Robert L. Eichelberger (1886-1961) was a U.S. military officer who was served in Eastern Siberia with the American Expeditionary Force during the Civil War.

Frank Whitson Fetter (1889-1992) was an economist who toured southern Russia in the summer of 1930 — the height of Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign.

I’ve only had time to scan the contents of the collection (which is freely available for use in teaching, research, and private study), but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks fantastic.

For the entrance to the collection, just click here.

–ScP

The song dates to Russia’s twentieth-century “Time of Troubles” — the period marked by Civil War and foreign interventions that fell during the years 1918-1921. In the midst of widespread political, military, and economic crises Bolshevik leaders routinely enlisted sympathetic artists, writers, and other “cultural workers” to produce propaganda materials that could be used to generate popular support for the Reds’ cause. With the re-capture of Kiev from Polish and Ukrainian troops in June 1920, Red Army commanders found themselves in possession of a small squadron of airplanes left behind by the fleeing Polish troops. The planes would soon be put to use in both training and reconnaissance missions. In the meantime, German and Khait were commissioned to produce a song about the bravery and heroism of pilots that might inspire the ranks and, perhaps, encourage a few individuals to volunteer for flight training. In an attempt to kindle the composers’ own creative efforts, the pair were taken out to the aerodrome where the planes were stored and treated to a series of flights. German and Khait delivered the new song the following day.

In subsequent years, “Ever Higher” (or, “Avia-march,” as it is also known) soared to widespread popularity. Throughout the 1920s, the song was prominently featured at public rallies, military displays, and aviation spectacles. In August 1933 the USSR’s Revolutionary Military Council (Revvoensovet) issued a decree establishing “Ever Higher” as the official anthem of the country’s Military Air Forces (VVS). To this day the song remains one of the most recognized and popular tunes from the Soviet period.

A recording of “Ever Higher” can be downloaded here from “Soviet Music” (“Советская музыка”) an excellent on-line repository containing more than 4,200 (!) audio clips of Soviet-era tunes.

Here’s an English translation of the Russian lyrics:¹

We were born to make fairy tales come true,
To conquer vast distance and space,
Our reason has made steel wings for our hands,
And throbbing engines our hearts have replaced.

[Refrain]:

Ever higher, higher, and higher
We aim the flight of our birds
The tranquility of our borders
Breathes in each propeller.

Throwing our willing planes to the heavens,
Or making unprecedented flights,
We feel our air force is growing stronger,
Our world’s first, proletarian fleet.

[Refrain]

Our keen glance pierces every atom,
And resolution clads every nerve,
Believe us: to every ultimatum
Our air force is prepared to respond

[Refrain]

ScP

1. Adapted from the translation found in James von Geldern and Richard Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 257-258

The site, called Made in the USSR: Treasures from the Soviet Atlantis, contains over 500 images and photos of items produced in the Soviet Union.

It’s a rather eclectic collection that includes everything from journals and posters to cigarette cases, matchbook covers, and Christmas ornaments. Unfortunately, the images are not accompanied by explanatory text, so folks who aren’t already well-versed in Soviet history and culture may not grasp the significance of what they’re seeing. Still, it’s a terrific idea for a website.

The collection includes more than a few items directly related to aviation. (Several can be found by following the “Early Soviet Stuff” link at the bottom of the home page). My favorite is this one:

It’s a pin for “Dobrolet,” the syndicate established in 1923 to oversee the development of the Soviet civil aviation system. The airplane logo (which also appeared on Dobrolet’s official stationary, rubber stamps, and other items) was designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko. Last time I checked, pins like this were fetching around $500 in Moscow flea markets.

Incidentally, the very first item that shows up in the site’s “Early Soviet Stuff” collection also has a tangential tie to aviation. The item is an early edition of “The Terrible Cockroach” (Тараканище) a poem-story by the famed children’s author Kornei Chukovsky in which the eponymous insect wrecks terror on the animal kingdom. In 1927, the film studio Sovkino made an animated version of “The Terrible Cockroach.” At the end of the Sovkino cartoon an Osoaviakhim airplane arrived and sprayed insecticide on the bug.

