The genesis of Dictatorship of the Air was the product of an innocent but unexpected question that I was asked by Russian friends in the spring of 1995.
At that time, during one of my first archival trips to Moscow, I was invited to present an academic paper on “The Influence of Charles Lindbergh on American and European Society” to a gathering of Russian historians of technology. Nervous about having to give my first public lecture in Russian to a group of senior historians (but thrilled at the prospect of having received the invitation in the first place), I rushed home to relay the news to the family with whom I was staying, the Dmitrievs: Nina and Vitya (then both in their late 50s) and their twentysomething son Aleksandr.
Responding to my obvious excitement, they congratulated me on the invitation and offered help in any way they might (proofreading my Russian text, correcting my pronunciation, etc.) before Nina turned and, utterly nonplussed, asked me, “So who is Charles Lindbergh?”
“Who is Charles Lindbergh?,” I responded, looking at each member of my family. “You know, he’s the American who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.”
“Never heard of him,” came the reply, followed by blank stares all around.
“Never heard of him?” I asked incredulously, “His trans-Atlantic crossing was one of the greatest accomplishments in aviation history. He’s America’s most famous pilot!”
“Oh,” Nina concluded, “So he’s your [i.e. America's] Valerii Chkalov.”
***
In the days that followed, I thought quite a bit about what I considered to be this rather strange exchange between me and my Russian friends. Although Nina was soon able to devise an answer to her own question, “Who is Charles Lindbergh?,” I remained perplexed that the question had even been raised. How could it possibly be that none of the Dmitrievs (all educated, well read, westernized Muscovites) had never before heard the name of arguably history’s most famous aviator? No less odd, I thought, was Nina’s ultimate equation of Charles Lindbergh as an American version of Valerii Chkalov (a famous Soviet pilot of the 1930s). Afterall, Lindy’s flight had preceded Chkalov’s accomplishments by nearly a decade and, besides, outside of aviation buffs and Russian specialists Chkalov’s name was virtually unknown in the U.S. Surely, in the hierarchy of world aviation heroes it was far more accurate to speak of Chkalov as a Russian version of Lindbergh rather than the other way around. Wasn’t it?
Initially, I credited my friends’ unfamiliarity with Lindbergh and his feat as a product of their Soviet upbringing. Throughout the Soviet period of Russia’s history, Communist Party leaders had gone to great lengths to publicize the technological (and other) accomplishments of their citizens while downplaying the achievements of the United States and the West. Thus, it made sense for contemporary Russians to associate great moments in aviation history with their own native pilots.
Still, politics and propaganda alone could not answer the basic questions that I began to ask myself soon after the conversation about Lindbergh: If Soviet citizens then (and Russian citizens today) identified great moments in the development of aviation with their own set of heroes and deeds, might it not also be the case that they attributed to these heroes and deeds a set of values and traits different from “ours”? Surely, the individualism and capitalist spirit that Americans admired in folks like Lindbergh and the Wright brothers could hardly have resonated in collectively inclined, socialist Russia? And if this was, indeed, the case, what then were the values, characteristics, and ideals that Russians admired in their flight heroes? And to what extent did these values and ideals shape the development of Russian aviation institutions, individuals, and events in ways different than in the United States and Europe.
In other words, “What is ‘Russian’ about Russian aviation?”
This basic, but essential question would frame all of my subsequent research on the history of flight.
So how does one set about trying to identify, define, and describe the cultural values, characteristics, and meanings that shape Russians’ response to aviation? I’ll address that topic in my next post: on the historical documents, books, and archival sources used in DotA.
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July 10, 2006 - 6:38 am
Very interesting. It makes me think of Alan Cobham, probably the closest British equivalent to Lindbergh (or Chkalov, who I for one am not familar with!), and who was probably more famous in Britain in the interwar period. But I suspect Lindbergh’s name is now much more likely to be recognised than Cobham’s. (The same might be said of Charles Kingsford Smith in Australia.) Aside from pure nationalistic pride in a home-grown aviator, I think one reason for Cobham’s popularity was that he strongly associated himself with patriotism and imperial unity. Or is that two reasons? Anyway, I certainly agree that you can divine something about a nation’s culture by whom it chooses for its heroes.
August 4, 2006 - 4:08 am
I have come across many instances when my educated American friends were completely in the dark about Yuri Gagarin, or Mendeleev, or any number of pioneers who happened not to be anglosaxons. I am confident that were the first man to conduct such a long and pioneering flight not American, or his journey not one between two English speaking countries, he or she would hardly register on the American cultural radar, which I have found to be dominated almost exclusively by english speakers and some western european personages (and with Asian or African pioneers as if nonexistent entirely!). Instead of simply blaming Russian ignorance of Lindbergh on stalinist nationalism, it should be asked whether the same sort of nationalism was responsible for Lindbergh’s popularity amongst Americans.