Attempted assassination of Leonid Brezhnev

An assassination attempt was made upon Leonid Brezhnev on 22 January 1969,[1] when a deserter from the Soviet Army, Viktor Ilyin, fired shots at a motorcade carrying the leader through Moscow.

Though Brezhnev was unhurt, the shots killed a driver and lightly injured several celebrated cosmonauts of the Soviet space program who were present in the motorcade.

The spaceflight crewmembers—Vladimir Shatalov, Boris Volynov, Yevgeny Khrunov, and Aleksei Yeliseyev—had returned only a week earlier from their historic manned-ship-to-manned-ship docking mission in space, the first of its kind.

Arriving at Vnukovo Airport, they were being driven with Brezhnev and Soviet head of state Nikolai Podgorny to their commemorative celebration inside the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses.

Ignoring the waving cosmonauts, he opened fire on the second car in the line: he later admitted that he only assumed it carried Brezhnev, but this ZiL limousine was filled only with other cosmonauts from earlier missions: Alexei Leonov, Valentina Tereshkova, Georgy Beregovoy, and Andriyan Nikolayev.

[4] Ilyin underwent a lengthy interrogation led by KGB chief and future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.