ScP

From under the rubble

Although the years that immediately followed the demise of the Soviet system were accompanied by widespread and significant transformations in the field of Russian history, it cannot be said that these changes were themselves brought about by the historic events that transpired in and around 1991. A paradigmatic shift in Russian historiography was already underway by the time that the USSR had entered into its final stages of decay. Increasingly influenced by the “linguistic turn” that had earlier transformed the historiography of Western Europe, Russian historians were moving away from the issues and concerns that had defined the totalitarian–revisionist dispute towards cultural analysis based on methodologies devised by linguists and literary theorists.¹

One of the earliest and most influential works to incorporate the linguistic turn was Laura Engelstein’s acclaimed study The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (1992). Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault’s theory that “sexual categories and norms constitute at once a system of power relations configuring the social body and a way of thinking about power and organizing power through the medium of actual bodies” (3), Engelstein explored the extent to which public discourse regarding sexuality articulated by members of the trained professions and other shapers of civic culture in late Imperial Russia compared with similar efforts on the part of the European middle class. (9) Focusing, in particular, on educated Russians’ views about sexual deviancy, crime, and disease, Engelstein concluded that public discourse on sexuality revealed the contradictions, frustrations, and failures of Russian liberal thought in the years that preceded 1917. Her concomitant demonstration of the extent to which the views of liberal Russians differed significantly from those of their west European counterparts ultimately revealed the limitations of a “Foucauldian” approach to understanding the Russian context; a topic to which she returned in a 1993 article published in the American Historical Review.²

For her path-breaking effort, Engelstein won widespread scholarly accolades and a permanent position in Ph.D. reading lists across the United States.³ In retrospect, her work was no less important as a marker of the field’s ongoing shift away from established political and social history toward the history of culture writ large. Among the more significant monographs on Imperial history to appear in the early 1990s studies devoted to crime, the working class, the peasantry, and women similarly made use of the new cultural history to explore, in innovative ways, already well-established topics.⁴

The transformation of the field engendered by the new cultural history was of course greatly hastened by the increased access to archival sources that followed the implosion of the USSR. The loosening of Soviet-era restrictions on foreign researchers and the declassification of long-suppressed documents that began circa 1992 opened up many new avenues of research for scholars of Russia. As western academics and graduate students rushed to take advantage of the new openness, an “archival revolution” seemed to be in the offering. Ironically, however, the opening of Russian archives at first led to a re-opening of old debates regarding the Soviet system as the contestants in the “totalitarian-revisionist” controversies of the 1970 and 1980s looked to the newly available materials in search of silver bullets with which to slay their longtime historiographical foes.⁵ In short order, the dispute over the origins and nature of the USSR was transformed into a rather fierce debate over the cause of the USSR’s collapse and its meaning to the socialist tradition.⁶

Of the numerous contributions to this dispute, Martin Malia’s was the most noteworthy. An old-school intellectual historian who in 1961 authored one of Russian history’s greatest biographies (a study of Alexander Herzen, nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest thinker),⁷ Malia had followed up his first book with thirty years of professional silence. He re-emerged in 1990 as the initially anonymous author of an essay titled, “To the Stalin Mausoleum,” that forecast the failure of Gorbachev’s reform efforts and the inevitable collapse of the USSR. Following the fulfillment of this stunning prediction Malia plunged into the historiographical fray with the 1994 publication of an intentionally polemical book-length history of socialism’s failure in twentieth-century Russia. Tellingly titled The Soviet Tragedy, Malia’s first monograph in more than three decades took the revisionists to task for their earlier attempts to demonstrate the legitimacy of the October Revolution, to distinguish the “good” Lenin from the “bad” Stalin, and to establish the Soviet system’s capacities for modernization and reform. According to Malia, 1991 was proof that the questions motivating their approaches had been a priori false. The revisionists had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Soviet system. They had “ignored the possibility…that nothing went wrong with the Revolution, but rather that the whole enterprise, quite simply, was wrong from the start.” (10) In place of their mistaken emphasis on social modernization and upward mobility, Malia countered with a “concrete agenda” that “reasserted the primacy of ideology and politics over social and economic forces in understanding the Soviet phenomenon.” (16)

