Sheremetevo airport, Moscow’s main international terminal, is located eighteen miles NW of the city’s center. Given the Russian capital’s expansion since the airport opened in 1959 this is now not at all far from Moscow proper, though it seems much farther to downtown by car. (It can easily take over an hour to reach the heart of the capital when traffic is bad. And in Moscow, traffic is almost always bad.) As Moscow is Europe’s largest metropolis (current population approx. 10.4 million ), you might expect that city vistas would figure prominently in your airplane window during final approach and landing. By and large, though, there’s not much to see. At least, not in comparison to the amazing views afforded by some of the world’s other great cities.

On a clear day, the approach is dominated by the mundane topography of podmoskv’e (the city’s suburban region): a few roads and railway tracks intersecting forests and fields, accompanied by clusters of small summer cottages (dachas) and some non-descript buildings that grow a bit denser as the plane nears the runway. Although the landscape has altered somewhat recently thanks to increased development near the airport, arriving into Moscow, I’ve always been keenly aware of how much the view is dominated by the countryside: flat, open, and seeming endless. From the air, the city is hard to discern. It’s almost as if it is in hiding, enveloped by prostranstvo – the vast space that encompasses the country’s near limitless hinterlands. In direct counterpoint to the sharp verticality of its politics, Moscow’s topography is decidedly horizontal.

I am always excited to find myself returning to Moscow. But from the standpoint of an aerial eye, the arrival has never made much of an impression.

That changed last week.

As my plane descended toward Sheremetevo last Friday morning I noticed something that I hadn’t seen before: Moscow now has a skyline. Or, to be more accurate, it has a skyline now visible from an airplane. And it’s modern one at that: a distinct cluster of steel and glass high-rises that emerge from the Eurasian plain to mark the location of the capital and its bustling business center. It’s certainly not much compared to New York, Tokyo, or Chicago, but it is definitely there.

The “cluster” is Moscow-City (Москва-Сити) — a gigantic $12 billion (and counting) development project first begun in 1995. It’s the latest in a long line of grand strategies to renovate Moscow. However, as I rode into town toward the apartment where I’m staying (located a brisk twenty-minute walk from Moscow-City itself) I noticed something else – there’s little activity at the construction site. From up close, Moscow-City has all the appearances of an abandoned development surrounded by sleeping boom cranes. Thanks to the onset of Russia’s worst economic crisis since 1998 – work on the architectural mega-project (like others elsewhere) has slowed to a crawl. Although spokesmen for the project pledge that construction will continue, the opening of some of Moscow-City’s partially built structures will be delayed until 2016 — four years behind schedule. The again, things could be worse.

It would seem that skyline that I saw through my airplane window was something of a mirage. At least for now.

Even by the typically monumental standards of Soviet-era memorials, “The Motherland Calls” is an impressive sight. Towering seventeen stories above the Russian city of Volgograd, the monolithic statue depicting a windswept woman holding aloft a sword is a striking combination of neoclassical styling and Stalinist kitsch. A symbolic representation of Soviet victory over Nazi invaders, the figure intentionally recalls the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Like that ancient masterpiece, the Soviet composition communicates dynamism and strength. A closer inspection of “The Motherland Calls,” however, reveals at least one important difference. Cast entirely out of reinforced concrete, the dull, grey surface (interrupted here and there by cracks and the rust marks caused from embedded rebar) suggests none of the solidity and timelessness of the marble Greek statute…

To read the rest of the piece, head over to The Russian Front by clicking HERE.

This past month, Duke University Libraries unveiled a new digital collection documenting daily life in the early Soviet Union. Titled, “Americans in the Land of Lenin,” the photographic archive contains 750 images drawn from the personal papers of two Americans who found themselves in the USSR during the two decades that followed October 1917.

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

[While in Europe in late November and early December, my friend and colleague Nathan Wood began research on his next project, a book-length study that will explore the introduction of bicycles, automobiles, and airplanes in the lands of East Central Europe (specifically Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland). Tentatively titled, "East Central Europe in the Age of Speed" Nathan's future work promises to shed a great deal of light on a region typically ignored by historians of technology. It's a terrific concept. Soon after his return from Poland, Nathan drafted a short piece describing his project accompanied by a few photos he collected during his travels. He graciously agreed to allow me to post them here -- back in January. But as one thing led to another (including my first site hack) I put-off blogging altogether. At long last, I have resolved to get back up to speed blogging about Russia, technology, aviation, and whatnot. So without further delay... ]

Here’s Dr. Nathan Wood on East Central Europe’s “Age of Speed”:

If East Central Europe is often considered backwards in comparison to its Western neighbors, what did this mean in an age of fast new forms of personal transportation? Could transportation technologies be seen as a way to “catch up” or even surpass the center? I will look at the mechanics and specialists who built and steered the machines, the avant garde and futurist artists and poets who rhapsodized about them, and the popular reception of these machines in the illustrated press.

In the four photos I have selected here, you can see something of the interconnectedness of these machines. The people who were interested in bicycles were also intrigued with automobiles and airplanes. Recall that Orville and Wilbur Wright had a bicycle shop and that Charles Howard, the owner of Seabiscuit, worked in a bicycle shop before specializing in cars. Moreover, to the public, his knowledge of bicycles meant that he should also know something about cars.

The inventors of the first plane in Cracow were a Czech and a Pole who worked in an auto garage. The Czech pioneers of motorcycles and autos, Václav Laurin and Václav Klement, were cycling specialists first and then they designed airplane engines. Ferdinand Porsche (yes, that Porsche) designed a revolutionary airplane engine, and BMW first built airplanes, before specializing in cars. In my research, I found that bicycling magazines soon had sections on automobiles, while car magazines, like Samochód (the Polish word for automobile) had sections on motorcycles, motorboats, and especially airplanes. The question on the cover of this issue, one frequently asked in the popular press, is: Who’s faster and defter? (The plane or the car)

There is also a sense of progressiveness connected to the new machines, especially for women. For a woman to ride a bicycle was at first scandalous, but of course it was also empowering, offering her freedom of movement otherwise impossible in an age when a respectable woman was expected to have an escort in public. Note that the girls in the top photo from the 1920s demurely pose sidesaddle for the picture, even if they did not ride that way.

The cover from Auto and Sport from 1928 seems so familiar to us today because we are accustomed to seeing pretty women and fast machines on the cover of specialty magazines almost exclusively for men. It is also telling that automobiles and sport are connected. Dunlop, the company that made the tires for 60% of the early automobile racers also made tennis racquets. The connection between cars and sport was natural. To play tennis, ride motorcycles, and drive cars was all part of being modern.

The final point, and this should come as no surprise, is the fact that much of the language regarding the new machines is readily recognizable in a variety of languages. Just as the driver in this last photo probably looks no different from a motorist in any other country at the time, so too, do many of the words look familiar. I suspect you had no trouble deducing what “Auto i Sport” is all about, or “Auto i Turysta”–especialy given the clue in the Polski Touring Klub’s title. The Polish word for bicycle, “rower,” came from an English invention, the Rover, the “safety bicycle” invented in 1885 that looks like the bicycles of today and gradually rendered the large front-wheeled “pennyfarthings” obsolete. Does this make everyone who used slight variants of the original word derivative, or are the terms simply evidence of the interconnectedness of the users of these new technologies in the Age of Speed? Well, that is something I still have to work out. . .

–NW

This past Thursday the USS Intrepid returned to New York harbor to take-up her post at Pier 86 along Manhattan’s West Side. The Intrepid’s arrival marked the end of a two-year hiatus during which time the ship (and its Hudson River berth) underwent a $120 million restoration. A veteran of the Second World War, Korean War, and the conflict in Vietnam, the Intrepid, since 1986, has served as home to the floating Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. The museum is scheduled to re-open to the public in early November.

Today marks my own return to action here at DotA following a late-summer hiatus. I suspended blogging during September in order to wrap up one scholarly project and to begin two new ones. I’ve also returned to teaching following a year off devoted to research and writing courtesy of American taxpayers. In the days and weeks to come, I’ll have more to say about what I was doing with my time (and our money). I’ll also have DotA’s first guest article, updates to an older, favorite post, and new articles of my own, together with links to related new items, and the like.

In the meantime, visitors concerned about recent Russian military developments may want to check out this post from The Russian Front.

ScP

Readers interested in commentary regarding the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia should head over to The Russian Front. There, Dr. David Stone has posted a thoughtful (and, to my mind, quite accurate) article describing how American foreign policy in the Balkans during the 1990s established (unintentional) precedents for the current Russian actions in the Caucasus.

Stone begins:

There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began as a golden opportunity to flex its muscles, make Georgia an object lesson for the rest of Russia’s neighbors, rally Russian voters, and tighten its grip on Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in the Caucasus…

For the rest of the piece, click here.

[Cross-posted from The Russian Front]

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: It’s amazing what one can find on the Internet.

In the summer of 2005, the city of Moscow played host to a photographic exhibit honoring the 60th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War. Titled, “1418 Days,” the exhibit drew upon a collection of rare wartime images contained in the archives of the Moscow House of Photography (Московский Дом фотографии) to tell the story the USSR’s wartime experience.

Not surprisingly, most of the images concerned the battlefield heroism of Red Army soldiers at the front. But the exhibit included more than a few photographs drawn from the rear as well including scenes of factory life, public demonstrations, the air-raid shelters in Moscow’s metro, and bears (no, really).

The material from the 2005 exhibit (including a 40-minute video produced for the occasion) is available for viewing on-line. As is so often the case with these types of things, English-language translations are few and far between, so non-Russian readers will find themselves at a disadvantage.

