It really is amazing what you can find on the Internet. While trolling YouTube a couple of days ago in search of aviation videos for a project on the history of flight culture, I discovered that someone has posted a documentary clip of the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky. The largest plane in the world when it debuted over Red Square in Moscow on June 19, 1934, the Maxim Gorky was one of the greatest showpieces of Stalinist aviation.
As the clip’s voice-over notes (albeit in French — sorry!), Andrei Tupolev was selected to head the construction project which brought together more than 800 technicians representing dozens of aviation workshops and bureaus from across the USSR. Work on the plane progressed from late 1933 through the spring of 1934. When completed, the Maxim Gorky measured 112-ft long and possessed a wingspan of just over 206 ft. [11 ft greater than the earliest Boeing 747s] In its initial configuration, the ANT-20 was equipped with eight engines, three on each wing with two mounted in tandem above. (Later, the tandem engines were removed when found to be unnecessary).
Like the airplane from which its design was derived, the Soviet TB-4, the ANT-20 was ostensibly to function as a heavy bomber. The plane did set a number of world records for lift capacity, but its was ponderously slow. Its maximum speed of 138 mph would have made it easy prey for contemporary fighter aircraft. In reality, the Maxim Gorky prototype was intended to be a propaganda platform. It was routinely dispatched to the Soviet hinterlands to generate support for the Communist Party’s policies. To fulfill this task, the Maxim was equipped with a powerful radio transmitter (known as the “Voice of the Sky”), a printing press, a photographic laboratory, and a projector to screen films for isolated rural audiences. Rows of lights located underneath the wings enabled the crew to display electronic text messages to spectators on the ground.
Less than a year after its triumphal debut, the Maxim Gorky was destroyed in a mid-air collision with an escort plane during a public flyover at the Moscow aerodrome.
If you’d like to know still more about the Maxim Gorky, check out this excerpt from Dictatorship of the Air where you can read about the origins and construction of the aircraft and the problems that plagued the propaganda squadron to which it was attached.
Happy New Year!
ScP
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January 14, 2007 - 5:19 pm
[...] We all know that Japanese Americans were interned because of Pearl Harbor, don’t we? Like a true historian I have to point out that it wasn’t as simple as that. The Bizarre Jokester at Amazingly Bizarre sheds some light on an obscure but crucial link in the chain of events: a Japanese pilot’s single-handed invasion of the tiny island of Niihau. On the other side of the world Russia’s German population was suffering at the hands of Stalin. Otto Pohl at Otto’s Random Thoughts tells us how they were deported to Siberia, then deported again to a worse bit of Siberia. At Dictatorship of the Air, Scott Palmer finds YouTube footage of the gigantic ANT-20 aeroplane, quite literally a Stalinist propaganda machine. It should be a big leap of the imagination from Stalinist propaganda to the classic Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart film It’s A Wonderful Life, but apparently not for the FBI. According to Wise Bread, they investigated the film and its supposedly subversive message, looking for evidence of communist infiltration of Hollywood. [...]
January 21, 2007 - 5:09 pm
Thanks for this helpful website. I was looking for gigantic aircraft and the Maxim Gorky came to mind. It really is in a league with the Spruce Goose and maybe the ANT-225 Mirya. Your comment about the internet was right on target–the ever-growing repository of almost anything you wish to explore–and the most amazing is the search engines–which make it giant leap for the world.
Thanks again for your website–well done.
July 9, 2007 - 9:40 pm
[...] The Soviet Union’s premier airplane designer during the 1920s and 1930s, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev was responsible for many of the USSR’s earliest aviation successes. In addition to constructing the country’s first all-metal combat airplane (ANT-3), Tupolev lead the design and construction of such milestone aircraft as the ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky” and ANT-25 (the first airplane to make a trans-Polar crossing). [...]
June 1, 2008 - 4:02 am
Ivan Blagin,
Ace Soviet Union fighter pilot,Flew escort for the Gorky,and was the first aviator to become a dirty word.
The Gorky sported a movie theater,newspaper office,16 line telephone exchange,darkroom,laundry,pharmacy,and cafe.
The Gorky was often escorted by single engine aircraft to compare it’s huge size.
On May 18,1935,Ivan was flying escort..he decided to loop his plane around the Maxim Gorky and miscalculated the distance and slammed into one of it’s wings,causing both planes to break apart several thousand feet above the ground.Blagin and all 43 people aboard the Gorky died.Soviet officials were so furious they coined a new word-blaginism-
which means “selfish exhibitionism and lack of proper Socialist discipline”