The professional silence that followed the appearance of Malia’s monograph was deafening. Although criticisms of The Soviet Tragedy began to circulate at conferences and in articles soon after its publication, Slavic Review, ostensibly the field’s leading journal, simply ignored the book. So, too, did the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and virtually every other scholarly publication in the nation. One of the few exceptions was America’s most important journal devoted to Russian history, Russian Review, which published a belated, but even-handed and generally favorable evaluation written by Yanni Kotsonis.⁸ As if adding insult to the injuries Malia had inflicted on professional sensibilities, The Soviet Tragedy was enthusiastically praised in the prestigious non-academic venues that reviewed the book.⁹

Whatever the merits of Malia’s polemical account of socialism in Russia, concurrent developments in the changing field were beginning to prove him right in one significant regard. “That I-word’” (as one of my revisionist colleagues once referred to it) was returning to prominence (though not quite dominance) in the study of Russian history. Even before the ink had dried on Malia’s page proofs, a new generation of historians hard at work in Russia’s freshly opened archives, was rediscovering the centrality of ideology and politics to the history of twentieth-century Russia.

Among the more notable new works in this regard was Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain. A sweeping micro-history of Magnitogorsk (the Stalinist-era planned city intended to serve as the center of Soviet iron processing and industrial development), Magnetic Mountain employed a wide array of new sources unearthed in recently opened regional archives together with local and factory newspapers, unpublished histories, and oral interviews in depicting the origins and nature of “Stalinism as a civilization.” Borrowing heavily from concepts first developed by Foucault (to whom the book was dedicated), Kotkin set out to describe the vision and reality of Soviet daily life by applying Foucault’s notion of “subjectivity’ (“the process by which individuals are made, and also make themselves, subjects of the state”) to an empirical study of local citizens’ accommodation and resistance to the mechanisms of Soviet power (22-23).

Kotkin divided his monograph into two sections. The first, titled “Grand Strategies of the State,” outlined the broader process of Soviet industrialization, describing the manner in which the Magnitogorsk complex was planned, constructed, populated, and managed. The second section, on “The Little Tactics of the Habitat,” examined such workaday issues as food and housing, shop-floor conditions, and the administration of justice, from the standpoint of citizens living and laboring within the context of the state’s grand design. Together, the two sections vividly portrayed the vision and reality of “socialist construction,” illustrating the process through which Bolshevik values, behaviors, and beliefs were articulated in the Party’s official ideology only to be resisted, adapted, or accepted by the men and women living in the shadow of the “Magnetic Mountain.” Although several reviewers correctly observed that the book’s broader arguments regarding the Stalinist system’s Enlightenment roots and theocratic structure were hardly original, Kotkin’s reassertion of the importance of ideology to understanding the Soviet experience resonated with scholars in ways that Malia’s polemic had not.

Ideology has since figured prominently in other studies of the Soviet past. In his award-winning monograph, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, Stephen Hanson explained the rise and decline of the Soviet Union as resulting from a peculiar vision of time grounded in Marxist ideology. Arguing that Marx’s theory and Soviet practice were characterized by a paradoxical “charismatic-rational” teleology that saw time as a force to be transcended through “time-disciplined” revolutionary action (131-32), Hanson proposed that the history of the USSR could be understood as the product of the Soviet leadership’s inability to make human relationships and institutions conform with their broader ideas regarding the nature and process of development. Ideology played a similarly consequential role in David Brandenberger’s study National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of National Identity, 1931-1956, which explored the myriad ways in which Russian nationalist elements formed a constituent part of official Soviet propaganda. According to Brandenberger, Soviet officials undertook an “ideological about face” in the mid 1930s, abandoning their previous, idealistic efforts to mobilize public support through exhortations of proletarian internationalism in favor of a strident, pragmatic, and more successful emphasis on Russian nationalism. Ultimately, Brandenberger concluded, the emergence of “russocentric etatism” as a chief feature of Stalinist-era ideology unintentionally laid the groundwork for the emergence of a modern Russian identity.

