Moscow, 1937
Page 45
Amid the international enthusiasm for flying – we might almost speak of an international aviation wave – Soviet Russia had a significant part to play, and not just in the 1930s. Under Stalin the Soviet Union simply resumed the policy that had already begun to make an impact in pre-revolutionary Russia. Not long after Louis Blériot’s crossing of the Channel in 1909, Muscovites had the opportunity to see a demonstration on Khodynka Field by the French aviator Georges Legagneux in a biplane.31 The craze for flying in Moscow was much like that in London, Paris and New York. In pre-revolutionary Russia, flying was the preserve of private individuals, an elitist and expensive sport. Even then there were important engineers and inventors at work. Before the Revolution, Russian aviation had designers such as Igor Sikorskii, who had built giant planes, including the Russkii Vitiaz' and the Il'ia Muromets – among the most advanced planes in the world.32
The technical and organizational foundation of a modern aircraft industry melted away at first in the confusion of the Revolution and the Civil War, only to burst into new life even more vigorously than before and on a completely new basis. Mass organizations now came into existence which saw it as their task to disseminate knowledge of flying and to increase familiarity with its different aspects: handicrafts, aircraft construction, radio technology, technical training, parachuting as a mass sporting activity. Millions joined up in organizations such as Osoaviakhim, which mobilized the curiosity of the young, interest in technical matters, hobbies, the thirst for adventure and military training. More than anywhere else, flying, parachuting and radio had developed into mass activities and exerted an attraction for young people otherwise showing little interest in communism. Aviation had a greater resonance in Russia and provided a larger reservoir of people eager to conquer the skies than almost anywhere else. There were films, magazines, flying clubs, a regular fashion for aviation, with pilots as role models for young people and as stars. An entire iconography of flying came into being. There were planes flying over the Russian landscape, plane watching, flying weeks and propaganda flights. Peasants were taken up in planes to help them overcome their fear of flying; in fact, everybody wanted to fly – including women collective-farm workers of seventy or even older – or so those responsible for propaganda output would have us believe. No parade on Red Square would be complete henceforth without a fly-past of at least nine different models.
The same thing may be said of the conquest of the North Pole. The newspapers were full of the details. The Zeppelin flight of 1929 had been accompanied by an entire armada of journalists and reporters – among them the Soviet aviator and writer Mikhail Vodop'ianov, but also Arthur Koestler.33 The world’s media had avidly followed the rescue of the stranded crew of the Nobile by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin. The scientific measurement of the world, the opening up of new sea routes, curiosity and the spirit of adventure – all these things came together here.
The Soviet Poliarniki, the crews of the Sibiriakov in 1932, the Cheliuskin in 1934, the Papanin group and the transpolar aviators did not just continue the old tradition of pre-revolutionary Russian polar research; they were also part of an international race for the Pole.
Heroes of the age: Stalin’s aviators
Aviators were the stars of their day. Newspaper reports and plays revolved round them. Songs were dedicated to them, including a famous ‘Aviators’ March’. Famous films, such as Sergei Gerasimov’s Seven Brave Men of 1936, took up the topic of the flight to the Pole. Sculptors and painters modelled and depicted men and women pilots. There is a bust by Vera Mukhina of the aviator Kokkinaki, and there is a portrait of Otto Schmidt by Mikhail Nesterov.34 They were the heroes populating the dreams of children, both boys and girls – ‘I want to be like Chkalov’. Aviators make their appearance in all young people’s diaries. An exhibition such as ‘Conquering the Arctic’, which was shown in Gorky Park in 1937, attracted over half a million visitors, and among the principal attractions of the Soviet pavilions at the New York World Exhibition were the Arctic and air travel.35
The biographies of the actual people mentioned here – Chkalov, Papanin, Krenkel', Gromov and others – have not yet been written. Until they are, we must make do with the heroic images we have from newspapers, memoirs, epic narratives and films. Such testimonies are in a sense guides showing how heroes are made. They were intended to serve as role models for a whole generation, and that is in fact what they became for many people. No detail in these accounts was left to chance. The new Soviet hero was a manufactured product. He supplied a contrast to the American hero, who worked only for himself, for his personal career, and whose expeditions – like those of Admiral Richard Byrd – were financed by Henry Ford as a form of publicity.36 In the Soviet case, this heroism was based on collective effort and was grounded in the solidarity of the entire nation and the performance of its industries.
