Flight from Freedom

With a quick, behind-the-curtains scuffle of secret operatives and an embarrassed official gulp, the U.S. Government last week rushed a prize exhibit offstage. The exhibit was ist Lieut. Anatoly Barsov, formerly of the Soviet Air Force.

Pilot Barsov was the Russian who crash-landed his Soviet bomber at a U.S. airfield in Austria last October, and in Russian and broken English announced that he and his navigator, 2nd Lieut. Piotr Pirogov, wanted to see the U.S. They particularly wanted to see the state of Virginia, about which they had heard on the Voice of America. Brought to the U.S., they were marched through Virginia in high style, given the full hero-of-the-cold-war treatment (TIME, Feb. 14). Then the Voice of America gave them $100 apiece, and they were turned loose in the land of opportunity and all but forgotten.

Dreams & Delirium. Young (28), handsome Piotr Pirogov quickly found a literary agent, arranged to give lectures, write articles and turn out a book. But Barsov was at a loss. Older than his navigator and outranking him, he seemed to resent his pal's success. An inarticulate, heavy-boned man with thick-knuckled peasant hands, Barsov found himself all but ignored. In his diary he noted: "As always, all-knowing and haughty to the point of stupidity, [Pirogov] insulted me repeatedly . . . Today's quarrel with Pirogov made clear my dependency upon him. But! . . ."

Barsov missed his wife and child: "In five hours of sleep had a lot of delirium, saw my son (he was very glad to see me back) in my dreams, wept a lot ... I don't know what to do." He drank heavily, worried about "pulsations" in his heart.

Coals & Ditches. Pilot Barsov took a small, cramped room in Brooklyn, got a $1-an-hour job pressing coats in a clothing factory. Then he signed on as an unskilled laborer in Stratford, Conn. Boris Labensky, an engineer at the Sikorsky Aircraft plant, took him into his home. For eight weeks, Barsov lived with them while he dug ditches for drain pipes. It was a bitter comedown for an officer.

There was a U.S. Communist in the gang, and they talked long and earnestly.

"Bitter Enemies." Abruptly, one .day late in July, Barsov left. Soon he turned up at the Russian embassy in Washington. Outside official Russian circles no one knows whether U.S.S.R. agents threatened him with reprisals against his family or whether he simply asked to go home.

Days later, he met Pirogov in a bar on upper Broadway. The embassy had promised, Barsov said, that if they would both go home, there would be no reprisal and no trial. He asked Pirogov to stop work on the book he was writing, offered to get him the money to pay back whatever advances had been made. Pirogov was scornful. As they left, Pirogov said: "Tell them thanks for their offer of money and for finding such a fool in you. If we ever meet again, it will be as bitter enemies." Barsov replied: "The embassy says it makes no difference if it's five or ten years--Pirogov will be back in the Soviet Union. I will watch you swing in Moscow's Red Square."

After Pirogov reported this to U.S. authorities, Barsov was watched closely. Immigration men had no intention of allowing the Russians to smuggle their backslid refugee out of the country in a dramatic "rescue." Three weeks later, Pirogov arranged to meet Barsov in a Washington restaurant "Aux Trois Mousquetaires," a block from the White House.

At 6 p.m., five men and two women walked in casually and sat down. A few minutes later Barsov appeared with Pirogov. A waitress started toward them. One of the men reached out, seized her firmly by the arm and told her not to move. The seven rose. One tapped Barsov on the shoulder. "Immigration officers," he said. They hustled the Russians into the street.

Said a waitress: "The tall Russian [Pirogov] was tusseling with two or maybe three men. They had him against a fence. The poker-faced fellow was putting up a terrific fight. You should have seen him rolling on the sidewalk with one of the men. They handcuffed him and the tall one too."

Repentant Sinner. Pirogov was promptly released. But Barsov was whisked out of sight. The Soviet embassy searched his empty $2-a-day hotel room, then sent a note to the State Department. State was mum.

Last week the embassy publicly demanded that State explain the "sudden disappearance" of their repentant sinner.

They soon found out. The U.S. had deported him to Austria as a visa violater. There, said a cool State Department announcement, "Barsov is now being given an opportunity freely to determine whether he wishes to return to the Soviet Union or remain under U.S. jurisdiction in Europe."

Next day in Austria, Anatoly Barsov was driven to the Urfahrer Bridge spanning the Danube at Linz. A U.S. captain asked him for the last time whether he was sure he wanted to be turned over to the Russians. Barsov shrugged indifferently, shook his head, as he went off to join the two Russian officers who were waiting for him.

"I Was Not Lucky." The world could be sure that the Russians would squeeze Barsov for every last drop of propaganda-value. But Barsov had some explaining to do himself. In his shabby room in Washington a TIME correspondent found another document, like the diary in his own handwriting. It rang with Marxian cliches ("Now I am in the hands of those 'whistling dancers'--men who obtained control . . . through a cruel exploiting of the working class") and the sickening self-accusations of the Moscow purge trials. Wrote Barsov: "I am giving this confession maybe before dying." He had made his break, he pleaded to invisible judges, not because he was the least bit dissatisfied with the Russian system but because he was curious, because he had quarreled with his wife, because "I was not lucky in the army." Criticism of the Soviet regime attributed to him really came from "this travesty of a human being," Pirogov. Wrote Barsov: "Traitors to their country . . . should be subjected to a strict isolation and even destruction ... I am in the category of those people, and I have to be destroyed if I shall not be corrected by the corrective labor camps."

Said Pirogov: "Within six months, he will die like a dog."

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