The reincorporation of ideology into the study of the Soviet past was only one of the many ways in which the archival revolution of the early 1990s reinvigorated Russian history. Like their more politically inclined colleagues, social historians also benefited from access to new sources and documents. Particularly valuable to scholars of Soviet society were svodki, informational summaries produced by the Party and secret police organs, which detailed the attitudes and moods of the populace. Along with svodki, vast quantities of personal complaints, letters, denunciations, private diaries, and other previously inaccessible items were disgorged from the archives and made available for researchers’ use. Armed with this new cache of materials documenting the interactions of Soviet citizens with the organs of the party-state, researchers expanded considerably understanding of the social and institutional mechanisms that shaped the lives of Soviet citizens during the 1920s and 1930s. The result was a number of innovative works devoted to such topics as daily life, popular opinion, public demonstrations, and social ostracism.¹⁰

The same was true for specialists focusing on the armed forces. Largely ignored amid the “totalitarian-revisionist” cacophany of the 1970s and 1980s, Russian military and diplomatic history has experienced a renaissance of sorts since the mid-1990s thanks to the emergence of a small but talented group of young scholars. Among this cohort, David Shimmelpenninck van der Oye, Joshua Sanborn, Eric Lohr, and Jonathan Grant contributed important new books on, respectively, the intellectual origins of the Russo-Japanese War, social mobilization during World War I, wartime treatment of non-Russian minorities, and the Putilov armaments company. Meanwhile, senior historian Peter Gatrell has written extensively on the period of the Great War, producing three significant monographs on the relationship between tsarist state and industry, wartime refugees, and the socio-economic history of Russian involvement in the conflict.

Military historians of the Soviet period have proven every bit as productive as new archival discoveries and a few sensationalist works encouraged work in a subfield already popular with the broader reading public. As Bruce Menning noted in a recent survey of Russian military historiography, intercessions on behalf of foreign scholars by the late Dmitrii Volkogonov and the publication of Viktor Suvorov’s controversial Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? helped spur successful efforts to declassify and make available archival materials relating to the Second World War.¹¹ Historians subsequently took advantage of the new openness to explore a host of topics dealing with military issues. Understanding of the inter-war period has been clarified thanks to Lennart Samuelson’s and Sally Stoecker’s separate studies of military planning and innovation, Raymond Leonard’s history of Soviet military intelligence, and David Stone’s award-winning Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933. No less significant are Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution and William Odom’s account of The Collapse of the Soviet Military.

Of all the scholars working on Soviet military history, however, none have been more prolific than David Glantz and Roger Reese. As major contributors to the prestigious Modern War Studies Series from the University Press of Kansas (one of the nation’s leading academic publishers of military history), Glantz and Reese have been responsible for a remarkable array of deeply researched and path-breaking books relating to Soviet operational history (Glantz) and the history of the Red Army (Reese). In addition to having written (with Jonathan House) the definitive one-volume history of military operations on the Eastern Front, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Glantz soundly rebutted Suvorov’s Icebreaker claims in his 1998 study, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War, now the standard account of the USSR’s military ineptitude in the face of its conflict with Germany. Subsequent works on the rebirth of the Red Army during the War and a series of impressive studies of Operation Mars and the separate battles for Leningrad, Ukraine, and Kursk (among others), have established Glantz as the West’s foremost authority on Soviet military history. Where Glantz’s work has clarified understanding of combat operations during the Second World War, Reese’s scholarship has focused on the institutional history of the Red Army. His first monograph, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, challenged established interpretations by arguing that the rapid and chaotic expansion of the Soviet armed forces during the 1930s (and not Stalin’s 1937-38 purge of the officer corps) was the principal cause behind the Red Army’s 1941 collapse. Reese followed his inaugural book with a concise history of The Soviet Military Experience, 1917-1991 and, most recently, the first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps.

