User:Applsdev/Yuri Vetokhin

Yuri Aleksandrovich Vetokhin (Юрий Александрович Вето́хин; March 19, 1928, Leningrad, USSR - March 6, 2022 , San Diego, USA) is a writer, social activist and defector who attempted three times to escape from the Soviet Union, who spent 8 years in prison in specialized psychiatric hospitals. He had escaping after that, in 1979 (at the age of 51). Yuri Vetokhin jumped out at night through the porthole of the cruise ship from 8 meter heights into the water and had swum about 30 kilometers in 20 hours through the ocean to one of the Indonesian islands. Later Vetokhin asked for political asylum and moved to the United States.

Yuri Vetokhin is the author of the biographical book of memoirs "Inclined to Escape" ("Склонен к побегу"), which first published in 1983 and withstood many reprints.

Biography
Yuri Vetokhin born in Leningrad on March 19, 1928 in the family of Alexander Sergeyevich and Elizaveta Yakovlevna Vetokhin. Mother gave Yuri the foundations of religious education (which was rare in those days). His father, who worked as an agronomist, noticed and encouraged him a tendency to literature. In the 1930s, they lived in the village of Luga, Leningrad Oblast of the Leningrad Region. The parents of Yuri Vetokhin, remaining in the besieged Leningrad, in February 1942 perished. Yuri himself as half-dead 13-year-old teenager was taken out by an uncle from the besieged Leningrad on the ice of lake Ladoga to the evacuation point of Voilokolovo (the modern name of Voibokalo).

Study and career
After the World War II, having returned to Leningrad and graduating from school, Yuri Vetokhin entered the Leningrad Naval School, after which he received a specialty of a long-range sailing navigator and officer rank. In the early 1950s he served as a navigator on one of the ships of the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok. He was a member of the Communist Party.

In 1951 he married. Wife - Tatyana Ivanovna. In 1954, she wrote a statement to the party organization of the military unit, where Vetokhin served, accusing her husband of anti-Sovietism. After the investigation and interrogations on this charges, Vetokhin attempted suicide. In 1955, Yuri and Tatyana divorced.

In 1958, Vetokhin, having left military service, moved to Leningrad. Throughout the 1960s, he worked as the chief engineer of the computing center of the Leningrad Engineering and Economic Institute, joined the Leningrad City Literary Association and began to prepare to escape abroad.

The first escape
On August 13, 1963, Yuri Vetokhin made a first unsuccessful attempt to cross by swim the USSR border on Black Sea from Batumi to Turkey: having lost orientation in a night storm, was demolished by a current north - to the city of Poti. Without clothing he caused suspicions of border guards and was arrested on August 14 and delivered to the headquarters of the border troops of the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He managed to hide the intentions of the escape, introducing himself as a swimmer-marathon. After 8 days of detention and interrogations, he was released.

Upon returning to Leningrad, in September 1963, Yuri Vetokhin left the party’s ranks and quit his previous work. From 1964 to 1966 he worked as a leading engineer in the Bureau of Mechanization of Engineering Labor of the Leningrad Council of People's Commissars and resumed preparations for a new escape from the USSR.

The second escape and imprisonment
On July 12, 1967 Yuri Vetokhin made a second attempt to escape to abroad from the southern coast of Crimea, but was discovered by the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR Navy, was overtaken and catched. After that, Yuri Vetokhin was arrested and sent to Simferopol, he was interrogationed and charges under Articles 17 (“Crimes are in a state of psychiatric disorder”) and 75 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“Illegal crossing of the border”, which provided for the term of imprisonment up to 3 years), and then reclassificationed charges for Articles 17 and 56 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“Betrayal to the Motherland” - from 10 to 15 years in prison or execution), which, in the presence of Article 17, actually meant an unlimited conclusion in “Special Persicular” - the method of reprisals with dissenters widely practiced in the USSR.

Firstly he was kept in Kharkov, then in the Kherson prison. Forensic psychiatric examination of the Ukrainian SSR recognized Yuri Vetokhin as fully healthy. In December 1967, Vetokhin was transferred to Moscow with a note on his personal file “Inclined to escape”, which later became the name of his book.

In Moscow he was kept in Butyrskaya and Lefortovo prisons. Yuri Vetokhin was sent to the secret political department No.4 of the All-Union Research Institute of Judicial Psychiatry named after Serbian, whose employees declared him insane. In March 1968, the Crimean Regional Court sent Yuri Vetokhin for compulsory treatment in the Dnepropetrovsk psychiatric hospital of a special type. In the hospital, he was assigned courses of injections of sulfur, insulin, haloperidol and as a result of such a “treatment”, at the end of 1974, with undermined health, he became almost a lying patient.

Liberation and third escape
In 1975 he wrote statements with recognition of himself to the psychiatric ill, and for this reason that has made an attempt to escape from the USSR, and also that he is now cured and does not think about the escape. On September 23, 1975, the medical commission decided to extract Vetokhin from a Dnepropetrovsk psychiatric hospital of a special type and transfer to forced treatment to the Leningrad Regional Psych, where he stayed under surveillance for another year.

By the decision of the Leningrad Court of September 15, 1976, Yuri Vetokhin was released from forced treatment.

After the release, he worked as a loader in a public canteen and was preparing for a new escape, saving money from his salary. In addition, in order to collect the necessary amount of money, he had to sell mushrooms collected in the forest and cranberries collected in the swamp at the collective farm market.

In October 1979, he bought in Leningrad Travel Bureau a ticket to a ship that made a cruise “From Winter to Summer” from Vladivostok along the Japanese and Philippine Islands to the equator and back. On November 28, as part of a group of tourists, he flew to Vladivostok. On November 29, the "Ilyich" cruise ship with 500 tourists, including Vetokhin, went on a trip.

On December 9, 1979, when the ship, preparing for the return, drifted in the Molucca Sea 30 kilometers from the Indonesian islands, Vetokhin, waiting for the occurrence of darkness, escape. Having hung on the back of the porthole, he jumped from 8 meter heights and, had swum about 30 kilometers in 20 hours, reached the shore of Bacan one of the islands of the Maluku archipelago. He was picked up by local residents who sailed past the island on a motor boat.

In the USA
After passing legal formalities in Indonesia and receiving approval for his request for political asylum, at the beginning of 1980 Vetokhin moved to the United States. In the USA he settled in San Diego. In the USA Yuri Vetokhin worked on the autobiographical book “Inclined to Escape”, which was published in Russian in 1983, translated into English and withstood several reprints.

In 1989, the non-governmental organization Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge (USA) awarded Yuri Vetokhin the medal "For Courage".

He conducted active educational work, conducted lectures in the USA and Canada about his escape and in support of Soviet dissidents. He gave an interview, played on the Radio "Freedom".

Vetokhin led an active lifestyle until old age: he drove the car, swam for a long time, loved fishing, traveled a lot.

Yuri Vetokhin died on March 6, 2022 in the city of San Diego, not having survived thirteen days before its 94th birthday.

Family

 * Father: Vetokhin Alexander Sergeevich-agronomist, engineer-economist (d. 1942).
 * Mother: Vetokhina (in the girlishness of Grigoriev) Elizaveta Yakovlevna (d. 1942).
 * Wife: Tatyana Ivanovna Vetokhina. We got married in 1951. In divorce since 1955.