Education
At the 1979 canoe sprint World Championships in Duisburg, West Germany, Česiūnas attended the event as a spectator.
At the 1979 canoe sprint World Championships in Duisburg, West Germany, Česiūnas attended the event as a spectator.
He later became known for his role in "" when he defected from the 1979 International Coach Federation Canoe Sprint World Championships in Duisburg, West Germany (now Germany near Düsseldorf) only to return to the Soviet Union afterwards for his "misconduct". During the event he vanished, the first in a series of defections that would later include principal ballet dancers Alexander Godunov, Leonid Kozlov and Valentina Kozlov, and figure skaters Oleg Protopopov and Ludmila Belousova. However, while he was studying German in Dortmund, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) agents allegedly swooped in and took Česiūnas back to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets claimed that Česiūnas had met a woman named Ursula Vorkhert who invited to spend the night with him and then drugged him up.
Česiūnas later appeared with anti-Communist Lithuanians and being asked to speak out in favor of a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, two months before the Soviet"s invasion of Afghanistan and almost six months before American President Jimmy Carter"s actual boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics. Česiūnas made his way to the Soviet Embassy in Bonn - "not without incident" and returned to the Soviet Union and imprisoned with a fractured skull according to Kurt Rebmann, West Germany"s chief federal public prosecutor in 1979.
Another reason the Soviets were concerned also had to do with a possible book Česiūnas had planned to publish on doping in the Soviet Union prior to the 1980 Summer Olympics. The Soviets later toned down their rhetoric on the incident, stating Česiūnas had "got into dubious company" while the West Germans continued to maintain he had been kidnapped.
In 2002 telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times, Česiūnas stated he returned from West Germany voluntary but was threatened by Soviet officials with fifteen years of hard labor in a coal mine for his defection and was not imprisoned only due to the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow.
As a result, Česiūnas was demoted from his custom agent position to being a civilian coach at a children"s sports school which paid only a third the salary of his customs position. Česiūnas earned two presidential decrees from Lithuania after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2000, Česiūnas was informed that Vorkhert, whom he met in Lithuania in 1998 after the country"s 1991 independence, had died at 75.
Česiūnas later returned to his customs position, becoming head of shifts for Lithuanian customs as of 2002.
He also received monthly pensions from the Soviet and Lithuanian Olympic Committee of United States dollar 30 and United States dollar 120, respectively.