1. John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987): 879-907
2. Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 98:2 (1993): 338-353
3. For a representative sample of opinions regarding the book, see Irina Paperno, editor, “Symposium,” Slavic Review 53:1 (1994), 193-224
4. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Barbara Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
5. The most candid statement in this regard belongs to historian Robert Conquest, author of a classic 1968 study of the Stalinist Terror that was subsequently criticized by the revisionist camp. When asked by his publisher to suggest a title for the revised 1991 edition of the book Conquest replied, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools”? Ultimately, the press settled on the less prosaic The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Conquest’s comment is documented in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002)
6. Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also The National Interest 31 (1993) and Daedalus (Spring 1992) both of which are devoted entirely to the issues surrounding 1991. For a detailed discussion of the interpretive approaches that emerged to explain the Soviet collapse, see David Rowley, “Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms,” in Kritika 2:2 (2001): 395-426
7. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961)
8. See, Yanni Kotsonis, “The Ideology of Martin Malia,” The Russian Review 58:1 (1999): 124-130
9. Cf. The New York Review of Books 41:15 (September 22, 1994): 20; The New Republic 210:15 (April 11, 1994): 35-39
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Karen Petrone, Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)
11. Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Translated by Thomas B. Beattie (New York: Viking, 1990). Suvorov argued that the German invasion of the USSR was a preemptive response to on-going Soviet preparations for an attack on Germany. See, Bruce W. Menning, “A Decade Half-Full: Post-Cold War Studies in Russian and Soviet Military History,” Kritika 2:2 (2001): 341-362

Of all the airplanes that populate the canon of aviation history it seems to me that one is of particular importance; not merely for its impact on transportation, society, and the military, but also for its contribution to the development of modern aesthetics.

That airplane is the Douglas DC-3.

The Birth of the Douglas DC-3

If you’re an aviation buff, you are probably already aware that the Douglas DC-3 was, in many respect, the product of accident and happenstance.

On 31 March 1931 Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA) flight 599 crashed near the town of Bazaar, KS while en route from Kansas City, MO to Los Angeles, CA. The downing of the Fokker Trimotor would have likely remained a historical “un-event” had it not been for the fact that legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne was numbered among the nine passengers and crew who died when the plane went down.

Rockne’s death demanded answers.

Initially, authorities and aviation journalists speculated that the plane had come apart shortly after take-off owing to strong turbulence and icing produced by a thunderstorm. Further examination, however, revealed that this could not have been the case. Meteorological records indicated that there had been no thunderstorm cells or other atmospheric disturbances in the area. A long, thorough, and very public subsequent investigation concluded that the airplane had broken up in clear weather due to fatigue cracks in its cantilever stressed-plywood wings. The resulting public outrage lead the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce to ground all Fokker Trimotors operating in American airspace. (Later the ban was lifted, though the planes were thereafter restricted to flying mail routes only.)

The Commerce Department’s ruling effectively grounded TWA’s fleet. If the company was to remain in business, it would have to find a replacement aircraft, preferably one that would reassure a public increasingly concerned about the safety of wooden planes. The obvious candidate was the new Boeing 247 currently under development. An all-metal aircraft incorporating advanced design features, the 247 represented the state of the art of aircraft design when it debuted in the early spring of 1933. By the time it entered full production in 1934, the latest version (the 247D) was considered to be the most advanced passenger plane in existence.

Unfortunately for TWA, the new 247 was unavailable for purchase. Another airline, United Airways (member of a larger conglomerate that included Boeing as one of its subsidiaries) already held purchase options on all of the aircraft slated to be built in the first year of production. Desperate to counter the advantage that would be enjoyed by their rivals at United, officials at TWA contacted the Douglas Aircraft Company to commission a new design that might challenge the technically advanced new Boeing. In no time, Douglas engineers developed the DC-1 — the platform of what would eventually become one of history’s most important airplanes, the DC-3.

Like rival Boeing’s 247, the final version of the all-metal stress-skinned Douglas monoplane (the DC-3) incorporated a wide array of new technologies and construction techniques such as advanced engine cowlings, variable pitch propellers, and a retractable under carriage that improved airflow around the aircraft and, thus, reduced drag. These “streamlining” measures enabled the airplane to travel farther and faster with larger loads while consuming far less fuel than less advanced aircraft. But the DC-3 also added important new features not found on the 247. These included more efficient wings, wing flaps, and a spacious cabin incorporating the latest innovations in soundproofing. Perhaps most importantly, the longer and wider DC-3 could seat up to twice as many passengers (21) as the Boeing 247.

