Soviet Woman Jumps Ship, Crosses Arctic to Defect
A Soviet waitress leaped off a cruise ship into an icy bay and walked for four days through the arctic wilderness in a daring defection from the Soviet Union, a Norwegian official said today.
Erik Framstad, a government official on the Norwegian territory of Spitsbergen Island, said the 29-year-old woman suffered frostbite but was recovering quickly from her ordeal in the hospital at Longyearbyen, a coal-mining town of 1,200 people on the island.
“She is in surprisingly good shape and will be discharged from the hospital in a few weeks. She is making a remarkable recovery,” Framstad said.
He declined to identify the woman but said she was a waitress from the Ukraine.
She jumped 65 feet from the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorki into the 37-degree water of Advent Bay on July 21.
The ship, carrying Central European tourists, had just left Barentsburg, a Soviet coal-mining town 30 miles west of Longyearbyen, and was heading toward Isfjord and the Arctic Ocean when the waitress jumped ship.
Spitzbergen is on the arctic archipelago, about 500 miles north of the Norwegian mainland. Moscow runs two coal mines on the island under a 1920 treaty.
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