Cognac special forces

If a bottle of cognac is found in the hand of a killed terrorist, it is not at all necessary that he is a chronic alcoholic. It’s just that the Alpha unit worked here. This is a trademark of the special forces - to place some Hennessy next to the killed criminal. Last week, the group that distributed elite cognac among terrorists turned 35 years old.

"A" means "Andropov"

– The need to create a counter-terrorism unit in the country became obvious after 1972, when terrorists captured Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. That’s when the decision was made to create a group,” said one of the forefathers of Alpha, Oleg Balashov.
However, it is unclear how long this decision would have been walking along the corridors - it is generally easy to get lost in the corridors of the Lubyanka. But on July 3, 1974, in Vnukovo-2, four repeat offenders seized a Yak-40 and demanded a corridor beyond the cordon... A shootout with the police began. They say that when the bandits were neutralized, there was thick powder smoke around the plane... The smoke cleared, but the residue remained.

“One of the reasons that prompted Yuri Andropov to sign the order to create an anti-terrorist special unit was the attempt to hijack the plane,” confirmed the former commander of the unit, Sergei Goncharov.

“The unit was created in the strictest secrecy,” recalls Alpha veteran Leonid Gumenny. “Even the order for its creation was written by Andropov by hand and existed in a single copy. The group was staffed only by employees of state security agencies, to whom high demands were made from the very beginning: a certain amount of practical work experience, excellent physical fitness, professional training and, importantly, a good educational level. Alpha fighters had to not only master hand-to-hand combat techniques and handle all types of weapons, but also be able to quickly find non-standard solutions.

The selection was so strict that attention was paid even to the appearance of the special forces soldiers: not only healthy, but also handsome men were selected for Alpha. True, the unit was initially called differently - simply “A”, perhaps in honor of KGB chief Andropov, who personally supervised the group.

“It was a secret structure, the existence of which few people knew then,” said Gumenny. – The general public became aware of us only because of Alpha’s participation in the events of 1991. At the same time, the word “Alpha” appeared: apparently, it was invented by journalists by analogy with the American “Delta”.

Wings carried the wedding into the distance

“Alpha” had to do a lot of things after its appearance on July 29, 1974. Even the start of the war in Afghanistan was entrusted to her. But the release of the first hijacked plane—the one for which the group was actually created—had to wait almost 10 years.

Pravda did not write about this, only in secret KGB documents: “On November 18, 1983, at 16.16 Moscow time, during the flight of a Tu-134A aircraft flying along the Tbilisi-Leningrad route with 57 passengers and 7 crew members on board, a group of armed criminals demanded to land the plane in Turkey. (At the same time, the terrorists shot and mutilated several people.) At 23.08, 38 special forces officers arrived in Tbilisi.”

“We entered the airport building in helmets, in equipment, with cases,” recalled Igor Orekhov, a participant in the operation. “There are a lot of people around, everyone is staring at us.” After all, at that time not a word was written about the group - top secrecy. When the command was given to prepare for the assault, they took their places on the plane. Not “in”, but “on” the plane. You crawl and feel every rivet. And yet, apparently, the car was rocking. Shouts were heard from the cabin: “Don’t even think about storming! We’ll shoot everyone!”
The release operation lasted 8 minutes. None of the passengers were injured. The leaders of the gang turned out to be newlyweds German Kobakhidze and pregnant Tinatin Petviashvili, a young Georgian actor (in Abuladze’s “Repentance” he was supposed to play the dictator’s grandson) and a student. Their wedding cortege included other representatives of the “golden youth” of the republic. Taking advantage of the situation, they freely carried grenades and pistols on board.

Kobakhidze no longer had to “repent.” The captured terrorists were sentenced to the tower. But after the collapse of the Union, they were almost made heroes, fighters against totalitarianism, Georgian Bonnie and Clyde. Now their roles are played by other people: the play “Denim Generation”, glorifying the struggle of the “golden youth” with the Russian satraps from “Alpha”, is successfully performed on the stage in Tbilisi.

If they are offended, they will not carry out the order

“Alpha” was brought down from heaven to earth very quickly. Both literally (except for the hijacked airliners, they had to liberate buses and schools, prisons and palaces), and figuratively (in the 90s, criticism poured in from all sides). The special forces even got it for Nord-Ost, although during the liberation of the theater center on Dubrovka, the hostages suffered only from the gas, which was not launched by Alpha.

“None of the hostages died from bullets fired from our weapons,” explained Leonid Gumenny. “Some also say that the special forces, having killed all the terrorists, thereby deprived the investigation of the opportunity to find out who was behind this crime. These people forget that there was a huge amount of explosives in the building. It was enough for the only surviving terrorist to make a movement with his hand for everything to fly up into the air. Not only those in the building would have died, but also many people outside it. We should not have given the terrorists even the slightest chance to blow up the center. And we didn't give it.

In the entire history of Alpha, the group refused to carry out an order only once. As stated in the documents investigating the 1991 coup: “During the investigation into the State Emergency Committee case, it was established that Operation Thunder to take the White House did not take place only because of the refusal of the direct executors - the officers of the Alpha group.
And in fact, on August 20, 1991, the group commander was verbally given the task: “Seize the White House, intern the government and leadership of Russia.” Vympel, the Moscow riot police, and others were placed under Alpha's command - a total of 15 thousand people. But Alpha remained on the sidelines.
“The most despicable blow to Alpha were the events in Vilnius in January 1991,” former Alpha member Viktor Luttsev explained the demarche. “On orders from the Kremlin, we stormed the television center seized by Lithuanian nationalists. At the same time, for the first time in the previous ten years, our comrade Viktor Shatskikh died. You can imagine the state of the guys. But not only did no one meet us upon our return to Moscow, Gorbachev then declared to the whole world that he had not sent Alpha to Vilnius. We took this as a betrayal.

Since then, Alpha has not participated in political battles. Now it’s more and more like “cognac”...