The man who flew over the Iron Curtain to escape communist Czechoslovakia in 1984 came to America, but delivered the biggest political irony when he fled the blue state of California in 2017, seeking a more libertarian lifestyle in the middle of the Utah desert.
Today, Ivo Zdarsky, 62, jokes that if he had to flee again, for whatever reason, he would fail. He has nowhere left to run to.
We may never know how close we came to nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War, but Zdarsky knows what we can expect if we end up going communist. From his hanger home in Lucin, a ghost town abandoned in the 1990s—population one—Zdarsky shared why and how he escaped. “It’s kind of depressing. They don’t let me do things I like to do,” Zdarsky said in his markedly accented English….