A small, inconspicuous street named Kapustina is situated in the shadow of the Northern Reservoir – one of the main recreational spots for the residents of Rostov. A dense, branching grove, walking areas, and beaches are adjacent to open-air summer cafes and a rowing dock for enthusiasts. Not so long ago, few city residents could confidently say who Boris Kapustin was and why this street was named in his honor. Yet, this man’s name was once known throughout Germany. However, in just a few decades, the situation has changed dramatically. The memory of the Soviet pilots’ feat was forgotten. With the beginning of the new millennium, thanks to the educational work of public activists, it was restored. Now, at the very beginning of the avenue, there is a monument commemorating the feat of the pilots Kapustin and Yanov, which took place on April 6, 1966, in the skies over Berlin.

Many years have passed since that tragic day when, in the sky above Berlin, the crew of a Soviet aircraft, led by the first-class pilot Captain Boris Vladislavovich Kapustin and with Senior Lieutenant Yuri Nikolaevich Yanov as navigator, decided to sacrifice their lives to steer their malfunctioning plane away from the densely populated areas of the city. The West was astounded by the courage and heroism of the Soviet pilots. In Germany, they were recognized as National Heroes and posthumously awarded the “Gold Badge.” The pilots perished but saved the lives of Berlin’s civilians. The memory of this feat should be immortal.

The work of an international team of enthusiasts of various ages and professions, from public activists to politicians of different ranks from Russia and Germany, has allowed the feat of Kapustin and Yanov to be preserved in the memory of both peoples.

On April 3, 1966, five Soviet crews from the 668th Aviation Regiment of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany received an order to ferry Yak-28P aircraft from Novosibirsk to Köthen airfield (GDR). All aircraft were unexpectedly landed at an intermediate airfield in Finow, 15 minutes short of reaching Köthen. The crew of Kapustin and Yanov was serving in this city.

Kapustin’s widow recalled that Boris Vladislavovich himself had mentioned a malfunction in one of the aircraft. For almost three days, technicians tried to repair the engines. Finally, on April 6, all five crews flew to their destination. The day was overcast, the sky covered with clouds. At the 12th minute of the flight, at an altitude of 4000 meters, both engines of the aircraft of Kapustin and Yanov’s crew failed. The command post ordered them to eject. But the pilots decided to break through the clouds and assess the situation. After performing a maneuver, they saw the densely populated Berlin below them. They immediately decided to steer the aircraft away from the city and land it in a clearing. However, they had lost altitude and speed, and unexpectedly encountered a dam and a cemetery in their path. On April 6, 1966, Easter was being celebrated in Germany, and the cemetery was crowded.

Boris Kapustin ordered the navigator to eject and decided to steer the falling aircraft away from the crowd. However, Yanov refused to abandon his comrade.

Eyewitness Jürgen Schrader, who was working at a construction site that day, described the events as follows: suddenly, an aircraft emerged from the clouds, trailing a plume of smoke. It was moving in jerks, apparently, the pilots were desperately trying to restart the engines. The aircraft passed over two residential multi-story buildings, barely missing the antennas on the roof. Eyewitnesses noted that by superhuman efforts, the aircraft managed to climb slightly and bypass the dam and the cemetery. After that, it plummeted into the Stössensee lake, burying itself in the mud two meters deep. A German pilot who happened to observe the maneuver said, “…He did the impossible…”

For a day, the British (the aircraft had fallen in their sector of West Berlin) refused to indicate the crash site. And when the bodies of the pilots and the fighter were handed over to the Soviet side, it turned out that the secret technical developments of the aircraft had been dismantled. As a result, the declassified Yak-28P aircraft did not go into series production and was not adopted for service as planned.

It was for this reason that the pilots were posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner, rather than being awarded the title of Heroes of the Soviet Union (as follows from the response of the Ministry of Defense to the pioneers of School No. 75 in Rostov-on-Don). The secret fighter fell into the hands of a potential enemy, which used this to modernize its aviation.

The remains of the pilots were handed over to the Soviet side with great solemnity. The ceremony involved the English Royal troops and Scottish riflemen. The top-ranking officials expressed their gratitude and condolences to the families and loved ones of the heroically deceased pilots. The government of the GDR offered to bury the pilots in Treptower Park and to provide their families with apartments in the center of Berlin with lifelong state support. However, the widow Galina Andreevna Kapustina insisted on burial in her native Rostov-on-Don. On April 11, 1966, a farewell ceremony was held in the GDR to honor the heroes. Every city and town sent delegations and flowers.