The hero is bold, but never loses control. ‘I am not rash in my boldness. I am exactly like everyone else.’37 He is a romantic, but a romantic who calculates and whose feelings are under control. He is not an individual but a mass phenomenon.38
Most of these heroes were so young that the Civil War was a defining moment for them. It was the point at which they first came into contact not only with the Revolution but also with modern technology, with the plane and the radio. They were not Party people in the stricter sense but talented human beings who were able to make use of their gifts: energetic, with initiative, sometimes audacious to the point of rash impulsiveness. If mishaps occurred, if they had a crash landing or suffered an injury, they experienced it not as a defeat but as a spur to even greater efforts. They combined qualities that are almost designed to convey a positive and impressive image of humanity. They were energetic and practical, not dogmatic, but tried and tested by life itself. They were ‘strong characters’ of well-defined individuality, not bores or stereotyped figures designed by the propaganda experts, but merely discovered by them. And the ‘regime’ could take credit for having made use of this resource and exploited it for its own purposes. Lev Nikulin wrote of the aviator Mikhail Vodop'ianov in terms appropriate to a charismatic figure.
Natural talent. There can be no better description of Mikhail Vodop'ianov. When you see this tall, courageous man, when you meet his restless and at the same time clear gaze, when you follow his somewhat slow, stolid movements, you think such gestures are possible only when strong, free birds move on the ground. There he goes down the street and gets into his car. He treats it like a tame, obedient animal. He drives the car safely and quickly; but it’s as if the streets of the city are too narrow for him. He is used to the open spaces high above the ground. ‘The Russians are born aviators’, it said in an English newspaper recently. Vodop'ianov is a born aviator. He is a Russian aviator, a natural talent, a hero beloved of the Soviet nation.39
These features could be found just as easily in Papanin, Chkalov and Krenkel' and even in a scientist and academy member such as Otto Schmidt. According to his Soviet hagiographers, Schmidt combined many qualities in his own person: he was a scholar and a Bolshevik, the editor in chief of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, a renowned mathematician, a member of the Pamir expedition and then the scientific leader, organizer and spokesman of important polar expeditions – he not only ‘edited’ the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, he also presided over the Arctic plain;40 he was both a scholar and a practical man. Another hero of the age, Il'ia Mazuruk, is praised for his coolness. It was said that he could have acted as midwife even during a flight.41 Anatolii Alekseev, commander of the SSSR N-172, was steeled in the ‘crucible of the Civil War’. ‘This man resembles neither the romantic heroes of novels by Jack London who have been lured into reckless games with “fate” in the snowfields of the north, nor the resolute but inhumanly hard heroes to be found in Kipling. He is utterly different by nature.’ It is true that he survived the winter for months on end in his fur sleeping bag, eating nothing but bear meat, but he did not waste time thinking about the ‘exotic Arctic ice’.
Instead, what filled his mind was the vision of newly built harbours in Igarka on the Yenisei or the flight characteristics of wings and engines.42 As for Ivan Papanin, who was known affectionately as ‘Vaniusha’, born in 1894 and the son of a sailor, it was said of him that, as well as having been a recruit in the First World War and an activist in the Civil War, he was a man who kept on educating himself – in astronomy, navigation, and radio, in addition to the history of polar research.43 Petr Shirshov, a member of the Papanin expedition, born in Ekaterinoslav in 1905, was a qualified hydrobiologist, but also a veteran of the Cheliuskin expedition. Yevgeny Fyodorov, born in Bessarabia in 1910, was a qualified magnetologist.44 Ernst Krenkel', the first short-wave radio expert of the Soviet Union, sprang from a family of German origin. He had flown to the Arctic with the airship Graf Zeppelin and owed his fame to the Cheliuskin expedition. ‘Of course, he had read Jack London as a child and dreamed of travelling, dangers and adventures. But he was also fascinated by practical physics.’ He came from lowly origins and had to work to pay for his education, but now the first radio operator of the Soviet Union chatted with the whole world, with Baku, London, Paris and Mosul. He became the most famous person in the Soviet Arctic, and after the landing on the Pole he discovered the sublime sound of the age: ‘The eternal silence of the Pole, its mysterious silence is at an end. We can hear the Pole. This is the North Pole speaking! This is the North Pole speaking! It is speaking in our mother tongue.’45
‘There are thousands of dreamers like me’
On 21 May 1937, the premiere of Dream, a play by the writer and poet Mikhail Vodop'ianov, took place in Moscow’s Realistic Theatre. By a striking coincidence, the same event took place on the stage and in reality:
At exactly the moment when the gong signalled the beginning of the play, Vodop'ianov emerged from the cockpit of his orange metal bird at the North Pole into the sunlight of the polar spring. At the end of the performance in the theatre, the spectators clamoured to see the author. However, the author failed to appear on stage, since at that moment he was very far away. He could neither enjoy the success of his play nor could he hear the applause. Instead, he was busy fulfilling the dream of his life, the dream to which he had dedicated his drama.
