviet-born human rights activist and writer, Eduard Kuznetsov, in his home in Motza Illit, Israel, April 8, 2015. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Eduard Kuznetsov, a former prisoner of Zion and journalist for a Russian-language newspapers and radio, died on Saturday night at the age of 85. He was one of the leading figures in the struggle to help Jews leave the Soviet Union.

His daughter Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov announced his death in a Facebook post early on Sunday morning. He lived in the coastal city of Hadera.

Kuznetsov was one of the leaders of a 1970 attempt by Soviet Jews to hijack an empty civilian aircraft with 16 other refuseniks in order to escape to the West.

The operation — which was dubbed Operation Wedding after the cover story, according to which the hijackers claimed they were traveling to a big family wedding — was initially meant to involve more people, but many dropped out after two Zionist groups disagreed over the plan and the State of Israel discouraged them from carrying it out.

However, Kuznetsov; his wife, Sylva Zalmanson; and one of the original planners, Mark Dymshits, did not back down and continued to plan the operation with 14 others, reasoning that even if it failed, it would effectively highlight the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union to the rest of the world.

The operation ultimately did fail, as the KGB knew about the plan, and the hijackers were arrested on the runway a few steps away from the plane.

Screenshot from film of Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov with her father. (Courtesy/David Stragmeister/IBA & Latvia National Film Center)

Zalmanson-Kuznetsov chronicled the operation in a 2017 documentary titled “Operation Wedding,” seeking to answer the question of whether her parents were terrorists, which she determined they weren’t because their plan focused on their desire for no one to get hurt.

Kuznetsov and Dymshits were sentenced to death, and Zalmanson was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Eight of the other co-conspirators were also given various prison sentences. Kuznetsov’s and Dymshits’s sentence was later commuted to 15 years following a global outcry, and in 1979, he was released as part of a Soviet prisoner exchange with the United States.

It was Kuznetsov’s second prison sentence in Soviet Russia after being sentenced to seven years in 1961 for reading anti-Soviet poems in public in Moscow.

After his release from prison in 1979, Kuznetsov immigrated to Israel with Zalmanson, who gave birth to Zalmanson-Kuznetsov the following year. Kuznetsov and Zalmanson divorced in 1982, and he wed Larissa Gerstein in 1983. The two remained married until Gerstein’s death last year.

Between 1982 and 2007, Kuznetsov worked for various Russian-language newspapers and radio stations as a journalist and editor, receiving a lifetime award in 2018 for his contribution to Russian-language journalism in Israel.

He also won a Gulliver Award in France in 1974 for “Prison Diary,” one of the two books he wrote secretly in prison and smuggled out to the West. The other book, which he wrote in 1975, was titled “I am an Israeli Citizen!”

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