In Rostov-on-Don, the Kapustin family was met with another terrible news: the father had passed away upon learning of his son’s death – his sick heart could not bear the grief. The coffins of the father and son were placed in the Builders’ Palace for farewell by delegations, friends, relatives, and city residents. On April 12, traffic was halted in the city, and the two coffins of the Kapustins were carried by hand through the central streets amidst a huge gathering of people to the Brotherly Cemetery. There, a solemn rally was held, and with military honors, the father and son Kapustins were buried in the same grave.

Boris Vladislavovich Kapustin was born on December 11, 1931, in the Otradnensky district of the Krasnodar Territory, at the Sovkhoz No. 28 of the Urupskaya Zootechnical Station. Today, this is the “Urupsky Breeding Plant” LLC. One of the organizers of the farm was his father, Vladislav Alexandrovich Kapustin, a specialist in agriculture, a professor, and a holder of the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, and gold large and small medals of the All-Soviet Exhibition of Economic Achievements (VDNKh).

The Kapustin family moved to Rostov-on-Don when Boris was 3 years old. He studied in the 1st and 2nd grades at School No. 45, and in the 3rd to 7th grades at School No. 51. He then graduated from the Rostov Industrial Technical School, was involved in sports, and loved to “walrus” with friends, swimming across the Don River in both directions in any weather. In winter, they even cut through the ice to make a path for themselves. As a teenager, Boris loved to ride motorcycles.

When the “Stalin’s call” for aviation was announced in the country at the end of the 1940s, Kapustin made his decision immediately. At the age of 18, he entered the Kirovabad Military Aviation School named after V.S. Holzunov, after graduating from which he served in Ukraine (Ivano-Frankivsk region, Khmelnytskyi region).

In 1957, he married Galina Andreevna, who accompanied Boris in every move to a new place of service. A son, Valery, was born in the family.

Service in Germany began in 1960 in the town of Finow, 38 km east of Berlin, where the bomber aviation regiment of the 24th Air Army of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany was stationed, and continued until the tragic events of April 1966.

Boris Kapustin excelled in aviation – he flew on all types of aircraft, was a navigator instructor. He had a well-deserved authority and enjoyed the respect of his fellow servicemen, was elected chairman of the regimental court of officers’ honor for 5 years, was the secretary of the party organization of the 2nd squadron, a member of the party committee of the military unit. One of his students was Yuri Yanov. Together they served in Kolomyia, in Starokonstantinov (Ukraine) and in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.

Yuri Nikolayevich Yanov was born on August 2, 1931, in Vyazma, Smolensk region, into the family of a railway worker. In 1950, he graduated from secondary school No. 1 in Vyazma and voluntarily joined the army. In 1953, he graduated from the Ryazan Military Automobile School, and in 1954, from the Chelyabinsk Military Aviation Navigators School. Yuri had a first-class pilot rating and logged over 1,000 hours of flight time. He served in Ukraine and Germany. Yuri Yanov became a party member in 1962. He conducted political classes with the squadron soldiers with love and great interest. He was fond of chess, taught his wife and daughter to play, and often competed in tournaments. He was both the best chess player and the best shooter in the regiment. As a chess player, he was often invited to tournaments by his German comrades, and he frequently played for the local team in competitions between districts of the GDR.

After the tragic events of April 6, 1966, Yuri Yanov was buried in his homeland, in Vyazma, at the Yekaterininskoye Cemetery. Yanov left behind his wife, his eight-year-old daughter Irina, and his very young son Igor. On September 1, 2001, a memorial plaque was installed on the building of Vyazma Secondary School No. 1 in honor of Yuri Yanov.

As ten-year-old boys, the future pilots lived through the horrors of the Great Patriotic War and remembered for life the air raids of the German aviation, the explosions, the burning houses, the stuffy bomb shelters… It so happened that it was they who steered the falling aircraft away from the busy streets of Berlin.

By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated May 10, 1966, Kapustin and Yanov were awarded the Order of the Red Banner posthumously.

In the 1990s, an article titled “How World War III Could Have Started” was published in the “Komsomolskaya Pravda.” In it, the authors questioned the heroism of Kapustin and Yanov. They accused the deceased pilots of aerial hooliganism over Berlin without investigating all the circumstances of the tragedy and without having a real understanding of what happened, as evidenced by the presence of more than ten factual errors in the article. The pilots’ place of service was distorted, as were the awards they received for their heroism, the name of the aircraft was incorrectly given, and more. Galina Andreevna Kapustina filed a lawsuit against the newspaper. After nine hearings in Moscow, the Kapustin family won the case. Boris Vladislavovich’s son, Valery, obtained a certificate from the archives about the cause of the accident, which was due to engine malfunction. The engines were produced by the Moscow Aviation Plant, which later admitted its fault. To establish all the circumstances of what happened, the leading specialist of the aviation accident investigation inspection of the flight safety service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant Colonel A. Tarudko, was involved. It took two years to defend the good name of her father and husband. At the ninth court hearing, the heroism was confirmed, and the “Komsomolskaya Pravda” was ordered to publish a retraction.

