Suppose Simas Kudirka’s celebrated leap—from the Sovietskaya Litva, a Soviet fish-processing ship, to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Vigilant—had brought him instant freedom. He would have come to America, an eager, voluble Lithuanian radio operator. The press—above all, the talk shows— would have sought him out. He would have been a one-month celebrity; afterward, a name on an index card in dusty newspaper morgues. But a kinder fate may lie in store for Kudirka—paradoxically because of the harsh fate that met him on his forcible return to the Soviet Union, a stony-hearted Coast Guard admiral having ordered that he be handed back as a deserter.
Kudirka had decided to make his leap for freedom because he already understood that the Soviet Union, which had swallowed up his native Lithuania in 1944, was no happy place to live. The twisted nature of the regime itself, however, he had hardly begun to guess at, far less to comprehend. The labor camps, to which he was sentenced for ten years, showed him. He looked on unwillingly, in horror and disgust, but he looked. And he understood.
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