To view the photographic collection in chronological order, click HERE.

ScP

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Tom Geisler, a reader who has recently returned from a visit to the Russian Federation. While in Moscow, Tom organized his own trip out to the Russian Air Force Museum at Monino. He’s been kind enough to permit me to post his letter. Here’s what Tom had to say about his visit to the museum:
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This coming Sunday, 15 June at 9 pm (CST) the Discovery network’s Military Channel debuts a new program aimed at aviation history buffs. Showdown: Air Combat uses restored aircraft and interviews with veteran pilots to recreate aerial combat encounters from the First World to the (almost) present.
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Although I don’t often post material relating to faculty life, teaching, and other sundry academic matters, this morning I came across two articles on higher education that non-academics really should read.

The first is a short piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Did You Publish Today?” It’s a light-hearted column intended for those people “who believe that academics have summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn’t work.”

If you have ever wondered what it is that academics (especially those in the humanities) actually do, “Did You Publish Today?” is a good place to start.

The second piece is less mirthful.
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Although the majority of my posts on Soviet aviation culture have focused on visual and literary productions such as posters, films, poems, and short stories, arguably the best known and most popular composition (at least for Russians) is “Ever Higher” (”Все выше”) — an aviation-inspired tune that appeared several years before the young Bolshevik state even had an air force!

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.
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I just returned this evening from a trip to Lawrence, KS. I headed out there late last week to deliver a couple of talks at my alma mater, The University of Kansas and ended up staying a couple of extra days.

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Department of History for their kindness and hospitality.

I always enjoy going home to visit. But this past weekend, I had a fantastic time — as did a lot of other folks:

A few days ago I received a message from a reader (Jim Davis) who wanted to know if I might be able to provide information regarding a short newsreel that he had come across:

I have a short film clip … silent … black and white … it shows a large single-engined monoplane and biplane and crews with locals at Urga, Mongolia and “Pekin” China.

While it wasn’t much to go on, I knew right away what the subject was. It’s some rare footage documenting the USSR’s first major international aerial expedition: a 4,000-mile journey between Moscow and Peking that Soviet propagandists dubbed “The Great Flight.”
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A note appearing this afternoon on the SEELANGS listserv alerts subscribers to a new website dedicated to Soviet material culture.

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

The years that surrounded the turn of the twentieth century were marked by wide ranging artistic experimentation and innovation. Influenced by the sights and sounds introduced through recent technological creations such as automobiles, airplanes, and the cinema, artists of all genres began to incorporate the new sensations of speed, dynamism, and simultaneity into their creative works. The most prominent early exponent of a new technologically informed art was the Italian editor and ideologue Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Enraptured by the dawning machine age, Marinetti aimed to sweep aside the perspectives and values of the past in a thoroughgoing aesthetic revolution. As he announced in his famous “Futurist Manifesto” from 1909:

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.
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In the years that followed 1945, one of the more contentious debates between Soviet and Western scholars of the Second World War concerned the role of the Allied Lend-Lease program in contributing to the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany. Western scholars tended to view the Allied delivery of materiel and equipment as the decisive factor in determining victory on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, official Soviet-era histories downplayed the Allied contribution (when they mentioned it at all); correctly, though disingenuously, noting that American and British airplanes represented only a small percentage of the total number of aircraft produced by Soviet factories while ignoring the immense amount of raw materials, communications equipment, and ground vehicles supplied via Lend-Lease.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russian and western scholars have arrived at a general consensus that while Lend-Lease was far more important to the USSR’s war effort than Soviet scholars were willing to acknowledge, the decisive role in securing victory was, nevertheless, played by Soviet soldiers and citizens. It’s a view that is on display, for example, at the visually rich English-language Lend-Lease page sponsored by the Russian Air Force (ВВС России).
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Just before Christmas I took a break from blogging in order to clear up a backlog of obligations that had piled up. I wrote a couple of book reviews, attended yet another conference, finished a book proposal, and ploughed through a collection of grant applications. [I also spent time in front of the TV watching some fantastic college football.]

Although I managed to get a quite a bit done, it’s meant that things around here have been quiet for rather longer than I had intended. Sorry. Then again, what d’ya expect for free?

I’ll get back in gear with an aviation-related post early next week.

In the meantime, one of the more interesting stories to have emerged from Russia over the last month was the mid-December announcement that the Moscow city government has given the go ahead for the construction of the world’s largest building: a mega-structure known as “Crystal Island.”

The brainchild (or hellspawn, you pick) of the London-based architectural firm Foster + Partners, Crystal Island will enclose nearly 27 million square feet of space within a 1,500 ft. tall multi-use structure that will feature 900 apartments, 3,000 hotel rooms, an international school for 500 students, cinemas, a theater, a sports complex, and more. A 16,500-space underground parking lot is intended to accommodate visitors.

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[This is the final part of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. Previous installments: Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Cross-posted from The Russian Front.]

What is to be Done?

For scholars who have themselves been forced to curtail (or forego altogether) archival work owing to a lack of institutional support, the relative decline in research money available to Russian historians may seem inconsequential. It may even occasion a not altogether unjustifiable case of schadenfreude. After all, having long benefited disproportionately from federal largess, scholars of Russia, it stands to reason, have little business whining about declining federal support as governmental attention shifts elsewhere.

Still, while it is certainly true that Russian historians have for many years enjoyed access to funds not available to their colleagues studying, say, Britain, France, or Germany, it is likewise true that Russian historians have not now (nor are they likely anytime in the near future to have) access to the kind of research support typically sponsored by Western European governments. Given how little the Russian state has done to support the work of its own native scholars, it is hard to imagine that it would ever consent to subsidizing research conducted by foreign graduate students and academics. What would happen to American Ph.D. programs in European history if, over the course of the next five years, the governments in Paris and Berlin reduced by one-half the number of Chateaubriand and DAAD fellowships available to U.S. scholars and graduate students needing to work in French and German archives? This may well be the fate awaiting Russian historians.
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[This is the third of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. Previous installments: Part One and Part Two. Cross-posted from The Russian Front.]

Revenge of the Nationalities?

Despite the impressive work being done in the broad subfields of cultural, political, social, and military history, the most important trend to have emerged since 1991 has been the growing interest in the geographic and cultural “peripheries” of both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Recently awakened to the place of non-Russian ethnic groups in the history of the country (thanks to their role in the collapse of the USSR) and increasingly influenced by the methodologies of geographers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and comparative sociologists, erstwhile Russian historians and newly emerging scholars have been at the forefront in developing scholarship relating to ethnicity and nationality within Russia proper and in those regions that Russians today refer to as their “near abroad:” Central Asia and the Caucasus.
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[This is the second of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. For Part One, here. Cross-posted from The Russian Front.]

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
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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 [↩]

[This is the first of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. Cross-posted from The Russian Front.]

A brief history of Russian history, 1945-1991

Although the scholarly study of Russia’s past may be said to have begun as early as the mid-eighteenth century with the publication of Mikhail Lomonosov’s Short Russian Chronicle (1760), Russian history, as an established academic field, is a relative newcomer to the United States.¹ Originating in Slavic language programs created near the turn of the twentieth century first at Harvard (1896) then, later, Berkeley (1901) and Columbia (1915), Russian history did not truly come of age in the United States until well after the Second World War.² After languishing for over half a decade as a woefully under funded and exotic subject principally of interest to the children of immigrants, Slavics rocketed to academic prominence thanks to the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Passed in response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Title VI of the NDEA aimed to address America’s perceived national security needs by providing for the training of international experts, especially those possessing skills in less commonly taught languages viewed critical to the nation’s geopolitical interests. Under the initial terms of the congressional mandate, the federal government funded nineteen “language and area centers” to facilitate the expansion of language instruction and related subjects in higher education. Title VI simultaneously created three other programs: modern foreign language fellowships (today known as Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships); international research and studies; and language institutes. Along with the language and area centers, these programs “formed a comprehensive approach to foreign language and world region education intended to prepare the United States for current and future global challenges.”³ Even though Title VI was international in scope and intentionally designed to promote the study of regions around the globe, owing to the centrality of the USSR to then contemporary American domestic and foreign policy considerations, the study of Russian language, culture, and history benefited greatly from the initial and subsequent reauthorizations of the program. More than any other factor, Title VI was responsible for the rapid development of Russian history in the United States.
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1. George Vernandsky, Russian Historiography: A History. (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978), 3 [↩]
2. For a brief account of these earliest programs, see Horace G. Hunt, “On the History of Slavic Studies in the United States,” Slavic Review 46:2 (1987): 294-301 [↩]
3. A brief history of Title VI programs is available on the home page of the U.S. Department of Education. See, http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/history.html. The number of language and area studies centers (or, National Resource Centers as they are now known) has grown to over 165 today [↩]

[Cross-posted from The Russian Front]

About this time last year, The Journal of the Historical Society published an essay of mine devoted to recent trends in the field of Russian history. Although the article (”Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America”) was commissioned by the Journal’s editor, George Huppert, for the purpose of introducing non-Russian historians and general readers to developments in the field, I believe that many of the issues raised in the piece may be of interest to specialists as well.

Beginning late tomorrow and continuing over the course of the next ten days or so, I will post a series of installments containing the main text of the JHS essay. I welcome TRF readers to comment on the points made in the article or, at least, to think about the developments that the article addresses.

