In November 1970, Lithuanian Simas Kudirka leapt onto a Coast Guard boat from a Russian ship anchored off Martha’s Vineyard and begged for asylum. For the next 12 hours, the Captain and crew tried to protect him until the order finally came down to return Kudirka to the Soviets. He was beaten unconscious and dragged back to certain imprisonment, maybe even death. Interviewed half a century later for this outstanding doc, the captain of the US Vigilant weeps as he tells the story, while Kudirka himself—now an impish, bow-legged octogenarian—returns to the American vessel to lead the camera on a frantic reenactment of his ordeal.

This episode was just the beginning of Kudirka’s extraordinary tale. His plight triggered a wave of protests that forced Nixon to publicly apologize and prompted delicate diplomatic efforts to hatch the would-be defector from the Gulag and have him sent back to the States. In a new interview, a decrepit Henry Kissinger shows up to prove that Henry Kissinger is still alive, but also to remind us that Cold War operators were ready to capitalize on the moment. And so, with State Department help, Kudirka eventually made it to the Bronx, family in tow. But this is where it gets really interesting. Interviewed by Bill Moyers in the late ’70s, Kudirka can’t conceal his growing disillusionment with western excess. He’s hardened and wiser still when the camera catches him in Santa Monica in 1991. Recently filmed wandering inside the neon corporate Babylon of Times Square, Kudirka finally says, “This is not for me.” He’s an endearing figure, constitutionally honest but unfailingly polite, while Giedrė Žickytė’s film is a marvellous work of counter-mythography, scratching away between the lines of a story that was always squeezed—as in a popular 1978 TV movie starring Alan Arkin—for its value as blunt propaganda.

Stir, September 2021