We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

The movement created by Marinetti profoundly altered the contemporary art world in the years leading up to the First World War. But the Italian theorist was hardly the only member of the avant-garde interested in integrating technology and art. Russians numbered among the most innovative and influential of the new “Futurists.” Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchonykh, David Burlyuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Kazimir Malevich (among others) took up Marinetti’s challenge. They set-out to create new modes of communication that would transcend previous forms in the construction of a new aesthetic.

Of all the Russians who contributed to the emerging avant-garde perhaps none was better suited to the role of technological prophet than Vasily Vasilievich Kamensky (1884-1961). Beginning in 1908 as editor of the poetry journal Spring (Весна), and later as a participant in the literary group Hylaea and contributor to the movement’s foundational collection of poetry A Trap for Judges (Садок судей) (1910), Kamensky was among the earliest of the “Cubo-Futurists,” the most prominent Russian group to build on the ideas first developed by Marinetti. No less important, Kamensky was one of the very few Imperial Russian citizens who had direct experience with the era’s most revolutionary technological device: the airplane.

Kamensky’s first encounter with aviation came in the summer of 1910 when he flew as a passenger along with Vladimir Lebedev (one of Russia’s earliest pilots and aircraft constructors). Smitten by the “passion for wings,” the poet resolved to master the new art of flying. After placing an order for a Blériot XI of his own, he traveled to Paris where he took some half dozen lessons from Louis Blériot himself. Kamensky then returned to Russia to complete his informal training under the tutelage of Lebedev. Within several months he had made enough progress that he was able to pass the flying exam administered by the Imperial All-Russian Aero-Club. By the early spring of 1912, Kamensky had joined the small ranks of Imperial Russia’s first licensed pilots.

As it turned out, Kamensky’s tenure as a pilot was short-lived. The poet’s aerial career met an abrupt end only a few months after he had earned his wings. Following a near-fatal crash into a muddy bog, Kamensky abandoned aviation and returned to literature. Still, the airborne experiences profoundly shaped his artistic vision. In the years to come, Kamensky worked to incorporate the sights, sounds, and sensations of the new technology into his poetry and prose. The result was a series of radically new works that helped shape Cubo-Futurism and, in doing so, contributed to the rise of modern aesthetics.

Typical of Kamensky’s air-minded Cubo-Futurism was his 1912 poem “The Flight of Vasya Kamensky on an Aeroplane to Warsaw” which describes a pilot’s sensations as he prepares to depart from an aerodrome. Aside from the poem’s subject matter (which was itself quite novel), it was the striking composition of the piece that set it apart from contemporary works. Instructing his readers that the poem should be read “from the bottom of the page upward,” Kamensky employed a series of progressively smaller typefaces to communicate the experience of observing an airplane’s take-off, ascent, and final disappearance into the horizon. In retrospect, the poem is an early indication of the immense contributions that Russians were poised to make in the written and visual arts.

A more extreme (though less immediately obvious) example of Kamensky’s air-minded artistry is his 1914 “ferro-concrete” composition “Constantinople.” Although the work is typically identified as a “poem” it bears little resemblance to anything previously seen in that genre. “Constantinople” consists of words, sounds, letters, and numbers grouped together in apparently random fashion and arrayed within individual sub-sections comprising a larger square-shaped field. The words (and parts of words) chosen by the author clearly suggest things that one would encounter on a visit to the Turkish city. Here, one encounters “sailors” (матросы), “mullahs” (муллы), and “seagulls” (чайки). There, one can glimpse the “shores” of the “Bosphorous” (берег — Босфор) and the ancient cathedral “Haiga Sophia” (Ай Софи). But the “poem” has no beginning or end. It is impossible to “read” even in its original Russian. As such, it is essentially untranslatable.¹ So what, if anything, does it mean?

It is only when we recall Kamensky’s experience as an aviator that “Constantinople” makes sense. The visually arresting, unreadable composition is a literal word-map depicting the city’s architectural features, inhabitants, and urban neighborhoods as experienced from overhead while looking down from an airplane. Little-known beyond a small circle of Russian literary and cultural scholars, “Constantinople” is one of the earliest and most important examples of aviation’s vital role in transforming twentieth-century art.

And now, the musical portion of today’s post:

1. For Jack Hirschman’s “translation” of the poem see, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium. The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude (U of California Press, 1995.)

Although it’s the sort of thing that any American grade-school student should know, the answer to the question “Who invented the airplane?” hasn’t always (or everywhere) been so.

Had that same question been posed to a Soviet citizen, he (or she) would most likely have responded with a name you’ve probably never heard before: Alexander Mozhaiskii.