In the play the hero has been given the name ‘Bezfamil'nyi’; he is making preparations for his flight to the Pole. However, another pilot has been chosen for the maiden flight. In the event this flight fails on account of faulty preparations. In consequence, Bezfamil'nyi gets his chance after all and, together with his girlfriend, the on-board mechanic Ania Biriukova, he manages to rescue the aviators marooned in the Arctic. The writer-cum-aviator Mikhail Vodop'ianov puts these words in the mouth of his alter ego in the play: ‘In our country there are thousands of dreamers like me.’ And he adds, ‘dreamers of the real’. ‘Truly an exceptional premiere!’ was the comment of his fellow writer Lev Nikulin on this happy coincidence of dream and reality. ‘Scarcely three months have passed since the play was written, and the writer is already landing his plane on the North Pole. The play has ceased to be a dream. The power of this dream inspired the writer. The power of this dream led to the flight over the Arctic ice. The magic of the dream helped the actors to create living and accurate figures of Soviet aviators. Truly an exceptional premiere!’46
Idea and deed, dream and reality came together in Vodop'ianov.
Vodop'ianov writes a book about the North Pole. He goes on to write a play on the same subject. This is no mere literary exercise on the part of an aviator who has mastered the pen. It helps him to bring his dream into a well-formed system and to make it comprehensible. He composes dialogues for the play, works on his book and simultaneously writes reports, occupies himself studying how to improve aeroplanes and pores over the flight paths for the North Pole flights of the future. He undertakes extensive reconnaissance flights to the Arctic. In this way he makes use of practice to correct and complement his plan.47
For one telling moment, rational calculation, imagination, technology and romanticism seemed to join forces and become synthesized in a scarcely surpassable unity.
‘Bolshevik romanticism’ and terror
However much Schmidt, the scientific leader of the Soviet polar expeditions, insisted on their scientific ambitions, their principal achievement lay elsewhere: in the success of a great adventure carried out with the greatest conceivable public support in murky, tumultuous times. The expeditions contained all the elements of an adventure: the conquest of the hazardous North-East Passage in the all-too brief summer period favourable to navigation – a passage frequently attempted before but never successfully; betting the bank on a once-and-for-all plane landing on the drift ice, the first-time crossing of airspace under the most challenging meteorological and technical conditions. Even with the most thorough preparations, expeditions like these still entailed a huge risk, a life-and-death commitment. This is clearly expressed by the epithet ‘Bolshevik romanticism’, which was coined at that time. It encapsulates the element of incalculability, individual courage, chance and good fortune. Air disasters such as the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst in May 1937 or the crash of the Maxim Gorky two years earlier are the symbols of the new era of aviation. It is almost as if we are witnessing a repetition of the shock created by the railway disasters of a century before.
By ‘Bolshevik romanticism’, official rhetoric understood ‘the marvellous union of dream and reality, of daring and calculation, of romanticism and sober preparation’.48 The aeroplane was far more than a means of transport; it was an instrument with which to overcome the vast distances of the Soviet landmass, a machine for destroying distances and for producing the Soviet space. Now that everywhere in the Eurasian continent had become accessible, no place was ‘excluded’; the periphery had been firmly and permanently tied to the centre. Whereas previously the immensities of Russia had always resisted domination and the exercise of power, it was as if Russia’s vast expanses had now been tamed. The backward, uncharted country, the country that seemed to disintegrate every year in spring and autumn because the roads had become impassable or the rivers had frozen over, had now been joined up for good. The inertia and sluggishness of the country, the burden of its history, seemed to have been overcome at a stroke.