The result was a far more comfortable, efficient, and cost effective airplane. The DC-3 promised to lower seat-mile costs by as much as 1/3 to 1/2 that of comparable aircraft. Indeed, the beginning of American Airline’s DC-3 service between NY and Chicago in July 1936 marked the first time in aviation history that an aviation company turned a profit by transporting passengers alone. By the end of 1938 DC-3s comprised nearly 80% of U.S. airliners’ fleets and had become standard equipment for nearly two-dozen carriers around the world.¹ Meanwhile, the Boeing 247 had gone from cutting edge prototype to obsolete also-ran.

The Streamlined Decade

The Douglas DC-3 was more than just a technically advanced and cost-effective aircraft. It was (and is) also strikingly beautiful. Characterized by sleek, flowing lines and its highly polished aluminum surfaces, the DC-3 (even seven decades after its debut!) evokes sensations of power, speed, and dynamism. The design features that made the DC-3 the most aerodynamically efficient aircraft produced to date were a near perfect union of form and function. The result was not merely an economic and profitable aircraft, but one that managed to capture and epitomize an emerging new aesthetic that quickly became synonymous with the “look” of the modern.

As Donald J. Bush described in his study of industrial design, The Streamlined Decade, this new aesthetic was indebted to principles that had emerged from the science of aerodynamics. Attracted to the simple beauty of sleek forms that offered the least resistance while in motion and eager to be associated with the most powerful symbols of industrial modernity, artists, architects, and designers of the 1930s turned to transportation technologies in search of inspiration. They found that inspiration in the flowing lines, clean surfaces, and polished metals used to improve the aerodynamic performance of trains, automobiles, and (of course) airplanes.

That the aerodynamic aesthetic increasingly favored by leading designers ultimately influenced popular tastes came as a result of the economic realities facing business and industry. Seeking any and every advantage they could find to entice consumers in the midst of America’s ongoing economic Depression, manufacturers turned to artists and industrial designers to “update” the packaging of their products. Very quickly “streamliners” like Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Robert Heller began encasing ordinary items within contoured shells notionally based on the principle of “minimum drag.” These forms lent themselves to mechanized mass-production processes and new materials such as plastics. Meanwhile, streamlining lent style and glamor to the most mundane domestic products. It transformed everyday items like telephones, fans, and pencil sharpeners into objects of futuristic beauty.

Of course, “streamlined” design had little to do with improving performance. The outward appearance of these implements had no effect on how efficiently they performed their duties. “Less wind resistant” toasters didn’t make faster toast, nor did stylized cocktail sets make more aerodynamic martinis. The streamlined aesthetic was intended for symbolic and decorative purposes. It aimed to stimulate consumption rather than enhance function.

The connection between aviation and industrial design soon came full circle as the era’s most celebrated “streamliners” began applying their air-minded visions to airplanes as well. Although best-known for his fanciful “Air Liner #4” (1929) — a “plane of the future” that he hoped would begin carrying passengers on transatlantic flights by the 1940s — Bel Geddes also transformed existing airplanes as one of the first designers hired to refashion commercial aircraft cabins. Following the end of WWII, Teague was likewise called upon to design the open, spacious, and clean-lined interior of the Boeing 377 Stratocrusier. These efforts ensured that the stylistic revolution produced by aerodynamic streamlining would apply as much to planes’ interior spaces as their external forms.

Embodied in the engineering principles that shaped the era’s most iconic airplane, the DC-3, the “streamlined decade” profoundly influenced the look of “the modern.” Today, the aesthetic revolution launched in the 1930s remains an integral part of our everyday lives. From the smooth flowing silhouettes of razors and deodorant bottles to the highly stylized plastic cases that protect computer circuitry, the “streamline decade” continues to shape (literally) industrial design.