Virtually unknown in the West, Alexander Fedorovich Mozhaiskii (1825-1890) was an Imperial naval officer, engineer, and early aviation pioneer. During the 1870s and 1880s he conducted a series of aerial experiments that included the 1882 launch of a steam-powered flying machine. However, as the flat wings affixed to Mozhaiskii’s contraption were incapable of producing lift, the aircraft relied on the momentum produced by rolling down an inclined ramp to become airborne.

Mozhaiskii’s vehicle “flew” in the same way that a Hot Wheels™ racer “flies” via its Thunder Launcher™ playset.

Which is to say, it didn’t.

Still, to this day, some official Russian publications (and the history exhibition at the Russian Air Force Museum in Monino) maintain that Mozhaiskii’s creation is, in fact, the world’s first airplane. No doubt, much of the support for this claim derives from the fact that Mozhaiskii’s device looks somewhat more like a modern airplane than did the Wrights’ design.

Given the propensity of Stalinist-era propagandists to claim Russian credit for the invention of everything from the steam engine, to radio, penicillin, and even baseball (!), Western historians have been prone to dismiss the Mozhaiskii story as just another example of strident Soviet chauvinism.¹ In actuality, the Mozhaiskii claim pre-dates Stalin’s rise to power by almost two decades. The story was advanced as early as 1910 in an article titled “The First Aviators” published in the most prominent tsarist-era newspaper Novoe vremia (The New Times).

Viewed in the broader perspective, such nationalistic claims are not as unusual or outlandish as one might think. The origins of the airplane were contested for decades before and after the Wrights’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. As late as the 1920s some Frenchmen continued to insist that Clément Ader’s bat-shaped Éole (1890) was actually the world’s first airplane. Meanwhile, to this day, many Brazilians insist that one of their native sons, Alberto Santos-Dumont, should be recognized as the pioneer of controlled heavy-than-air flight. Even in the United States, the Wrights’ triumph long went unrecognized by folks who should have known better. It wasn’t until 1914 that officials at the Smithsonian Institution finally acknowledged that the Wright Flyer and not former Smithsonian head Samuel P. Langley’s Great Aerodrome was the first airplane to take to the air.²

So, while the answer to the question “Who invented the airplane?” may now be obvious. It hasn’t always been so.

1. See, for example, the excerpt on “Aviation,” in Richard Stites and James von Geldern, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 479-486
2. The best discussion of the early controversies involving the Wrights, Ader, and Langley can be found in Richard P. Hallion, Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003

What was it like to fly the Soviet skies at the height of the Cold War? In 1963, Time magazine correspondent Edmund Stevens, the first Western citizen to make the Havana — Moscow run, described his experience:

One struggles up a ramp that is like a staircase leading to the fourth floor of a building—the Tu-114 is around 40 ft. high when standing on the ground. Inside the hatch, cabin follows cabin: a crew compartment; a large compartment empty of everything but a few suitcases, food hampers and cases of soft drinks; a serving pantry, with a galley down a flight of steps on a lower level. Then come the first-class compartments, four of them, each completely private. In contrast with the rest of the plane, where fittings are as spartan as those on a troop carrier, the first-class section has wood paneling and curtains.

Read the whole piece here.

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As this article in today’s Moscow Times notes, the last two decades have been almost as tumultuous for Rust as they have been for Russia. Since being pardoned and released from Soviet prison in August 1988, Rust has been twice divorced and thrice arrested (for fraud, petty theft, and attempted murder). He now makes his living as a professional poker player.

Although I’m not going to make the trip via Cessna, I’ll be landing in Moscow myself late next week. I’ll be there through early July conducting archival and field research in support of two new book projects. I’ve still got lots of packing and organizing to do in advance of my departure, so things may continue to be quiet around here for the next week and a half or so. However, once I’ve arrived and have established some degree of internet connectivity, I expect to post field reports on a more regular basis.

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On the whole, I agree with the article’s implicit argument regarding the importance of the West to Russians’ self-perceptions. Indeed, as I noted some time back in a lengthy post “In Defense of Russian Backwardness,” the conscious comparison of national standing vis-a-vis the Western world is an aspect of Russia’s cultural tradition that is essential to understanding the nation’s past and present. Still, I think the short piece gives short-shrift to some relevant history.

Specifically, the claim that the Khrushchev era was the period in which comparisons with America came to dominate Party rhetoric strikes me as mistaken. While it is true that earlier “the Bolsheviks were no less concerned with catching up with and overtaking Germany, France, or Great Britain,” it is not accurate that prior to the 1950s the United States was seen as “merely one of a number of capitalist countries that were used as examples” for promoting industrial, economic, and other policies.

