By job he was an oceanog­ra­pher, by heart he was a dreamer, by nation­al­ity he was a cit­i­zen of the planet Earth — in short, he was an extra­or­di­nary guy. Yet his per­sonal file in the USSR was stamped as “not wor­thy of an exit visa” so he was not allowed to leave the coun­try, even if it was for a hol­i­day. So in Decem­ber, 1974 he jumped a cruise boat “The Soviet Union” off the coast of the Philip­pines islands — and he swam to freedom.With no food or drink, no swim­ming equip­ment apart from flips and gog­gles, he swam to the shores about a hun­dred kilo­me­ters for three days — com­pletely alone at sea.

Since his child­hood, Slava Kurilov had been very keen on swim­ming and he loved the sea so deeply, he made it his career — he was an oceanog­ra­pher, a deep sea diver. He knew the sky — all the major con­stel­la­tions, he knew mete­o­rol­ogy, he had a vivid inquis­i­tive mind  — he also spoke good Eng­lish, had a sis­ter liv­ing in Canada and his father was in a Ger­man prison camp dur­ing the WWII, which also con­sid­ered some­what of a treach­ery. A few times Slava applied for a per­mit for research trips out­side the coun­try, but to no avail — the rea­son being “endan­ger­ing the secu­rity of the USSR”.

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