Mathias Rust lands by Red Square
An 18-year-old amateur pilot slips through Soviet air defence
On 28 May 1987, Border Guards Day, Mathias Rust, a German with about 50 hours of flying, left Helsinki in a rented Cessna and landed on a bridge by Red Square. Defence Minister Sokolov and hundreds of officers were sacked, and Muscovites nicknamed the square 'Sheremetyevo-3'.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 7 years earlier
- 1981 AIDS first described — 6 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 21 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 2 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 2 years later
- 1990 German reunification — 3 years later
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — 4 years later
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — 5 years later
Middle East
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 9 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 8 years earlier
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 7 years earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 3 years later
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 6 years later
Africa
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 20 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 13 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 4 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 7 years later
- 1998–2003 Second Congo War — 11 years later
Asia
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 21 years earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 12 years earlier
- 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — 2 years later
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 17 years later
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — 24 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 18 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 17 years earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 4 years earlier
- 1990 Launch of the Hubble Space Telescope — 3 years later
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 14 years later
Oceania
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 5 years later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 69)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 57)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 86)
- Mother Teresa (aged 77)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 76)
- Richard Nixon (aged 74)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 68)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 63)
- Fidel Castro (aged 61)
- Elizabeth II (aged 61)