The United States occupied a special place in the eyes of Bolshevik leaders from the very outset of the Soviet regime. As they set out to construct their imagined “new world” based on advanced technology, heavy industry, and efficient production methods, prominent party figures and lesser functionaries continually looked to real, existing capitalism in the United States for methods and practices that they could adapt to the quest of building socialism.

As Alan Ball notes in his 2003 study Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia:

“Time and again, [Soviet leaders] distinguished American from European capitalist lands antiquated by remnants of musty tradition. The stifling hand of the feudal past did not grip the New World as it did the old, they contended, and thus the United States possessed vigor unmatched in Europe. …Apart from specific products, Bolsheviks perceived American assembly-line techniques in enormous factories as best suited for industrializing their own country. ‘In the scale of its economy, in the methods of production (mass production, standardizations, and so forth),” remarked Anastas Mikoyan, commissar of trade in 1930, ‘America is the most appropriate for us.’”¹

If the article misfires in locating the origins of Russia’s obsession with the “American model” in the 1950s, it does make the convincing case that at no time was this attitude on more conspicuous display than during Nikita Khrushchev’s tenure as First Secretary; a fact attested to as well by the following newsreel footage courtesy (once again) YouTube:

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1. Alan Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia, New York: Rowman & Littlefield (2003), 24.

In a televised appearance at a ceremony honoring Russian diplomats who died during the Great Patriotic War (i.e. World War II), Lavrov declared that, “attempts to make a mockery of history are becoming an element and an instrument of the foreign policy of certain countries.” The Minister went on to accuse the EU and NATO of conniving with these attempts.

Lavrov’s comments are the latest rhetorical volley launched from the Kremlin as part of a rancorous diplomatic row between the Russian Federation and its Western neighbor Estonia. The tiff was set-off late last month when the Estonian government transferred the “Bronze Soldier,” (a monument to Red Army troops who died fighting the Nazis in World War II), from its prominent position in Tynismyagi square in the nation’s capital, Tallinn to one of the city’s military cemeteries. At the same time, the remains of nearly one dozen soldiers resting in an adjoining mass grave (братская могила) were also disinterred. They are scheduled to be reburied in June.

The removal of the monument and the “desecration” of the soldiers’ remains has sparked protests among Estonia’s sizable ethnic Russian minority which comprises just over 25% of the country’s population. It also engendered a week-long protest outside the Estonian embassy in Moscow, calls from numerous members of the Russian State Duma to sever diplomatic relations with the Baltic state, and the sudden announcement that Russian oil and gas supplies to Estonia have been shut-off owing to issues involving “railway maintenance.” No less ominously, the Estonian government has alleged that, over a span of several days, hackers operating out of IP-addresses based in Moscow state institutions have repeatedly brought down the web sites of several prominent Estonian governmental agencies including the office of the president, parliament, cabinet ministers, and the foreign and defense ministries.

President Vladimir Putin, who has publicly denounced the Estonian actions, today weighed in on the related issue of Russia’s contributions to the defeat of German fascism. Speaking in advance of Wednesday’s Victory Day celebrations in Moscow commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, President Putin noted that “Unfortunately, not everybody understands that Russia lost more people in this war than the rest of the world combined. That’s the way it is, but we pay tribute to the memory of all victims of Nazism. This includes anti-fascists in Germany itself. It includes our allies in World War II.”

Here, at least, Russia’s President has a point. Western citizens are typically unaware of the immense suffering and sacrifice endured by the Soviet people during 1941-1945. The war is a source of pride for many Russians today and it is likely to remain so for future generations who desperately need a “usable past” around which they can form a national identity.
As I noted some time back in a different venue, more willingness on the part of Western officials to acknowledge Russia’s contributions to World War II might go some way towards defusing the blustering emotions that often surround official Russian discussions of the war and its meaning.

Whatever the case, while the Kremlin’s ham-fisted and bullying response throughout the incident has been properly criticized by Western journalists and op-ed writers, few seem to have considered that the government of Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip may share responsibility for this brouhaha. Why is it that the monument’s presence in the Estonian capital suddenly necessitated state action now, sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Perhaps tellingly, the country’s head of state, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who recently vetoed a proposed “Law on Forbidden Structures” that would have banned public display of monuments glorifying the USSR, acknowledged this past week in an interview with the Financial Times that the issue might have been resolved simply by renaming the monument.

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In the months that followed, air shows multiplied across the Continent in places like Brescia, Nice, Monte Carlo, and St. Petersburg, as local aviation enthusiasts sought to duplicate the excitement and success of the French event.