The TRF version of “Scholarship at the Crossroads” does differ from the original in several respects. For example, I have eliminated many of the footnotes appearing in the journal article by providing direct links to works mentioned in the text. In other cases I have updated (or added) information to reflect more recent events.

[Note: The definitive version of this essay is located at: www.blackwell-synergy.com. To access it, click here.]

As far as decades go, the 1970s were a pretty miserable time for the United States. From the country’s humiliating exit from Viet Nam through the Watergate scandal and OPEC embargo, to stagflation, economic “malaise,” disco, leisure suits, and the Iranian hostage crisis, the years between 1970 and 1979 were, on the whole, rather depressing. Even America’s national pastime suffered embarassment and disgrace.

Given the zeitgeist of the seventies, it’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous decade coincided with the golden age of the disaster film. Movies about the masses facing impending doom ruled at the box office. Just a quick survey of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) turns up more than two dozen such films from award-winning box-office successes like Earthquake (1974), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974), to less well-known yarns The Cassandra Crossing (1976), City on Fire (1979), made-for TV “thrillers” Heat Wave! (1974), The Day the Earth Moved (1974), Flood! (1976), and one infamous “B-movie” flop.

Among the many disaster films that graced the silver screen, movies about airplanes were particularly prominent. Much of the reason had to with the immense success of the decade’s first smash hit, Airport (1970) which pulled in a then whopping $45 million in receipts. Airport’s success led to a string of lesser sequels: Airport 1975, Airport ‘77, and the abysmal The Concorde: Airport 1979. By decade’s end, airplane disaster flicks had become so familiar that they invited parody in the smash 1980 spoof Airplane!

Ironically, just as Hollywood studios began to subject airplane disaster films to ridicule, Soviet film makers took their first stab at the sub-genre. The fruit of their labor was Air Crew (Экипаж) — a 1979 Mosfil’m production released the following year.

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It took quite a bit longer and quite a bit more work than we had originally expected, but I am pleased to report that the e-book version of Dictatorship of the Air. The e-version appears this month as a new title in the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book project.

The DotA e-book is more than just a scanned version of the “book book.” ACLS selected DotA for inclusion as the first Russian history title in its special collection of XML books. These electronically tagged texts contain tools, functions, and capabilities, that (among other things) make make them fully searchable and linked to external internet resources.

Better yet, the ACLS edition contains a host of new stuff including nearly two-dozen additional photographs, full-color posters, digitized archival materials, and never before translated poems and short stories. It also comes with an extra chapter (on pre-WWII Soviet aviation films) that’s accompanied by half a dozen rare video clips.

So, how do you get yours?

ACLS XML titles are not for sale. But if you’re affiliated with one of the nearly 600 individual universities and consortia that subscribe to ACLS Humanities E-Book, you can access it for free through your institution’s library. Just click here.

ScP

Earlier this week the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Research Library announced the expansion of Stalinka, its on-line gallery of pictures and artifacts depicting Josef Stalin.

The searchable collection currently contains over 500 images of the Soviet dictator in photographs, posters, painting, cartoons, sculpture, and the applied arts. Each image is accompanied by a (sometimes very) brief description.

It’s a resource well worth visiting.

ScP

Like most institutions associated with academia, the academic conference is a curious thing. It’s a combination of educational seminar, professional retreat, class reunion, and subsidized junket. It’s also an integral (and unavoidable) part of being professional scholar.

I attended my first conference as an undergraduate in the spring of 1988. It was a meeting held by a regional affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Since the early 1990s I’ve averaged at least one a year. Typically I present at the AAASS national gathering, but I’ve been to others, too: AATSEEL, SAH, AHA — as well as the occasional thematic conference dedicated to aviation or some aspect of Russian culture or history.

Regardless of the specific association or venue, scholarly conferences typically share a common structure and rituals: dozens of individual panels spread out over three or four days interspersed with official side trips to sites of (professional) interest; informal evening gatherings; the requisite banquet/keynote/awards ceremony and, of course, a book display. They also come with a common cast of characters: earnest young graduate students learning the ropes; arrogant Young Turks trying to “change the dominant paradigm,” jaded senior scholars looking forward to retirement; and workaday faculty enjoying their lone opportunity to escape from their teaching (only!) institutions — plus a slew of recent (and soon-to-be) Ph.D.s willing to sell their souls for their first tenure-track jobs.

After you’ve been around for a while and attended a handful or so, it becomes pretty obvious that if you’ve been to one academic conference, you’ve been to them all. You always know what to expect, until you encounter the unexpected.

I did just that this past weekend.
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As is true of other historical subjects which focus on the material products of human ingenuity, the history of aviation is nearly always written with an eye toward achievements understood to have defined (or best represented) a particular period or era. No art historian, for example, would consider a survey of Western art complete without describing the significance and influence of David’s Oath of the Horatii or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Likewise, scholars of flight recognize certain specific works that have most profoundly influenced their field of study. In aviation history these “works” are, of course, airplanes. From the Wright Flyer and the Blériot XI which, respectively, gave birth to the airplane age and shaped the subsequent design of aircraft, to more contemporary creations such as the Boeing 747 that transformed international civilian aviation and the F-15 which altered the trajectory of military air power, there are certain airplanes that can be considered “canonical.” These are the aeronautical equivalents of the art world’s Mona Lisa or architecture’s Parthenon.

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.
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A: The Wright brothers, of course.

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.
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By the early 1960s, Soviet citizens could boast that their country not only possessed the world’s largest transport plane, the Tupolev Tu-114, but that the state airline company Aeroflot also operated the world’s longest non-stop passenger run with its service between Havana, Cuba and Moscow.

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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On Tuesday the Russian Federation’s eighth International Aviation and Space Salon (widely known by its Russian acronym MAKS) opened to great fanfare in the city of Zhukovsky outside Moscow. Held bi-annually since 1993, the Salon has become one of the world’s most important aerospace gatherings. According to state organizers this year’s celebration, MAKS-2007, is the largest in history. 583 Russian companies and 243 foreign firms representing 110 countries are taking part. Before the closing ceremonies on Sunday, the Salon is expected to attract in excess of 650,000 visitors who will be treated to typical air show fare including exhibition halls and displays, simulators, and numerous acrobatic demonstrations headlined by the “Russian Knights” flying team.

Despite its recent origins (the first Salon was held in 1992), MAKS is steeped in history. As President Vladimir Putin proudly noted in his welcoming address, MAKS “continues the longstanding tradition of aviation parades and air show holidays that has always existed in Russia.” His statement was no boast. Tsarist Russia opened its first “International Week of Aviation” in April 1910, just three months after Los Angeles-area aviation patrons hosted the first such meet in the United States. Dozens more events were held in Russia during the years leading up to 1917. In the Soviet period, public air shows, exhibitions, and spectacles were commonplace as Communist Party leaders exploited aviation to generate public faith in (and foreign fear of) their country’s military might.
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As I alluded in a post several weeks back, one of the reasons that things have been a bit slow here at DotA as of late is that I’ve been busy at work developing a new web site/blog.

I am happy to announce that last night the site went “live.”

It’s called The Russian Front. In addition to offering visitors commentary and articles written by professional historians, The Russian Front is intended to serve as a resource depot for documents, teaching materials, original translations, and the like relating to Russian military and diplomatic history.

Right now you’ll find a word of welcome and a few never-before available translations of important Soviet documents. We’ll have much more in the days and weeks to come as new resources are stockpiled and as my fellow “frontoviki” being adding articles of their own.

If you’re interested in military history, I hope you’ll consider making The Russian Front a regular part of your Internet travels. It promises to be informative, useful, and, we hope, entertaining. At the very least, I guarantee that you’ll find your experiences there far more rewarding than these guys did.

I always find it most difficult for me to stay abreast of current developments during the dogs days of summer. This year is no exception. Fortunately, the folks at Aviation Week and Space Technology are on the ball. They’ve just published a very good article concerning the current state of Russia’s commercial airline industry. According to author Alexey Komarov:

Effectively, the industry is entering a third phase in its post-Soviet existence. At first, the issue was merely staying afloat; then the focus turned to serving the large domestic market and shoring up the sector’s financial wherewithal. Now, airlines and manufacturers have ambitions beyond the confines of Russia and its immediate neighbors.

For the rest of the run-down on recent developments, click here.

[Note: For previous posts in this series, click here: 1 2 3 4 5]

[ My apologies for the long delay in posting the last segment of my series on the VVS Museum. After uploading Part Five, I took a week off to visit family and friends. Since then I've been hard at work with some colleagues developing what we think is going to be an exciting new web resource. I'll have more to say about that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here at last is my last word on The Russian Air Force Museum at Monino.]

As I first mentioned in the second part of this series, two of the displays housed at the VVS Museum are currently closed to visitors. The Museum’s hangar containing “Unique Flying Apparatuses” is unavailable while repairs are being undertaken to its roof. It is expected to re-open early this fall. Meanwhile, the exhibition devoted to the history of Russian aviation has been closed since a fire gutted much of the Museum’s main building in 2005.

Despite the fact that you cannot currently view these displays, we’ll conclude our field guide with a description of what you can expect to see once these parts of the Museum re-open.

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[Note: For previous posts in this series, click here: 1 2 3 4]

[Alas, all good things must come to an end. Since posting Part IV of my series on the Russian Air Force Museum at Monino, I have returned home from Moscow. My nearly month-and-a-half long stay was, by any measure, a success. I gathered a great deal of material on my next long-term research project, caught up with old friends, made some new ones, and had a great time.

