50 Years Since the Ermolenko Incident
2004 marks the 50th anniversary of the attempted defection of Russian musician Georgi Ermolenko, in which College staff and College residents played a role.
During the College’s August 1974 vacation period, the Student Quintet of Moscow Music College was one of the groups staying at St George’s while attending the International Society for Music Education (ISME) Conference being held in Perth. Shortly before they were due to head to the airport to return to Russia, Georgi Ermolenko, the Quartet’s brilliant first violinist, told College staff that he wanted to defect and remain in Australia. College Chaplain Lance Johnston and Senior Tutor Richard Borthwick became closely involved in the attempt to help him remain. After staying the night at Lance Johnston’s house Georgi was interviewed at the Parmelia Hilton Hotel for four hours by Professor Dimitri Kabalevsky, the Soviet President of ISME, and suspected KGB operative Vladimir Alexandrov, the cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy, after which it was announced that Georgi had apparently changed his mind and wished to return to Moscow after all.
Earlier in the week Tom Percy (1973), then a second year College resident, had got chatting with Georgi over lunch in the Dining Hall. When Ermolenko then decided to defect and ended up holed up in the Parmelia, orbited, amongst others, by ASIO and KGB operatives, Tom, one of Tom’s law lecturers, and a fellow College member went down to the Parmelia to see how they could help Georgi’s cause. After a couple of glasses of beer in the hotel’s bar, they decided a citizens’ arrest of the Soviet officer, who appeared to be coercing Ermolenko to return to the USSR, constituted an effective course of action. Oddly, despite measures taken to block lift access and more, they penetrated all security by simply walking up the internal stairs and managed to enter Ermolenko’s room, before finally being apprehended by the police - and then photographed by the gathered press throng, doubtless fresh from the bar too.
The attempted defection was widely reported across the world, with an article even appearing in The New York Times (12th August 1974 p 26).
The incident led to the UWA Guild taking out a writ in the WA Supreme Court to require clarification of Georgi’s wishes in open court. There were also accusations by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam that the anti-communist DLP-influenced WA unions, who went on strike in support of Georgi, had been encouraged by the CIA and dark counter-allegations of KGB action. A US State Department cable noted that the incident ‘embarrassed efforts by (the) Labor government to improve relationships with (the) Soviet Union… (the) Ermolenko case is a brief flurry which will presumably subside shortly.’ https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974CANBER05314_b.html)
The situation was resolved when the RAAF flew him out to Singapore from where he flew to Moscow. In 1975 Ermolenko and his parents emigrated to Australia legally and he later became a concertmaster at the Sydney Opera House. It appears that his ‘defection’ was a confused youthful impulse subsequently tempered by his close attachment to his musical parents still in Moscow.
Lance Johnston’s full account of the Incident from the 1974 Dragon is here.