In the USSR, as part of the youth military-patriotic movement in the 1960s-1970s, there appeared groups, detachments, labor brigades, and clubs named after the pilots Kapustin and Yanov. An example is the brigade named after B. Kapustin and Yu. Yanov at School-Internat No. 40 in Leningrad, where the club “Huge Sky” and a museum were created.

In Rostov-on-Don, one of the streets in the Voroshilovsky district was named after Kapustin, and School No. 51 (now Lyceum No. 51) was named after the pilot. A museum was organized in the school, where the Kapustin family donated personal items and documents. Thanks to the work of the guide Marina Yuryevna Antipova, an exhibition about the feat in the skies over Berlin was opened in the 1990s at the military-historical museum of the House of Officers of the Southern Military District.

A large-scale movement unfolded in the GDR. In the city of Sassnitz, at a fish processing enterprise, one of the brigades has been named after Captain Kapustin since 1968. In the brigade album, letters from the hero’s wife, newspaper clippings, and issues of the wall newspaper about the feat are collected. Monuments were erected in the cities of Finow and Eberswalde. A memorial plaque was unveiled at the site of the crew’s death on the dam. In Finow, an open-air aviation museum was created, where two dozen military and civilian aircraft and helicopters, as well as missile launchers, are collected. Here stands the very Soviet supersonic interceptor Yak-28P. Nearby is a memorial stone, on the slab of which is engraved in German: “To all the victims of the Cold War. You gave your lives for the lives of other people. Senior Lieutenant Yanov, Captain Kapustin. April 6, 1966.”

The Brandenburg Society for Friendship and Monument Protection, led by Waldemar Hickel and journalist Friedemann Gierert, is doing invaluable work to perpetuate the memory of the feat of Soviet pilots in Eberswalde. In Germany, an alley dedicated to Soviet soldiers who died on German soil has been created, in the center of which is a memorial slab in memory of Kapustin and Yanov, and rallies and flower-laying ceremonies are regularly held. Heinz Zinke and Dietmar Wünsche worked actively to preserve the memory in Bernau. The connection with German activists is maintained thanks to the enthusiasm of former Rostovites Nonna Ivashchenko and Eleonora Polunina.

Another monument to the feat of Soviet pilots became the song “Huge Sky.” In 1968, poet Robert Rozhdestvensky read a newspaper article about the pilots’ feat and was so moved that he soon wrote the ballad “Huge Sky,” with music composed by Oscar Feltsman. It was immediately included in the repertoire of Nikolai Gnatyuk, Mark Bernes, Muslim Magomayev, and Eduard Khil. And in the same year, Edita Piekha went to the IX World Festival of Youth and Students in Sofia and performed it there out of competition. The audience gave a standing ovation, although no one knew at the time that the heartfelt lyrics were dedicated to the feat of two real people. For the song “Huge Sky,” the young singer received the Grand Prix and first place.

In 2015, Galina Andreevna Kapustina spoke to participants of the regional student rally at one of the universities in Rostov. The young people did not let her go for a long time, asking many questions. They were astonished to learn that there are several memorial sites dedicated to Kapustin and Yanov in Germany, but none in Russia. “We will do everything to ensure that a monument is erected,” the young activists promised Galina Andreevna, who later created the regional public organization “Common Interest” and initiated the installation of the monument.

The installation of the monument became possible thanks to the painstaking, long-term work of a large international team of enthusiasts – public figures, local historians, museum workers, and journalists. From Germany to Russia, they conducted extensive informational and educational work, rediscovering for millions of Russians and Germans the heroism of Soviet pilots.

On September 15, 2021, a foundation stone was laid in Druzhba Park at the site of the monument’s installation. On November 21, 2022, the grand opening of the monument took place with the participation of Galina Andreevna Kapustina, the Assistant to the President and Chairman of the Russian Military-Historical Society Vladimir Medinsky, and the Governor of the Rostov Region Vasily Golubev. The monument is a stele stylized as the keel of a falling Yak-28P fighter jet, rising above a platform shaped like a map of Berlin. The monument to the heroic pilots was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Russian Military-Historical Society. The project author is Russian sculptor Vitaly Ivanovich Kazansky.

The great feat of self-sacrifice will forever remain in the monument and in our memory, to illuminate the path for those who have chosen the path of service to people through the decades.