Just In:John Lennon passed away recently….
Like the so-called Red Bikini Girl the previous year, a Soviet sailor jumped ship in Sydney Harbor on the day that John Lennon was shot dead in New York.
The effects of the Cold War were being felt on both sides of the world on December 8, 1980. At the close of a year that saw his adopted country boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, with Australia largely backing the ban, Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota Apartments in Manhattan.
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After a heated argument with his captain, Victor Dudko, a 43-year-old Soviet seaman, abandoned his ship, Novopolotsk, when it arrived at Sydney Harbor and took sanctuary among the city’s Russian community. Liliana Gasinskaya, an 18-year-old cruise liner employee, staged an even more daring escape the year before when she jumped out a porthole of the SS Leonid Sobinov while only sporting a red bikini and
Days after Dudko’s escape, the two would meet and compare notes about leaving the Soviet Union behind for a new country they knew little about. Having been granted political asylum, Liliana became the first cover girl for Australian Penthouse magazine in October 1979 — posing without her red bikini.
As a teenage reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, I reported on the second Soviet defection after learning that a Russian had risked everything to be with his covert Australian sweetheart at the Maritime Services Board in Circular Quay.
However, a few weeks prior, as a Beatles fan, I had dreamed of a far more ambitious story: traveling to the United States to speak with John Lennon about his much anticipated musical return
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