I’ll be spending the upcoming months reading and writing about the materials I gathered in the archives. In the meantime, however, I want to wrap up the “field guide” to the Monino museum that I began at the end of last month. In this, the penultimate post in the series, we take a look at the Soviet Union’s first jet fighters as well as some really big airplanes.]

Directly across from the Lavochkin group and extending along the entire opposite side of the walkway is a long line of planes produced by the Mikoyan-Gurevich OKB
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[Note: For previous posts in this series, click here: 1 2 3]

Extending the length of the other side of long walkway, directly opposite the aircraft of the Great Patriotic War are more than one dozen craft representing the Sukhoi OKB.

Aircraft of the Sukhoi OKB

For whatever reason, the Sukhoi OKB collection is “book ended” by two aircraft that did not emerge from the design bureau’s drawing boards. However, as neither can possibly escape notice, both are worth mentioning.
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[Note: For previous posts in this series, click here: 1 2]

Getting Down to Business: The Aircraft Collection

The Museum’s outdoor aircraft collection is divided into eight different sections. One of these is devoted to helicopters. Of the remaining seven, two consist of groups devoted to “Military-Transport Aircraft” and “Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War.” The rest are arranged in accordance with the experimental design bureaus (опытнyе конструкторскyе бюро, opytnye konstruktorskye burio, or OKBs) from which the planes originated.

As you enter the main gate to the outdoor collection, the first group of aircraft that you encounter (on your right) are those representing the Tupolev OKB.
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[Note: For the previous post in this series, click here: 1]

Getting In:

According to the official website, the VVS Museum is open:

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday from 9:30 am until 5:00 pm with a 45 minute break from 1:30-2:15 [Currently, the Museum seems not to be observing the scheduled break on these days]

Saturday the Museum is open from 9:00 am until 2:00 pm

The Museum is closed on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Technically, foreign visitors are required to call ahead to notify the administration of their desire to visit. I did not. As a result, the woman sitting at the registration desk gave me a stern glance. She then called her superior. He subsequently allowed me in without any trouble.

Odds are you’ll get in without the phone call. Given the Museum’s desperate need for cash (more about that in a moment), they’d be foolish to turn away any visitors willing to pay the entrance fee. Still, if you want to do everything by the book, here’s the relevant contact information:
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[I’ve been hard at work in archives and libraries over the course of the last two weeks. Although I’ve manage to accomplish a great deal on my multiple research projects, I have been less than assiduous in issuing dispatches from Moscow. In an effort to rectify my delinquency, I’m going to treat Avia-Corner visitors to something that’s been in short supply around here lately: honest-to-goodness Russian aviation-related content.]

Specifically, I am going to provide detailed information relating to the Russian Federation’s most important aviation museum: the Central Museum of the Military Air Forces (Центральный музей военно-воздушных сил or, transliterated, Tsentral’nyi muzei voenno-vozdushnykh sil). If you’re a Russian aviation enthusiast, odds are you already know that the VVS Museum is home to the world’s largest collection of Russian military aircraft and that it is, for all intent and purposes, the Russian Federation’s equivalent of the United States Air Force Museum located at the Wright-Patterson Airbase in Dayton, OH.

However, unless you read Russian you may not know much more than that. Accurate and detailed information regarding the Russian Air Force Museum, its history, contents, and operations is rather hard to come by for English-only speakers. The VVS Museum’s official web site contains quite a bit of useful material, but all of it is in Russian. Moreover, it is dated. (The website appears not to have been revised since it went on line in 2001.) In a similar fashion, the smattering of unofficial personal websites that turn up when one Googles “Monino Russian aviation museum” aren’t much more helpful. All contain pictures of planes. Few say much about the Museum itself. Nearly all are grossly out of date (some by more than a decade).

I took the day off from researching yesterday to travel to the VVS Museum. It is located in the Moscow suburb of Monino (about 25 miles due east of the capital). What follows in this and one (if not two) subsequent post(s) is an effort to provide non-Russian speakers with an idea of what it’s like to visit the Museum. The posts are part travelogue, part informational service, part commentary. My purpose is to put together an up-to-date “field guide” that will acquaint non-Russian speaking aviation enthusiasts with what is, by any measure, one of the world’s greatest collections of military aircraft.

If you are considering visiting the Russian Air Force Museum, I hope that what follows will help prepare you for your trip. If you do not have the opportunity to travel there, consider this a “virtual tour” of sorts.
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One of the things that I most enjoy about researching with old periodicals are those occasions when I stumble upon some otherwise long-forgotten article that tells you as much about the present as the past. I found one yesterday afternoon while thumbing through regional newspapers at the Russian State Library branch located in Khimki. The article appeared on the front page of the 15 March 1964 issue of Stalingradskaia pravda [Stalingrad Pravda] under the title “Климат и его современные изменения.” (or, “The Climate and Its Contemporary Changes.”)

As far as the current public debate on global warming is concerned, I am a devout agnostic.
Still, I couldn’t help but smile as I read through the Khrushchev-era piece. Here’s a full (if hastily composed) translation of the article:
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Of all the major construction projects that graced the decade of the Triumph of Soviet Socialism none, arguably, was a greater success than the Moscow Metropolitan named for Lenin. True, the project was a mass of confusion that fell behind schedule and went over budget while squandering natural resources and human lives, but what else would one expect from the Stalinist thirties? Unlike the Palace of Soviets, the Metro was actually built; unlike the White Sea-Baltic Canal; the Metro actually served a useful purpose; unlike the Dneprostroi Dam…well, you get the idea.

The opening of the Metro’s first line in 1935 was celebrated by state propagandists as a major achievement of Soviet socialism. To a considerable extent, it was. The Metro introduced a new modern form of transportation to Russia, it facilitated the movement of people around the rapidly expanding capital, and it helped bring about Moscow’s transformation from a sprawling and confused nineteenth-century village into a sprawling and confused urban metropolis.

When first unveiled, the Metro’s earliest stations (those constructed under the capital’s central districts) must have been stunning. Decorated with statures, bas-reliefs, and mosaics covering all the usual themes (the unity of workers and peasants, the vigilance of Red Army soldiers, the triumphs of state planning, the heroism of Party leaders, etc.) they functioned as propagandistic set-pieces that advertised the Party’s power while providing citizens with a constant display of iconic Soviet forms. (My favorites, of course, are the ones found in Mayakovsky station which are given over almost entirely to the exploits of aviators).

The well-ordered and rational Metro was a testament to the Soviet leaders’ faith in the transformative power of technology. One contemporary writer went so far as to proclaim the Metro’s subterranean structure to be a new “System of Copernicus:” the hub around which the capital of emerging Soviet civilization (and, in time, the world) would gravitate.

Today, most of the Metro’s Stalinist splendor has been worn away by decades of use as every year the hoards of steaming humanity that shamble their way through the underground grow larger. Although late at night (and throughout the day in the outlying regions of the city), the Metro is still the least inconvenient way to move about the capital, during the morning and evening rush hours when traffic is high, the experience can be less than pleasant.

Efforts are underway to improve the Metro, but it is an expensive and difficult task. New lines are being extended into under-served neighborhoods, new modern trains and passenger cars have been added (though they’re still relatively few), and alternative forms of transportation (such as monorails) are being used to form a second transportation “ring” around the city center. Whether or not these steps will be sufficient to ease the burden on the strained system is anybody’s guess.

In the meantime, for an amazing site containing panoramic and other photos of the Metro’s stations go HERE.

[From a meteorological standpoint, my arrival in Moscow last Friday came at just the right time. I managed to escape entirely an unusual spring heat-wave during which temperatures soared into the mid and upper 80s. Since then, the weather has been nothing short of marvelous (highs in the low to mid-70s, sunny, light breeze). After enjoying a long weekend catching up with old friends, I spent the better part of my first week re-orienting myself and setting up a schedule to begin work in archives and libraries. I’ve only now had a chance to complete my first post from Russia. As with future posts to come, this one has been tagged with the descriptor “Moscow Dispatches.”]

As most researchers who have spent time here would probably acknowledge, conducting archival work in Moscow is not a particularly simple task. Once you’ve done it a couple of times, it becomes easier (of course), but even experienced folk encounter routine Pains In The Ass (PITAs) that just can’t be avoided. Some are major, some are minor. The minor ones you shrug off as the quaint products of a different cultural milieu. The major ones, though, can drive you absolutely nuts. Since you can’t change them, the best thing to do is just embrace the suck.

Arguably the single most frustrating PITA one encounters while living and working in Russia is dealing with the bureaucracy. Russian bureaucracy is immense, it is impenetrable, and it is often malevolent. Like street mimes and hippies, it is best avoided.

The problem is, you can’t avoid it. It’s everywhere.

One of the by-products of Russia’s bloated bureaucratic organs is the centrality of official papers (бумаги) to one’s daily routine. It is impossible to function in this country without “papers.” Papers come in different shapes and sizes. [The most vital one is the passport.] There is nothing important that you can do without papers. You can (and at some point you will) be randomly stopped on the street by a cop and asked to produce your papers. If they are in order, move along. If you’re missing a requisite stamp or, God forbid, you don’t have them on you, you are at the mercy of the officer. He can send you to jail. (Although you’re more likely to simply pay a “fine.”) [Note: the present going rate appears to be approx. 500 rubles or $20]. Losing one’s papers or having them stolen (as happened to the wife of my best friend Aleksandr this past week) is a 10.0 magnitude PITA (on the base-10 “Sphincter Scale”).