America’s first international air show commenced on 10 January 10 1910 five months after Le Grande Semaine. It was hosted by the Aero Club of California at site just outside of Los Angeles in Dominguez Hills. The Dominguez Hills air show attracted some of the world’s most famous aviators including the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane, Louis Blériot, the winner of the first cross-country air race, Louis Paulhan, and American favorite son Glenn H. Curtiss, who had claimed the $5,000 Gordon Bennett Trophy Race held at Reims.

Attendance at the Dominguez Hills meet surpassed expectations. Over the course of the ten-day show an estimated 226,000 spectators converged on the airfield, generating more than $137,500 for the event’s sponsors and helping to launch the aviation industry on the West Coast.

The Department of Archives and Digital Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills has available on-line an excellent assortment of photographs, postcards, slides, news clippings, and programs from the 1910 meet. To view these materials from America’s first air show, visit CSUDH’s 1910 Los Angeles International Aviation Meet Research Collection.

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With the exception of a few qualified (and reasonable) statements regarding Russia’s historical levels of economic and industrial underdevelopment, it seems that many participants in the discussion are prepared to throw backwardness off of the ship of scholarly analysis.

I think the opponents of backwardness are wrong.

Before going further, I should clarify (in light this post from Nathaniel Knight on 10/24) that I am not interested in backwardness because I find it to be a convenient tool for pontificating about the failings of Russia or Russians. I am not “relentlessly” (or even remotely) “anti-Russian.” Nor am I advocating that “the West is best.” (It isn’t, except when it is.) What I am interested in is the extent to which backwardness, a peculiar, recurring theme in the history of Russia, helps historians to better comprehend the underlying cultural traits and characteristics that have shaped the ways in which Russian citizens and state officials have approached the problematic issue of modernization.

That much having been said, I think that the concept of backwardness is not only useful, it is essential to understanding Russia’s past. Without it, much (if not all) of Russia’s 19th- and 20th-century history is difficult to comprehend.

Here, on 10/24, David Goldfrank ruminated that the West “has been awfully good at setting such trajectories [of development and progress] as the ideal.” I think that comments of this sort reveal the cultural conceit that’s been an undercurrent of the H-Russia discussion from the beginning: namely, that the West forced upon Russians a (false?) consciousness of their “backwardness” in the face of the Western “superiority” (those scare quotes belong to others, not me.)

More concretely, aside from a handful of Harvard intellectuals in the mid-1990s, I’m having trouble thinking of Westerners who have traveled to Russia, carrying suitcases full of plans, intent on transforming the country along European lines. I have much less troubled coming up with numerous Russians who on their own traveled abroad only to return home wondering, “what’s wrong with Russia?” As Alex Martin noted in a much earlier post, it’s been Russians themselves (typically the county’s foremost thinkers and statesmen) who’ve acknowledged, criticized, and attempted to reverse Russia’s backwardness relative to the West. Are those who advocate that backwardness is a Western imposition suggesting that Tsar Peter the Great, Peter Chaadaev, Nikita Murav’ev, Pavel Pestel, Alexander Herzen (and countless others) weren’t thinking for themselves when they identified and condemned Russia’s backwardness while attempting to implement (or merely devise) projects for reform, based on Western models, that would enable Russia to catch-up with the West?

In short, I don’t see the argument that backwardness (together with its attendant concept progress) is a foreign “construct” forced upon the country by Westerners as convincing. In fact, I don’t even see it as an argument.

In a related matter, I am struck by the extent to which the H-Russia discussion has so far overlooked/ignored the historical sub-field that, arguably, has the most to contribute to this debate: the history of science and technology.

Tellingly, as regards science and technology, backward is not a relative, culturally “constructed” term. It is an objective, measurable fact. While it is true that technological progress is not inevitable or guaranteed, the reality is that since the mid-16th century, technology has developed at a dizzying pace (and the West has led the way). Over time, technology has become more complex. Insofar as it has also become capable of undertaking tasks more efficiently and effectively, it has improved. It has become more advanced. [For example, relative to an F-22 Raptor, the Blériot XI that first flew the English Channel in 1909 is backward.]

The point I want to raise is that Russia’s comparable level of technological development has been central to fostering Russians’ perception of their country’s general (social, cultural, political, etc.) backwardness. Moreover, the reality of technological backwardness is key to understanding the history of modern Russia because it has been intimately linked to the formation of Russian national identity, Russian understanding of their nation’s cultural/social development, and, very significantly, the manner in which both statesmen and citizens have attempted to modernize the country.

