"Ragnarok" by Christopher Fox Graham

"Ragnarok" a poem by Christopher Fox Graham explores the actions of Mathias Rust, the German teenager who single-handedly started the end of the Cold War by flying his Cessna into Red Square on May 28, 1987. Shot by Azami in Sedona, Arizona, March 18, 2012. Mathias Rust (born June 1, 1968) illegally flew into the Soviet Union and landed in Red Square in Moscow. An amateur pilot, he flew from Finland to Moscow, being tracked several times by Soviet air defence and interceptors. The Soviet fighters never received permission to shoot him down, and several times he was mistaken for a friendly aircraft. He landed on Vasilevsky Descent next to Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the Soviet Union. Rust said he wanted to create an "imaginary bridge" to the East, and he has claimed that his flight was intended to reduce tension and suspicion between the two Cold War sides. Rust's flight through a supposedly impregnable air defense system had great effect on the Soviet military and led to the dismissal of many senior officers, including Minister of Defence Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Sokolov and the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, former World War II fighter ace pilot Chief Marshal Alexander Koldunov. The incident aided Mikhail Gorbachev in the implementation of his reforms, by allowing him to dismiss numerous military officials opposed to him whilst reducing the prestige of the Soviet military among the populace, thus helping bring an end to the Cold War. Rust's trial began in Moscow on Sept. 2, 1987. He was sentenced to four years in a general-regime labor camp for hooliganism, disregard of aviation laws, and breaching the Soviet border. He was never transferred to a labor camp and instead served his time at the high security Lefortovo temporary detention facility in Moscow. Two months later, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to sign a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, and the Supreme Soviet ordered Rust to be released in August 1988 as a goodwill gesture to the West. For a while after the incident, Red Square was jokingly referred to by Muscovites as Sheremetyevo-3; Sheremetyevo-1 and -2 being the names of the two terminals at what was then Moscow's main international airport.