Word: pirogov
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Twenty-eight-year-old Lieut. Piotr Pirogov and his copilot, Anatoly Barsov, had been planning for a year to escape from Russia and get to the U.S. They had left their base near Lwow, formerly Poland, on a routine training flight that morning and headed for Munich in the U.S. zone of Germany. The third member of their crew, a flight sergeant, was not in on the lieutenants' plan. When they were airborne, Pirogov told the sergeant he could either come along or bail out while still over Russian territory. Since there were no parachutes in the plane...
...sent a tall, sturdily built Russian in the uniform of a major in the MVD (secret police) to question the fugitives. Pirogov led off with the statement that he wasn't going back to Russia until there was a change in the regime. When the major kept referring to a "forced landing," Pirogov corrected him sharply: "There was no forced landing about it. I landed on U.S. territory because I intended to. This was an escape, not a forced landing...
...Strike Him?" After an hour of fruitless questioning, the major asked Pirogov whether he had given any thought to his family back in Russia. "I object!" an American officer put in heatedly. "That's coercion." "What do you mean, coercion?" the MVD man replied in an injured tone. "Did I strike him?" After an hour's argument over what constituted coercion, the major was finally allowed to ask whatever he wanted. He drew a blank...