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The Kudirka case was a low point for the U.S. Coast Guard. The officers in charge exercised bad judgment in permitting the Soviets to retrieve the defector. It cannot have been right by any standard to allow a foreign official to engage in physical violence on a U.S. public vessel.
On 23 November 1970, during a bilateral negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union regarding fishing rights, he jumped from his ship, the trawler Sovetskaya Litva ('Soviet Lithuania'), onto the American coast guard ship, the USCGC Vigilant.
Dec 1, 2005 · Fate of Simas Kudirka. Simas Kudirka is sent first to the Potma prison in the province of Moldova, 225 miles southeast of Moscow. There he engages in a series of protests, hunger strikes, work stoppages, and attempts to alert the West to conditions in Soviet prisons.
The collection contains transcriptions, court proceedings, correspondence, and secondary source materials concerning Simas Kudirka's attempted defection to the United States in 1970. The materials were collected by the donor for an article that appeared in Martha's Vineyard Magazine in 2005.
- RU 472
- 1971-2005, undated
- Dunlop, Tom
form the President. The reports also suggested that the Coast Guard, after soliciting preliminary guidance from the State Department in mid-afternoon, sought no fur-ther guidance during that day and evening while the crucial decisions were being made by Admiral Ellis. The defector, identified as Simas Kudirka, a Lithuanian, was eventually re-
Oct 25, 2020 · But that same day, a Lithuanian-born sailor, Simas Kudirka, decided that he would make a daring attempt to defect from the Soviet Union to the United States. He would quite literally jump ship, clearing the three metre gap between the Litva and the Vigilant in order to escape.
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On 23 November 1970, however, a Lithuanian seaman, Simas Ionovich Kudirka, attempted to defect to the United States via the Coast Guard cutter "Vigilant," and his request for asylum was denied. He was forcibly returned to his ship, the "Sovietskaya Litva," within the territorial waters of the United States.