Nota Bene: The Aesthetic Revolution that Wasn’t

Although the “streamline revolution” embodied in the DC-3 profoundly influenced the manner in which pre-WWII American and European citizens envisioned the modern, it had little, if any, impact on Soviet aesthetics. While American and European perspective were being shaped by the “aerodynamic” creations of Bel Geddes, Teague, and others, Soviet artists and designers were being forced to sacrifice aesthetic innovation in favor of crude, monotonous, and bland forms that better served the Party’s fetish of increasing output norms.

Officially, the new mandate of “socialist realism” in 1932 imposed creative conformity across all fields of the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and design (as well as literature and music) were expected to adhere to the vision and principles of the Communist Party. According to this politically correct vision, artists’ work was expected to portray daily life “in its revolutionary development.” All productions were required to combine “truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic depiction” with “the task of ideological transformation.” The goal was the creation of art embodying a “revolutionary romanticism” that would remodel and re-educate the working masses in the spirit of socialism.

Transparent allegory and simplistic plot structures dominated literature. Highly stylized realism shaped painting and sculpture. Meanwhile, in architecture, designs of the thirties borrowed heavily from classical structures and motifs. (It’s one of the ironies of modern Russian history that the Soviet “world of tomorrow” produced an aesthetic vision so deeply rooted in the past.) The result was bulky, ponderous, and predictable structures built on an increasingly grand scale.

None of this is to say that Soviet aircraft failed to incorporate the technological advances that led to more aerodynamic and efficient designs. They did…thanks to the willingness of America’s Depression-era airplane manufacturers to sell their most advanced concepts to the highest foreign bidders. In July 1936, less than seven months after the debut of the DC-3, Soviet officials contracted with the Douglas Company for the purchase of one of the planes and a license to produce a native version. The domestically built aircraft, ultimately designated the Lisunov Li-2, debuted in 1939. The Li-2 would play a vital role as the Soviet air force’s most important transport aircraft. In the post-war world, it continued to provide service as the country’s chief civilian airliner. However, unlike in the West, the plane inspired no visions of tomorrow. That task had already been fulfilled by the Communist Party.

ScP

1. Tom D. Crouch, Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age. W. W. Norton: New York, 2003, p. 335

Still, according to a story appearing this morning via the Associated Press, the seventy-year-old mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance may soon be put to rest thanks to “new perspectives” provided by a recently discovered diary. The article reports that The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which for years has been leading efforts to confirm Earhart’s crash site on an uninhabited atoll, recently acquired the diary once belonging to James W. Carey. Carey was an AP reporter who had been dispatched to the south Pacific in 1937 to cover the flight of Earhart and co-pilot Fred J. Noonan from New Guinea to Howland Island — one of the last and most dangerous legs of their around the world flight. Of course, Earhart and Noonan never arrived on Howland. Instead, they disappeared somewhere over the ocean.

It turns out that Carey was aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca anchored off Howland. From there he was able to listen in on the radio reports dispatched from Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. The contents of the radio messages and Carey’s radiograms to the AP have long been available to investigators. The personal diary that Carey kept while on board the cutter was previously unknown.

Although TIGHAR executive director Ron Gillespie acknowledges that the diary doesn’t provide any new information about the content of Earhart’s radio messages, he notes that

[it] is the first document that puts a real person aboard Itasca and tells us something from a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days.”

TIGHAR members are convinced that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a flat reef 350 miles south of Howland where they survived for some time on scant food and rainwater. If they can raise sufficient funds, the group hopes this summer to dispatch its ninth expedition to the south Pacific to locate Earhart’s crash. Previous trips have turned up a number of tantalizing clues, including shoe heels, Plexiglass pieces, and an aluminum panel that may have come from an Electra aircraft. However, definitive evidence has yet eluded the organization.

So how did Carey’s diary surface? A TIGHAR volunteer who trolls the Internet for Earhart memorabilia spotted it for sale on E-Bay.

Cost of the diary? $26.

Sailing along with this summer’s TIGHAR expedition? $50,000

Viewing the following video of The Handsome Family’s “Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear?” Priceless…

ScP

As the clip’s voice-over notes (albeit in French now in Russian — 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!

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