Given the centrality of papers to everyday life in this country, Russians of all shapes and sizes are fixated by them. They understand that in Russian culture “papers” possess something akin to supernatural and miraculous powers. Like the bewitched charms or the Magic Keys employed by folkloric Heroes, papers can ward off danger or provide access to regions otherwise off-limits to ordinary mortals.
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Twenty years ago Monday, a nineteen-year-old West German named Mathias Rust shocked the world by landing a rented Cessna 172B near Moscow’s Red Square following a six-hour flight from Helsinki.

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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The second installment of the monthly blog run-down Military History Carnival has turned up a recent and relevant aviation-related post from the collaborative East Asian history blog Frog in a Well. In it, Alan Baumler ponders the question, “How air-minded was China?” and offers some background information concerning the role of airplanes and air power in Chiang Kai-shek’s vision of a new China.

It turns out that the Nationalist leader (and at least one of his subordinates) was “obsessed” with airplanes and viewed the development of Chinese aviation as a means for transforming his countrymen and unifying the nation. Baumler speculates that Chiang’s air-minded interests mirrored the widespread European fascination with flight in the inter-War period, particularly in 1930s Nazi Germany.

Perhaps. It seems to me though that it isn’t necessary to travel that far West in search of precedents to Chiang’s aerial obsession. In fact, it may be possible to identify the origins of Chiang’s fascination with flight without even leaving China.
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In yesterday’s issue of Kommersant, Sergei Minaev, a regular contributor to the newspaper’s weekly analytical supplement Власть (Vlast’), published a noteworthy piece on the propensity of Russian citizens and statesmen to measure what happens in their country by the yardstick of foreign standards. Titled, “Half a Century in Pursuit,” the article is a brief history of Soviet-era efforts to “catch and surpass” Western rivals in everything from economic production to Olympic medals. Minaev argues that it was only during the tenure of First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) that rhetoric concerning the need to best the West came to focus increasingly on beating the United States. He concludes his article by noting that, “For post-Soviet Russia’s citizens and politicians, the legacy of the Khrushchev period has been a habit of both appropriately and inappropriately comparing Russia with America.”

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.

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In the clearest sign yet that the concept of irony is often wasted on state officials, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today rebuked foreign governments that attempt to re-write history in order to serve contemporary political ends.

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.
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In light of the “war scare” that gripped a certain small corner of the Internet earlier this month, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pass along news from Moscow about plans to construct a new museum devoted to the Cold War. The most interesting aspect of the proposed project is its location: inside a former military command bunker 200 feet beneath the city.

The nearly 11,000-sq. foot bunker is part of a vast underground complex that was built during the mid-1950s. All totaled, there are more than 75,000 sq feet (7,000 sq. meters) of almost 300 rooms, corridors, galleries, and tunnels that housed a community of 2,500 military and civilian specialists from the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Communications, KGB technicians, and the Air Defense Forces. The complex was designed to sustain upwards of 3,000 people for up to three months in the event of an American nuclear strike.

In the decades that surrounded the collapse of the USSR, the complex fell into a state of complete disrepair. Late last year it was auctioned off to the private company “Novik-Servis” (Новик-сервис). The company has plans to transform the bunker into a multi-use facility that will include a Cold War Museum, nightclub, restaurant, and spa.

Currently, group tours of the dilapidated underground tunnels are available. For information about arranging a visit and for more on the construction and history of the bunker (including contemporary and historic photographs), click here (по-русски) or here (for the less complete English version of the site).

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Миру мир! — To all the world, peace!

The threat has passed! Peace has been restored!

Awakened to the impending doom of total war, the saber-rattler in Melbourne has stepped back from the precipice! Yielding to the unified voice of those millions who desire Internet harmony, Mr. Holman has turned his sword-like challenge into a ploughshare of cooperative and solicitous thoughts!

We extend fraternal greetings to Mr. Holman for his wise and beneficent decision! We rejoice in our return to the collective labor of constructing an air-minded blogosphere!

May children know only happiness and joy!

May clouds of war never darken the horizon!

May there always be sunshine!

Though we remain ever vigilant!

The wolf has cast aside his sheep’s clothing!

Without warning, without a formal declaration, Brett Holman, the autocrat of Australian airmindness, has perpetrated an act of stunning aural aggression! He has revealed his true bellicose nature!

The toady of Trenchard has responded to my peace-loving post of the Handsome Family’s “Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear” with an unwarranted and premeditated provocation! In a shameless surprise assault launched from his South Pacific lair, he has attempted to overwhelm my pop-cultural defenses by linking to three aviation-related music videos on his blog! With cunning and duplicity the salivating cur has brazenly challenged me to a YouTube duel!

Posting the Lucksmiths was a clever and unexpected ploy! And the ethereal (though highly tangential) Lisa Gerrard almost lulled me into complacency! But the lickspittle Holman erred grievously! He invited the People’s scorn and wrath by unleashing the gaseous OMD! How quickly the sycophants of 80s synth-pop forget! The Avia-Corner is alert to such tactics and prepared to do battle!

War has commenced!
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Just kidding. April Fools!

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.
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The Times is running a short article today on this weekend’s announcement out of Beijing that the Chinese government is committed to investing upwards of $7 billion to develop a 150-seat commercial jet capable of rivaling those sold by Boeing and Airbus. As the piece notes, the news is particularly vexing for the beleaguered Airbus company which is building an assembly plant in China in order to position itself better in that country.

It’s far too early to tell whether or not the Chinese will succeed in the goal of overtaking their Western competitors. Either way, coupled with their on-going efforts to gain a foothold in the regional air market with the upcoming launch of the ARJ21 (and the concurrent development of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 in Russia) the announcement underscores the significance attached by the communist government to the aerospace industry.

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[Note: On 4/2/07 I removed the Cyrillic characters "Аэро-стихи" from the title above after discovering that they made it impossible to locate or link to the text of the post using the built-in site search engine. You should now have access to the translation and original text.]

From the very beginning of their Campaign to Build the Red Air Fleet in the spring of 1923, Bolshevik Party officials oversaw the creation of propagandistic media aimed at inspiring citizens to join the voluntary society “Friends of the Air Fleet” (ODVF) and to contribute money toward the construction of airplanes. Posters, of course, played an important part of the state’s campaign but so, too, did written works including short stories, rhymes, and poems.

Most of the literary texts created to support ODVF have long since been forgotten, even by Russians. Very few (if any!) have been published in English translation. Nevertheless, these items are important for what they reveal about Soviet leaders’ intent and visions regarding the USSR’s emerging aviation culture.

The poem “Aero-verses” is a characteristic example. It was first published in 1925 by the short-lived journal Give Us Motors. High art it ain’t. But it reflects well two of the principal themes associated with ODVF’s initial campaign: that citizens should replace their faith in God with faith in technology, and that citizens’ should recognize as their duty participation in building aviation.

Here’s the English translation, followed by the Russian original:
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Those who haven’t seen it yet may want to pick up a copy of the latest (May 2007) issue of Aviation History. The magazine’s cover story, “Return to the Macon,” is devoted the recent underwater expedition that explored the offshore wreckage of the dirigible USS Macon, the largest aircraft ever built by the United States. [I blogged about the USS Macon and the expedition here.]

The issue also contains a review of Dictatorship of the Air written by Walter J. Boyne, former Director of the National Air & Space Museum and recent inductee to the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

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One of the disadvantages to having your head buried in books all day long is that you sometimes miss out on those few occasions when there’s something (other than South Park) that’s really worth watching on the tube. Tonight was almost one of those occasions.

Fortunately, I recovered just in time this evening to tune in to the History Channel’s “Dogfights” marathon.

In the event you haven’t seen the show (which debuted this past November), “Dogfights” uses computer animation, interviews, and archival footage to recreate famous air battles from the Great War through the present. Although some of the episodes seem to stretch their material to make it to the one-hour mark, they have been uniformly engaging, educational, and immensely entertaining.

“Dogfights” regularly airs Fridays at 10 EST /9 CST. It’s well worth watching.

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For eight days in late August 1909, the city of Reims, France played host to Le Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne one of the first and most successful air shows of the new age of flight. The Reims Air Show riveted European attention on the airplane, awakened the public to the reality of flight, and fired the imagination of artists, intellectuals, poets, and politicians. Fewer than one dozen pilots (all but two of them French) took part in the meet. Still, the air meet at Reims attracted more than 500,000 visitors and cemented the airplane’s function as both an object of inspiration and a source of public spectacle.

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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A little under two weeks ago I published an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor about the continuing practice of dedovshchina within the ranks of Russian army. (For those unfamiliar with the term, dedovshchina refers to the longstanding practice in which senior non-commissioned soldiers “initiate” the first-year conscripts under their command through physical punishment and beatings that often cross the line into outright torture.)

Today, the Moscow Times is running a related story concerning soldiers who have alleged that they were forced into prostitution by senior officers. While it remains to be seen if the soldiers’ accounts are accurate, this is hardly the first time that allegations of this nature have surfaced.

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Many thanks to my friends and colleagues, Dr. Alexander Prokhorov of the College of William and Mary and Dr. Yvonne Howell of the University of Richmond who were gracious hosts late this past week for events on their campuses. I was delighted to have an opportunity to screen and discuss a pair of less well known but important films from the golden age of the 1930s for two engaged and engaging audiences. In short, I had a terrific time and hope that those who came out for the talks did as well. Thanks again!

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For those who haven’t yet seen it, Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker article on Putin’s Russia is a must-read.

Go here.

