From Russia With Nerve : L.A. Man Escaped the Daring Way--Hundreds of Perilous Miles on Foot

It was May, 1980, and the KGB was looking for Vladas Sakalys.

The KGB, it seemed, was always looking for Vladas Sakalys, except for the 15 years when it had him in prison camps in Siberia, near Moscow or in his Lithuanian homeland.

Sakalys, who now works at a Los Angeles electronics company, said his run-ins with the KGB began when he was 13. His father had been a Soviet Army “collaborator,” and Sakalys’ schoolmates dared him to prove his Lithuanian loyalty.

He did, helping to print “Soviets Go Home!” pamphlets, a prank that earned him three days of questioning and beatings in a KGB jail, and another thrashing by his mother when he got home.

More of the same followed: at age 19, sentenced to six years; at age 26, sentenced to four years; at age 31, sentenced to five years. During his rare years of freedom--fewer than five out of 20--he was a “usual suspect,” an uncooperative Lithuanian rounded up when “anti-Soviet activity” cropped up in the region.

Baltic Declaration

But this, in 1980, was big trouble. Sakalys was one of 45 dissidents who signed the “Baltic Declaration,” endorsed by physicist Andrei Sakharov, demanding an end to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries--a touchy topic in the Soviet Union, even 40 years after it began.

The KGB picked him up on a Friday, questioned him, let him go to “think about” the 10 or 15 years in prison he faced, and said he would be brought back on Monday to swear his signature a forgery--or be charged.

On Sunday, Sakalys slipped from surveillance and went into hiding to plan his escape, in Vilnius, a city soon plastered with “wanted” posters calling him a “dangerous criminal.”

Two months later, Sakalys had left the Soviet Union the hard way: he walked.

For three weeks and more than 350 miles, he trekked across the electric-fenced, dog-patrolled forests marking the Soviet border, and through the icy marshes of Finland, whose police hand escapees back to the Soviets.

Feverish and barefoot, he stumbled into Sweden on July 19, opening day of the Moscow Olympic Games, to the bemusement of Swedish police.

That was 1980. Sakalys is 44 now, living in a Marina del Rey apartment. He came to the United States through an aunt in New Jersey and moved to Los Angeles two years ago, following a Lithuanian friend, defector Simas Kudirka, the sailor who jumped ship off Martha’s Vineyard in 1970 and who later befriended Sakalys in New York.

Sakalys reminisced a few days ago about his walk to freedom--something no more than a dozen people have been known to do. He said he felt free to speak fully, now that he has learned his companion-in-escape, who changed his mind and turned back at the Soviet border, was later arrested for trying the same thing and is now serving a 15-year sentence.

It was with this friend from prison that Sakalys lay low during June, 1980, then slipped onto a train in Jura headed for the northwestern border, a train loaded with drunk, rowdy soldiers. Sakalys pretended to be sleeping off a bender, too.

‘Practically . . . Impossible’

“We knew it was practically . . . impossible to escape. I wasn’t really planning to escape to the West, but it was a really desperate situation.”

When the train halted for a moment in the “white night” of an Arctic summer, they jumped and ran.

They walked 127 miles in 10 days, sometimes waist-deep in icy water. Then, at the first electric sensor fence, they waited for the dog patrol to pass. “I said, ‘Let’s go.’ He said ‘No, I’m afraid.’ It was maybe the worst moment of my life,” but he understood his friend’s reluctance: “I was in a desperate situation and he wasn’t.”

After extracting a promise of three days’ silence if his friend were caught, Sakalys, propped by a tree branch, stood on his friend’s shoulders and vaulted the fence. His friend tossed the backpack; it caught on barbed wire. Sakalys screamed, “Be careful!” The friend lobbed it again, and it cleared the fence.

Sought to Mask Scent

They waved and parted. Before moving on, Sakalys carefully sprinkled the ground with naphthalene, mothball flakes, to throw the dogs off his scent, 15 minutes of caution that “felt like years and years.”

It was a trick he learned in Vladimir Prison for political prisoners, where he had glimpsed captured U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. It had been Josef Stalin’s prison for handpicked enemies, Sakalys said. The prison library was still full of forbidden books that no one had dared to remove: philosophy by Immanuel Kant, politics by Niccolo Machiavelli. “It was my real university,” Sakalys said.

But it was the naphthalene lesson that saved him.

After hours of walking he came to a peninsula: more fences to one side, military barracks on the other, a vast lake around--a lake deliberately not shown on his Soviet-made map. Sakalys waited until 5 a.m. and walked “like in some trance” through the barracks yard. The soldiers slept; no one noticed him as he crept through the garrison, erasing his footprints from the raked dirt as he went.

Added Days of Running

For days more, he ran, walked and swam--sometimes five miles in freezing water. Once, spotting a soldier, he waited until the sun was in the man’s eyes before running.

On one lake, as he lay exhausted, naked and “white as cheese” among the reeds, his clothes bundled on his head, he saw a cutter flying the Russian naval flag, and submerged briefly, breathing through a reed.

There was no naphthalene left when he “decided just to run, because it was my last hope.” For two hours, through high grass and hilly marshes, he ran--the last half-hour with barking dogs on his trail--and vaulted the two last barbed-wire fences.

And then, 10 days after he began, he saw firewood, “not stacked Russian-style, but with accuracy.” He found a blue ice cream wrapper marked “Helsinki, Finland.” It was “the best moment of my life.”

But it was Finland and he would be sent back if caught. He trudged on, staring at the “nice, painted” houses and tended gardens. “I thought I must see everything to tell in the camps. It must be enough to last me for a lifetime of talks.”

Decides to Take Chance

Then he took a chance. At an isolated farmhouse, an old man--”old enough to remember the wars”--fed him, gave him a cigarette, packed three pounds of rye bread and gave him a map to Sweden, to freedom.

Sakalys gave the man his last possession of value--his watch--and kept walking. For 10 days more he tramped, leaping off the highway whenever a car drove by. At last, on July 19, a day after his tennis shoes gave out, he swam across “scary” rapids and stumbled up to a young boy--about the age Sakalys was when he was first arrested--and gasped out, “Is this Finland or Sweden?”

The boy looked at the apparition. “Sweden,” he said in English. “Telephone police,” Sakalys pleaded. (He had arrived in Tornio.)

From a Swedish jail so luxurious that Sakalys thought it was a hotel, he was finally identified by Soviet emigres who recognized him from labor camps, and freed.

He rested for six weeks there, and one day he saw his picture on a large sheet of paper, hanging on a wall. The photo, so much like the “wanted” posters, startled him. “Was it telling the people to watch out for me?” he wondered.

He nervously asked a passer-by what they meant, the words beneath that newspaper picture. “He said it means, ‘I am free.’ ”