Combining the traditional genres of the rhymed couplet (chastushka) and the woodcut (lubok), this ODVF recruitment poster tells the story of how a young peasant lad named Petya becomes a Red aviator. Constantly repeated in Soviet propaganda of the 1920s, the “peasant into pilot” motif was a transparent metaphor of Russia’s revolutionary transformation from a backward agrarian nation into a modern industrial power that would take place under the leadership of the Communist Party.
March 31, 2007 - 8:18 pm
Was the Soviet push for peasants to join aviation sincere or was it a campaign to urbanize the traditional farmer? In Marx’s writings he stresses the conformity of urban culture and declares that “rural life is idiocy.” I find it hard to believe that the Soviet Union believed a peasant could actually become a pilot considering the peasant was emblematic of Russian backwardness and the government used underlying themes to ridicule rural life during the days of the agit-flights. One of Russia’s failures was the fact that it did not value the individual. The poster campaign to turn the peasant into an aviator seems out of place considering the realities of Soviet cultural beliefs.
April 1, 2007 - 9:04 am
Mr. Schmidt,
You’ve picked up on one of the “internal contradictions” that characterized the Soviet approach to building the air fleet (and modernizing the county as a whole). I believe that the campaign was sincere. However, like “smychka” [the broader effort to encourage rather than compel peasant participation in the "Soviet experiment"] it was short-lived.
The reason for this was that policies aimed at accommodating the peasantry ran counter to far stronger currents in Bolshevik political culture, namely: the latent hostility to the “idiocy of rural” life (which you pointed out) coupled with a growing belief that the peasants were the principal obstacle to achieving rapid industrialization. The result was that the Party soon abandoned these methods in place of compulsion and collectivization.
Still, some peasants would become pilots. But far greater numbers would become victims of mass starvation and state violence.
ScP