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Although the construction of over-sized planes has been a defining element of Russian aviation culture from the dawn of the air age (Il’ya Muromets) to the present day (Antonov An-225), Russia, of course, is hardly the only nation to have designed and built really big aircraft. The U.S. has had its fair share, too. (The Convair B-36 “Peacemaker” and one-of-a-kind Spruce Goose immediately spring to mind.)

Now, according to a report in this morning’s New York Times, two really big pieces of American aviation history are up for sale.

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…or, as the fellows from Monty Python would say, “Now for something completely different…”

“Woman Survives Being Locked Up in Barrel and Thrown Into Sea by Jealous Husband”

Fortunately it has a happy ending.

I think.

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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!

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Many thanks to Brett Holman at Airminded who recently (and unknowingly) alerted me to LibraryThing, an on-line service that makes cataloging one’s book collection a very simple and painless process.

Just set up a free account, start inputting authors or titles, and you’re on your way. The site draws upon the Library of Congress collection, national Amazon sites, and more than sixty world libraries, to help you identify the specific edition(s) that you own. Once books have been entered into your LibraryThing collection they can be “tagged” by subject area, sorted, and searched.

The site is also a great place to get or give suggestions on what to read next as it enables you to view the contents of other members’ collections and exchange ideas through dedicated groups set-up by other library thingers

You’re allowed to have up to 200 books in your free account. Join as a paid member and you can catalog an unlimited number of books for a small $10 annual fee (Even better is the $25 lifetime membership).

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Over in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at my alma mater, the University of Kansas, faculty and students are hard at work on an interesting project: the construction of the Meridian, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that will use ground-penetrating radar waves to measure the thickness and conditions of Antarctica’s ice sheets.

Given the harsh climate in which the vehicle will operate, the development of the Meridian poses a number of challenges, not the least of which are the needs to create anti-icing concepts to keep the aircraft aloft and temperature-control systems for shielding its electronic systems. In the meantime, the project is providing an ideal laboratory for preparing students to work with technologies that will increasingly define aviation in the twenty-first century.

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In a recent entry cross-posted at HNN’s Revise and Dissent and his own blog Airminded, Brett Holman ruminates on the apparent differences that existed in the manner in which American and British audiences responded to the advent of the airplane age. Inspired by his reading of Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel, which noted that American aviation culture was characterized by an overriding faith in the benefits that would result from the coming air age, Holman contrasts the American “gospel of flight” with the far less optimistic views that he’s seen expressed in the writings of then contemporary British citizens.

I don’t doubt the accuracy of Brett’s assessment regarding British public opinion and I think he’s on the right track in attempting to assess the nature of the British experience by drawing comparisons and contrasts with other nations’ responses. Even so, while the optimism/pessimism dichotomy may be a good way of beginning discussion and suggesting further avenues of research, beyond that, I’m not certain that it helps us better understand the origins or characteristics of, say, American or British aviation culture.
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Last week the “Interstate Aviation Committee” (IAC) released its final report on the 3 July incident in Irkutsk in which an Airbus A310 operated by S7 (formerly, Siberian Airlines) slid off a wet runway while landing, clipped several building, and burst into flames, killing more than 120 people.

According to the IAC the crash of SibirAir flight 778 was caused by “pilot error.”
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Although the academic field of Russian history does not lack for talented and inventive scholars, as a general rule, there aren’t too many professional historians who can produce a book that combines innovative research with an engaging and entertaining narrative.

One of the few exceptions to the rule is Catherine Merridale, Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary University of London.

I’ve just finished reading Merridale’s most recent book, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 which recounts the experiences and emotions of front line soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. As with her earlier (2000) study, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, Ivan’s War benefits from Merridale’s consummate skill as an oral historian and her enviable ability to produce gripping prose. It is the kind of book that you just can’t put down and that you really wish you had written yourself.

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I wrapped up a whirlwind trip to the United States Military Academy at West Point yesterday. I had been looking forward to the visit for a couple of months. Given what I knew about the quality of its cadets and curriculum, I had pretty high expectations going in. I left even more impressed. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to participate in MAJ John Hodgson’s course on Europe in Transition and Revolution. The class discussion on Napoleon’s impact on European society and culture was lively, well-informed, and thoughtful, in short: everything that an instructor could hope for:

Thanks to Dr. Larry Mansour (Dept. of Foreign Languages) and MAJ John Nawoichyk (Dept. of Military Instruction) for inviting me out and organizing the visit. And thanks to everyone who found time in their busy schedules to come to my talk and the film screening.

Above all, thanks to the cadets for their dedication and service to the country.

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Over at the American Thinker, editor Thomas Lifeson has just posted another one of his characteristically well-informed and thought-provoking reports on the troubles roiling Airbus. In “Airbus Must Thread a Needle,” Thomas lays out the daunting challenges that the company will have to overcome if it is to remain a viable competitor against Boeing in the production of advanced airliners.

In the course of his article, he also has a few things to say about this week’s news that Aeroflot missed a key deadline in its interim agreement with Boeing for the purchase of 22 of the American firm’s 787 Dreamliners. As a result of the Russian government’s failure to approve formally the $3 billion deal by November 1st, Aeroflot has lost out on a discount of some $10-15 million on each of the planes. Thomas speculates that the decision may be a gambit aimed at further strengthening the Kremlin’s hand in its efforts to secure a significant role in the development of the Airbus A350 XWB (Extra-Wide Body) a potential rival to the Boeing 787. (A final announcement from Airbus on the A350 XWB project is expected this month).

Whatever the future holds for Moscow’s Airbus connection, the missed deadline with Boeing is bad news for those concerned about Russian air safety. At the earliest, the 787s originally contracted for 2010-2012, now will not arrive in Russian until 2014. For some passengers facing the prospect of flying on aging Aeroflot aircraft, those two additional years may well mean “Eternity.”

In other news, this past week the Moscow Prosecutor-General’s Office arrested Alexander Surikov, general director of the aircraft parts supply company SB-120 Sheremeyetvo. (SB-120 has a warehouse at the Moscow airport, but is not affiliated with the airport authority itself.) Surikov was taken into custody along with Viktor Gamayunov, the company’s Chief Engineer. The two have been charged with fraud, document forgery, and violation of airline safety rules for supplying faulty aircraft parts and for conspiring to sell parts with expired service lifetimes. The company had come under scrutiny during investigations into the sorry state of Russian’s civilian aviation programs begun in the aftermath of the Tu-154 and A-310 crashes earlier this year.

If Thomas Lifeson’s speculations regarding the Kremlin’s motives for missing the deadline on the Boeing agreement are correct, they would suggest Russian officials’ willingness to sacrifice safety on the alter of perceived state interests. This would be a callous and cynical approach to rebuilding the country’s aviation program but one, unfortunately, not without historical precedent…

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I just returned yesterday from a trip to Liberty, MO where I delivered at talk on the campus of William Jewell College, one of the country’s finest liberal arts institutions. The students were sharp, their questions informed, and the turn out was great. (Especially given that a new South Park episode aired that night!)

Many thanks to Dr. Thomas Howell, Chair of the Department of History at Jewell, for hosting the event!

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For the last two weeks, H-Russia (a list serv/discussion board catering largely to academics and graduate students) has hosted a lively debate regarding utility of the term “backwardness” in studying and describing the history of Russia. The discussion emerged out of a previous thread devoted to foreign travelers’ accounts of Russia, many of which (like the one penned by the Marquis de Custine in 1839) depicted Russians and Russia in what can only be described as highly unfavorable terms. Contributors to the debate quickly came to focus on the “utility” of backwardness as an analytical tool. Several responded with the predictably post-modern proposition that “backward” is a hierarchical and derogatory “construct” that denigrates Russian “uniqueness” by measuring the country’s accomplishments against an arbitrary yardstick of “development” established by the West. Other seemed to suggest that, at best, backwardness is an unhelpful throwback that neither clarifies or advances understanding about Russia’s history and current place in the world.

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.

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In addition to functioning as a transportation technology, military weapon, and instrument of economic development, the airplane has long served as a source of creative inspiration for artists, writers, and intellectuals. Indeed, from its very invention the airplane became an integral part of modern culture. In the weeks to come, I’ll be adding new posts regarding how flight, at various times and in various places, has influenced artistic expression. While most of these posts will focus on rather “high-brow” examples of the intersection of aviation and the arts, this one does not.
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The Avia-Corner has been on a self-imposed hiatus for the last two weeks while the DotA web site underwent a few upgrades and revisions courtesy Lisa Sabin at E.Webscapes design.

In the interim, we’ve jazzed things up a bit by creating unique headers for each of the site’s various sections. More important, the Avia-Corner now includes a “Recent Posts” column as well as an index function that allows readers to locate material by subject and/or month. There’s also a new search engine if you’re looking for a specific item or term.

Now, back to blogging…

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In the early spring of 2005, a Scottish art collective known as Henry VIII’s Wives launched a new project in homage to one of the twentieth century’s greatest avant-garde works: “Tatlin’s Tower.” Their ongoing project proposes

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.”
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On Wednesday, Aeroflot officials announced their long-delayed and much anticipated decision regarding the purchase of 44 new planes. The verdict? The state-run company will split the difference between the two foreign contestants by ordering 22 each from Boeing and Airbus.

The decision comes as no real surprise, indicating the Russian state’s interest in maintaining good relations with both the American company and the European consortium.

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Yesterday, the European consortium EADS rejected Russian demands for a seat on the company’s board of shareholders. The news comes on the heels of last week’s $1 billion stock purchase that gave Russia’s second largest bank, the state-controlled Vneshtorgbank, a 5% stake in the company that owns Airbus. President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Sergei Prikhodko subsequently indicated that Russia wanted representation on the EADS shareholders’ board and intended to purchase additional stock for the purpose of acquiring a blocking minority.