It is a pattern that has repeated itself with maddening regularity from the dawn of the 18th century to the present: an emerging (or sudden) recognition that Russian technological capabilities are sorely lagging behind those of the country’s western competitors spurs major reform efforts, directed by the state, which are intended to reverse decline and propel Russia into the front ranks of Europe’s leading nations. Seeking to “short cut” development, state agents rely heavily on the importation of advanced foreign technology, methods, and expertise. Improvements are made at great social and economic cost, progress (relative to Russia’s previous level of development) is achieved, only to result, in the span of a few years, in a renewed awareness of Russian backwardness accompanied by new calls for thoroughgoing reform.

In conclusion, it seems to me that the premises underlying much of the current H-Russia discussion are flawed and that the major questions posed thus far are misplaced.

Rather than asking “is backwardness a useful analytical tool?,” historians should be asking “How has technological backwardness shaped Russian responses to the challenges of social, cultural, and political, modernization?”

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to build the Tower, full size from steel girders and guy wires. It will be built in sections, in different venues and locations around the world until the whole Tower has been fabricated. The sections will not be united, but the Tower will exist in the world.

“Tatlin’s Tower and the World” is less interesting as an artistic “statement” than it is as evidence of the enduring legacy of one of twentieth-century Russia’s most visionary and inspiring artists, Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) a painter, sculptor, an architect who founded the avant-garde movement known as “Constructivism.”

“Tatlin’s Tower” (or, more properly, the “Monument to the Third International”) has been an object of curiosity, speculation, and inspiration since its architectural model was first unveiled in 1920. The visually striking new structure was intended to serve as the main headquarters for the International Workers’ Movement. “Tatlin’s Tower” was to rank among the greatest of the world’s architectural wonders once completed.

Encased inside double helix of iron and steel thrusting toward the heavens at an angle [photo], the core of the Tower would consist of three glass and steel building units shaped, from base to top, in the forms of a cube (for legislative assemblies), a pyramid (executive bodies), and a cylinder (information and propaganda services). Standing more than 1,300 feet tall, the edifice would have dwarfed the great monument to the French Revolution completed in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel. Moreover, unlike Eiffel’s static tower in Paris, Tatlin’s Monument would not stand still. Its three central units would mark the passage of time by revolving at different speeds: the cube rotating yearly, the pyramid monthly, and the cylinder daily. Meanwhile, the very top of the Tower would be equipped with a lighting apparatus capable of projecting messages and revolutionary slogans onto a giant screen (or, the clouds passing overhead).

In short, “Tatlin’s Tower” was every bit as grandiose, ambitious, and impossible to build as the proletarian paradise that it was intended to honor.

Aside from having produced one of the twentieth-century’s most enduring avant-garde architectural images with his “Tower,” Vladimir Tatlin is significant for having designed a second, no less impractical and marvelous device: a human-powered flying machine that he christened the “Letatlin.”

A play on the artist’s surname and the Russian verb “to fly” (letat’), the Letatlin was assembled during a period (1930-1932) when Tatlin’s Constructivist approach to art and architecture had fallen into disfavor with Communist Party officials. By the time that the full-scale model for the Letatlin was complete in 1932 the Stalinist assault on Soviet culture and the arts was beginning in earnest. That same year, Josef Stalin promulgated a decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations” which banned all independent studios, workshops, and groups. In their place the Party established official artistic and creative “unions” — bureaucratic mechanisms that would enable the Party to control artistic content and production throughout the country.

The Party also moved to impose an official style known as “socialist realism,” an artistic orthodoxy in which everything was portrayed as it was supposed to according to Stalinist ideology: the workers were enthusiastic about their tasks, the enemy vicious, cowardly and ever-present; and the Party always victorious. Irony, contradiction, and un-scripted conflict all were eradicated in favor of a grand “master narrative” that comported with the Party’s prevailing worldview.

Visually, the Letatlin is very much reminiscent of the ornithopter drawings that appear in the late 15th-early 16th century sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The similarities between the Letatlin and da Vinci’s ornithopter don’t end there. Both expressed an understanding of and approach to human flight rooted in a desire for personal freedom and transcendence. In the case of da Vinci, such longings were very much in tune with the emergent humanistic and individualistic worldview that evolved with the Renaissance. In the case of Tatlin, they represented sharply dissonant views that ran dangerously counter to the increasingly repressive and collectivist-minded political culture of the Stalinist 1930s.

The guardians of the politically correct Stalinist orthodoxy doubtless saw the Letatlin for what it was: a subversive statement regarding the need to liberate flight (and, by extension, the individual) from the mechanistic, industrial, and de-humanizing constraints that had come to dominate Soviet culture, society, and politics.

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