The aeroplane and the opening up of the previously inaccessible northern territories thus became synonymous with overcoming the inertia, the sluggishness, and the backwardness of the country all in one. The aeroplane was not merely a means of transport and the pilot not just a pilot; both were symbols of a revolutionary mission, a historical leap forward. It is worth noting, incidentally, that the tsarist regime had always feared that planes could be misused for all sorts of revolutionary propaganda and terrorist attacks from the air.49
It was none other than Trotsky who as early as 1923 had recognized the significance of flight for the creation of a Soviet space and the consolidation of Soviet power. He regarded Soviet aviation as one of the chief allies of the Bolsheviks in their struggle against space. Space, in Trotsky’s view, was Russia’s greatest adversary but also Russia’s greatest ally. It isolated Russia, but it also protected her against external enemies. The vast Russian spaces had promoted Russia’s backwardness; they had cut off its towns and ensured the conservation of a backward, nomadic and barbaric economy – side by side with ultra-modern American-style factories. The aeroplane thus became a ‘weapon in the battle with the malign qualities of space’; it could defend the nation, facilitate communication, and help supply rural territories by delivering goods and services. It should help do away with the isolation of the regions but also tear the countryside out of its rural seclusion, backwardness and cultural alienation.50 Giving aeronautics and also technical progress more generally an ideological inflection was almost inevitable. Their task was to demonstrate in an exemplary and also symbolic fashion what the country was as yet unable to achieve in reality: the leap into the future, the overcoming of the inertia and the burden of history – a classical in
stance of ‘compensatory symbolism’.51
Figure 19.3 Aleksandr Deineka, Nikita, the Russian Icarus (1940)
‘The inertia and sluggishness of the country, the burden of its history, seemed to have been overcome at a stroke.’
1937 was the year in which the dream of the Russian Icarus became reality as never before. This Icarus was the peasant Emelian Ivanov, who in 1895 had promised he would fly over Red Square ‘like a crane’.52 But these spectacular successes did not protect Soviet aviation and Soviet polar exploration from the frenzy of the Terror. In fact, aviators and explorers were more than usually exposed and vulnerable; every mishap, every technical defect, every failed experiment could easily be explained as an act of sabotage and the work of wreckers. In 1937 and 1938, institutes important both for pure research and for the aeronautical industry, as well as the sections of the military especially involved in aviation, were singled out for purging.
Figures prominent in Soviet aviation were among those affected by the wave of arrests and purges that was launched against the military leadership in May 1937. Yakov Alksnis, commander of the air force, was arrested and executed by firing squad in November 1937. Among other victims were Vasilii Khripin, chief of staff of the air force, Benedikt Troianker, political director of the air force, and Aleksandr Todors, head of the Zhukovskii Military Air Academy. The purge was not confined to the commanders but included researchers, designers and engineers. Nikolai Kharlamov, the head of the Central State Aeronautic Institute, was arrested and shot in 1937; his successor, M. Shul'tsenko, was arrested and executed in 1940. Large numbers of employees of the aviation industry were affected, notably the director of the Moscow aircraft factory; some production units even had to be shut down completely. Major design engineers – the bomber designer Vladimir Petliakov and Vladimir Miasishchev – were arrested in 1937. Andrei Tupolev, the brilliant aviation designer, was arrested at the end of 1937. This was three months after Gromov’s successful transpolar flight in an ANT-25 designed by Tupolev. Tupolev was detained for a number of years in the Central Design Bureau No. 29, which was run by the NKVD, but he survived. Others were not so lucky: Konstantin Kalinin, the designer of the first plane with delta wings, for example, was arrested and executed by firing squad in 1938 after allegations of sabotage following the failure of a K-4 prototype in a test flight. Aviation researchers were also arrested and shot. Around fifty leading designers and engineers were shot at the end of the 1930s, around 100 died in camps, and around 300 worked in the special camps run by the NKVD.53 Even Robert Eideman, the head of Osoaviakhim, the mass organization of Soviet aviation, perished in the purges in 1938. On 15 December 1938, Valerii Chkalov crashed during a test flight. His death triggered a wave of repressions in the aviation industry and was the origin of various rumours. Some believed he had died because of the premature nature of the test flight; others thought that he had lost his life because of his rashness and lack of discipline. Yet others claimed that he had become too popular for Stalin’s liking, and, lastly, it was said that he was even being considered as a possible successor to Yezhov – in other words, the most popular pilot in the USSR as head of the NKVD.54