In a joint statement issued yesterday, EADS co-chairmen Manfred Bischoff and Arnaud Lagardère dismissed the Russian demand as impossible under the terms of the company’s governance agreement, noting that:

“The existing corporate governance rules and structure have proved their efficiency for all shareholders. It would not be in the interest of the company to change corporate governance or enlarge the group of industrial shareholders,”

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Constructed for the U.S. Navy in the mid-1930s for the purpose of undertaking reconnaissance over the open seas, the USS Macon was the largest dirigible in American history. Requiring 6.5 million cubic feet of helium to inflate and weighing 400,000 pound, 785-foot long airship was a flying behemoth. Its interior was sufficiently large to accommodate a crew of 100 and up to five airplanes (which could be launched and retrieved in mid-air through an opening in the bottom of the dirigible’s hangar).

On February 12, 1935, the USS Macon, was lost in a storm off the coast of California. Miraculously, only two of the 83 crew members who were on board perished with the craft. Still, the loss of the dirigible effectively marked the end of the American military’s ill-fated and accident prone experiment with lighter-than-air technology. (Just two years earlier, Macon’s sister ship, the USS Akron, had gone down over the Atlantic, killing 76 crew members.)

On Monday, researchers from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the National Marine Sanctuary Program, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Stanford University, and the University of New Hampshire are planning to revisit the “age of the airship.” They will send a submersible robotic probe to film the wreckage of the USS Macon which now rests nearly 1,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

For more information about the USS Macon and next week’s expedition, head over to the web site of the Monteray Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The web site will have live streaming video of the underwater expedition beginning around 10:00 AM CST on Monday and continuing throughout the week.

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In the spring of 1935, American Staff Sergeant John Cook undertook a “fact finding” tour of the Soviet Union on behalf of the U.S. Army Air Corps to evaluate the condition of the USSR’s civilian airline service. What Cook experienced was, in his own words, “exceedingly unpleasant.” Everywhere he flew he encountered overloaded, uncomfortable, and poorly maintained airplanes, run-down and dirty (though recently built) airports, constant delays, and shocking lapses of safety. The aerial tour led Cook to conclude that what the Soviet Union offered in terms of air travel “cannot compare with even the poorest of American airways.”

Although Sgt. Cook’s experiences may seem strikingly familiar to passengers who flew Aeroflot in the 1980s or early 1990s, the reality, of course, is that flying in Russia today is significantly more comfortable and reliable than in years past. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, Aeroflot, as well as regional carriers like Sibir and Trans Aero, have made progress in improving their passenger service and, more importantly, their safety records. Still, progress is relative. There is a great deal of work that remains to be done before Russian domestic aviation can begin to be considered on par with that in the USA or Western Europe.
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A Tu-154 operated by Iran Airtour crashed on Friday while landing in the northern Iranian city of Mashad. Initial reports indicate that the Russian-built aircraft blew a tire shortly after touching down. A fire, sparked by a wing raking the ground, then engulfed the plane. Twenty-nine of the 148 people on board were killed.

Given the frequency with which Iran’s aging and poorly maintained planes inadvertently return to earth, Friday’s aerial disaster hardly comes as a shock.

Still, the crash of the Tupolev is unwelcome news for Russia’s beleaguered aviation program. On the same day that the Iran Airtour plane went down, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he is charging Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov with the task of improving Russian civilian and military aviation safety. Vladimir Vladimirovich’s (TM) actions come in direct response to a spate of accidents since May that have claimed the lives of 410 people in the airspace over the former Soviet Union (FSU).

Putin’s choice of Defense Minister Ivanov is telling. It is another signal that the Russian President is intent on drawing the country’s aviation programs under still firmer state control.

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During the height of the Cold War the USSR’s military air arm earned the country international renown and the respect of US military officials. The same can hardly be said of the USSR’s domestic aviation service. The state-run airline monopoly, Aeroflot, was widely derided, rather, for its awful service, poorly maintained planes, and dicey safety standards. Things got worse for Russian civilian aviation in the years that followed the USSR’s 1991 break-up. While Aeroflot continued as the Russian Federation’s flagship international carrier, hundreds of new regional operations (the so-called “Babyflots”) emerged to provide internal domestic service to the country’s far flung urban centers. (If anything, their service and safety records made even Aeroflot look good.)

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In the years that surrounded the turn of the 19th century, aeronauts (led above all by the French) toured the European Continent, hosting public displays of their daring for those wishing to observe the new science of ballooning. Of all the balloonists practicing the craft, perhaps none was more well-known than André-Jacques Garnerin. [click here for illustrations]

During the fall of 1803, and again in the spring of 1804, Garnerin, accompanied by his young wife, former student, and fellow aeronaut, Jeanne-Genevieve, organized a series of paid demonstrations of aerial prowess for the inhabitants of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The public spectacles undertaken by the Garnerins in Russia included both unrestricted flights as well as parachute jumps from tethered balloons, (the latter feats having previously earned Garnerin and his wife renown across the Continent). According to contemporary accounts published in the newspaper Московския ведомости [Moscow Register], the Garnerins’ aerial displays were an immensely popular attraction. They contributed greatly to the “aero-mania” that swept Russian high society in the century’s first decade. They also resulted in a significant, though little known, historical “first:” the first balloon flight by a Russian woman.

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[Note: This morning, I published the following op-ed in the "View" section at insidehighered.com If you wish to comment on the piece, head over there and join the fray!]

Digital publishing has been a hot topic for some time, but it’s received a good deal of attention as of late thanks to a series of recent developments. This year’s meeting of the American Association of University Presses, for example, devoted a panel to the subject. Meanwhile, Rice University has just announced plans to launch the first all digital university press. In a slightly different (though related) context, rumors abound that the next generation of Apple’s immensely popular iPod will possess the ability to download, store, and read book content.

Clearly, the movement toward digital content delivery is gaining steam. And, as such, it is not surprising to read that the technology’s more vocal enthusiasts are forecasting nothing short of a revolution in academic research, teaching, reading, writing, and publishing once it becomes ubiquitous.
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In July 1989 historian and Auburn University professor James R. Hansen published an article that quickly became an instant classic for historians of technology and, more specifically, historians of aviation. Titled, “Aviation History in the Wider View” and appearing in the leading scholarly journal Technology and Culture, Hansen’s article served as a much-needed critique of the way in which the history of aviation was practiced in the United States.

According to Hansen, the emphasis placed by very large numbers of amateur writers and aviation buffs on the airplane as an artifact had produced an excessively antiquarian edge in the writing of aviation history in the United States. With only a few notable exceptions, books about aviation history tended to adopt a near sacred reverence for the machine itself in which facts, figures, data, and diagrams dominated historical writing to the exclusion of analysis and interpretation. The result was a plethora of books containing reference information and technical minutiae, but little guidance that might help readers understand the broad and complex roles that machine-powered flight had played in shaping modern culture and society (and vice versa).

In the years that have passed since the publication of Hansen’s article, the subfield of aviation history has grown considerably. A number of major new works have appeared which fulfill quite well Hansen’s call for flight historians to adopt a “wider view.” Although much still remains to be done before the history of flight technology will be as squarely situated in the professional “mainstream” as, say, military, diplomatic, or political history, aviation (and aerospace) history is, today, in much better shape than at any time in the past.

As such, it might now be “safe” to say a few things about the continuing important role played by amateur historians and aviation buffs to the field. At least, that’s what I increasingly came to think this past week as I undertook work on a class that I’ll be teaching in the spring of 2008 (”History of Flight Culture”).

One of the key challenges that I am facing in preparing the class involves the time-consuming process of tracking down the visual records that I will need to enable students to see for themselves the personalities, planes, and events that shaped the “aviation imagination” in the twentieth century. Here, I have found the ubiquitous presence of aviation enthusiasts on the internet to be an overwhelmingly positive and immensely helpful thing.

One case in point is the UK-based website “Those Magnificent Men.” Devoted to the history of European aviation between 1910 and 1914, the site contains a terrific collection of historic images as well as handy information summaries about the planes (and some major early events) that were so crucial to shaping the “dawn of aviation.”

The site’s proprietor, Tom Brearley, is a private pilot, airplane buff, and amateur historian who clearly knows well and enjoys the subject. I’m looking forward to including his site in the list of internet resources that I’ll be recommending students visit next spring.

In the end, I think that James Hansen was absolutely correct in calling for a “wider view” in the study of the aeronautical past that moved beyond the antiquarian tendencies of many aviation enthusiasts. Even so, professional scholars should not overlook the contributions that continue to be made by amateur historians and airplane buffs. Few other subfields can boast of so large a group that so frequently provides helpful resources and handy information.

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If you haven’t stopped by the DotA Poster Gallery lately, you should. I’ve added five new posters (and commentary) to the collection. The new ones appear on page 2 of the gallery.

They’re here!

A few days ago my author’s advance copies of DotA arrived via FedEx from Cambridge University Press. After cracking open the box and peeling away the cellophane, I decided to head out of town to make a few deliveries to friends and family. As I’m still on the road, I’ve decided to postpone my usual weekly post. I’ll be back in a couple of days with a couple of new entries (on the future of publishing, aviation films, and some odds & ends). Check back later for the new stuff.

In the meantime, a quick check this morning of the Cambridge University Press website indicates that the Press now has the book in stock. [Books should be on their way to Amazon and other on-line book retailers very soon.]

So if you’ve been waiting to act, now would be a great time to order your three copies (one for home, one for the office, and one for the car!)

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Contemporary Periodicals
For historians and researchers interested in documenting popular attitudes towards aviation and aeronautics there are few sources more valuable than periodicals. In addition to providing useful “first-hand” narratives of then current events, materials drawn from newspapers, journals, and magazines are critical resources for revealing the issues and attitudes that shaped contemporaries’ views about aviation (and everything else for that matter!). Likewise, one can develop a clearer understanding of what was considered important at the time by tracking the quantity of articles (or the number and length of newspaper columns) devoted to a given topics. Imperial Russian and Soviet-era periodicals proved to be among the most important sources in researching DotA. I utilized contemporary aeronautical journals (like Herald of Aeronautics and Wings) to track developments within the scientific and sporting communities. Coverage appearing in the general press proved crucial to understanding how these developments were described to and perceived by citizens.

Domestic Archives
As I noted last week in the first part of this post, the use of archival sources is one of the chief characteristics that distinguishes “professional” from “popular” history. The materials that were incorporated into DotA came from both American and Russian archives. Although the latter were clearly more important than the former, I was able to glean a great deal of useful information from two US collections in particular.

National Air & Space Museum
The documents housed at the National Air & Space Museum represent a treasure trove for scholars working on aviation-related topics. Although the Air & Space collection is most useful for those focusing on American issues, regardless of one’s national/geographic specialty, the Museum’s library contains immensely useful resources. More important still are the curators and historians who work at NASM. Their collective knowledge of things aeronautical is unsurpassed. Anyone researching the history of aviation should plan to spend some time at Air & Space.

National Archives (Washington, DC)
In addition to providing me with a clearer understanding of America’s own aviation programs, the Records of the Bureau of Aeronautics provided extremely useful contemporary assessments of Imperial and Soviet developments from the perspective of US aviation experts. Meanwhile, correspondence from the Office of Naval Intelligence (America’s leading intelligence agency in the years prior to WWII) and the Defense Intelligence Agency was invaluable for documenting the Soviet Union’s extensive infiltration of American aviation businesses and industry during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Russian Archives
Naturally, the vast majority of archival research for DotA was conducted in the Russian Federation. As very few readers have any need for a detailed description of Russian archival holdings relating to aviation, here I’ll simply provide samples of the more important materials that I uncovered during the course of my research.

Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA): The Russian State Military-Historical Archive is the principal repository for materials relating to the history of the Imperial Russian military. From the standpoint of my own work, the archival records of the General Staff and the Military Ministry’s budget office proved to be quite valuable. In addition to containing memoranda and reports on the tsarist government’s efforts to build a military air fleet, the latter collection contained correspondence that shed light on the relationship between the state and the private airplane manufacturers with which it negotiated contracts for the domestic construction of aircraft.

Russian State Military Archive (RGVA): RGVA houses Soviet military records from the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War (1918-1941). The archive is extremely important as materials contained in the various collections of the Revolutionary Military Committee enabled me to document the origins and development of the Red Air Fleet during the early 1920s. Recently declassified reports contained in the RGVA collection also revealed the numerous manufacturing and production crises besetting the USSR’s aviation industry during the decade preceding WWII.

Russian Archive of the Economy (RGAE): Along with documentation relating to Soviet planning commissions, RGAE provided a wealth of information concerning Communist Party efforts to popularize aviation among the USSR’s citizens. The two most important collections in this regard were the Main Inspectorate of the Civilian Air Fleet (fond 9527) and the “Maxim Gorky Agitational Squadron” (fond 9576) which contained reports and memoranda regarding domestic propaganda (or, “agit”) flights from the late 1920s through the mid 1930s.

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF): Of all the Russian archives that I visited, GARF proved to be the most valuable. This is not surprising given that the archive’s collection contains the records of the USSR’s various “voluntary societies” devoted to aviation: the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet, Dobrolet, Aviakhim, and Osoaviakhim.

As the preceding descriptions are only intended to serve as glimpses of the kinds of materials used in writing DotA, I encourage graduate students and other researchers interested in visiting these archives to contact me for specific information regarding the collections and current working conditions.

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“Inventories”
It is almost impossible for aviation historians and history buffs to find themselves at a loss for something to read. The number of books, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, and illustrated guides devoted to aircraft is impossibly immense. And each year hundreds more articles and books are added to the mountain of existing works. The overwhelming majority of these sources fall into the category of what is considered popular history. Sometimes richly illustrated, well-written, and insightful (and sometimes not), these secondary sources derive their information almost exclusively from other secondary sources. In other words, rather than uncovering new archival evidence, introducing new arguments, or advancing new concepts, they re-package information available elsewhere. Very often, these sources are “inventories,” works that provide “facts & figures” (plus some cool photos) to the exclusion of other considerations. (Ex: a book on the P-38 Lightning or “Fighter Planes of the Pacific”). While such sources definitely have their place, they tend to suffer from at least one serious limitation: lack of historical analysis.

Analytical Works
The number of analytical secondary sources written for popular audiences is much smaller. Generally speaking, these are books written by journalists or professional writers who, while they may have an interest in aviation, are also widely published on other subjects as well. What sets these sources apart from the “aircraft inventories” is that they begin to consider the airplane within a broader historical context, or they advance a novel argument/thesis about aviation. Recently, a number of very good popular analyses have appeared. Near the very top of the list is Stephen Budiansky’s excellent Airpower, a survey of military airpower doctrine from Kitty Hawk through the Second Gulf War. Others examples include Richard Overy’s short work on The Battle of Britain and Lee Kennett’s The First Air War, 1914-1918.

Scholarly works
The final group of secondary sources are those written by professional historians and published by academic presses. In contrast to analytical popular histories, these works undergo a rigorous process of “peer review” before they’re accepted for publication. The manuscripts are sent out to two other professional historians who are experts in the field. These reviewers then check facts, challenge arguments, and offer detailed written assessments for revising, expanding, or otherwise improving the manuscript. To encourage an honest and candid assessment of the manuscript, the peer review process is “blind”. This means that the identity of the reviewers is kept secret from the author. He (or she) receives the evaluations of the manuscript not knowing who wrote them.

[Note: It is not uncommon for a manuscript to undergo not one, but two rounds of review, as the author, reviewers, and editor(s) debate the contents of the reviews and the author's responses to them. The blind peer review process explains, in part, why it takes longer to publish an academic history than it does to publish a "popular" one. This additional layer of "quality control" can add anywhere from 4-8+ months to the publication process.]

Although the number of scholarly works about aviation is nowhere near as large as the number of “inventories” and popular histories, scholarship on aviation and flight has really “taken off” over the course of the last decade. Many of the newer works [including Dictatorship of the Air] are devoted to what I refer to as flight or aviation “culture” (and others call “airmindedness“). Inspired by Joseph Corn’s path-breaking 1982 study, The Winged Gospel (now available in a 2002 reprint) these histories have paid increasing attention to the cultural, social, and political influence that aviation and the airplane have had in shaping the twentieth century.

Particularly noteworthy in this regard has been the contribution of UCLA professor Robert Wohl who is currently at work on the final installment of his three-volume trilogy concerning “Aviation and the Western Imagination.” The first two volumes, A Passion for Wings (1996) and The Spectacle of Flight (2005) have set the standard for historians focusing on Western European and American aviation.

Other leading professional aviation historians include: John D. Anderson, Roger Bilstein, Tom Crouch, Richard Hallion, Peter Jakab, Michael Neufeld, Dom Pisano, and Robert van der Linden.

Last (but certainly not least!), Von Hardesty, writing widely on both the Imperial and Soviet eras, has proven to be Russian aviation’s most prolific historian. In addition to having published numerous articles and essays on military aviation, Reina Pennington is author of Wings, Women, and War, the definitive account of Soviet women aviators in the Second World War. Insightful analysis of the contemporary, post-Soviet scene can be found in the writings of Jake Kipp and Benjamin Lambeth.

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.”

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Welcome to the “Avia-Corner,” the weblog for Dictatorship of the Air!

If you’ve found your way to this part of the web you probably know by now that Dictatorship of the Air (or, DotA) is a forthcoming book about “Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia.” You probably also know that the book is being published by Cambridge University Press an esteemed academic press known to many as the world’s oldest printing and publishing house.

What you may not know is that despite its academic credentials, DotA it is not intended to be a book just for academics. Nor, for that matter, is DotA intended to be just a book. Instead, it is meant to be the beginning of a conversation about the relationship between culture and technology and how this relationship has contributed to the development of the modern world. The “Avia-Corner” weblog is intended to further the discussion begun by DotA .

Although my own posts will tend to focus on the culture of Russia and the technology of aviation, I invite readers (both non-specialists and specialists alike) to share their thoughts about issues relating the blog’s general themes.

Each week, new “article-length” commentaries will be posted in the wee hours of Friday night/Saturday morning, with shorter responses to discussion threads and readers’ remarks appearing as need be. Generally speaking, the content of the longer commentaries will be devoted to a range of subjects reflecting the subject matter of DotA: Russia, History, Technology, Culture (and, of course, Aviation). [The Avia-Corner will also contain an occasional comment or two regarding higher education, teaching, and the profession of history.] Of course, readers’ responses and comments are not only welcomed, but encouraged.

In the meantime, between now and the July 31st release of DotA, the longer commentaries will be aimed at providing readers with background information about the book, its source base (archives, newspapers, secondary sources, films, etc.), and its general subject matter.
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