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.

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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.

As a run-up to the program’s debut, the Military Channel invited a small group of air-minded bloggers to contribute comments and questions to Showdown’s hosts via a telephone roundtable. The half-hour conversation covered a wide range of issues including: WWII pilot training, ground-support operations in Afghanistan, and the rapidly escalating costs of developing 21st-century fighter aircraft. Once the recording of the roundtable has been made available by the folks at the Military Channel, I’ll post a link to it here.

In the meantime, you can look forward to Showdown’s debut this weekend.

UPDATE: To listen to the audio file of the roundtable click the “play” arrow below…

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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:

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.

And there’s more! As the folks at the architecture and design blog Inhabitat note:

[The] building will also incorporate a number of sustainable design features into the overall scheme. The exterior facade will be solar responsive and will include solar panels which, along with wind turbines, will generate electricity for the huge tower. Natural ventilation will be provided thanks to numerous strategically placed large atriums. The internal environment will also have dynamic enclosure panels slotted into the structural framing that will allow daylight to penetrate deep into the heart of the structure; the panels will also be controlled to modify temperature inside the building – closed in winter for extra warmth and opened in summer to allow natural ventilation. Energy management is at the heart of this structure, several on-site renewable and low-carbon energy generation projects are planned.

The project has gotten quite a bit of coverage on-line among news services and bloggers. Although most recognize it as stunning statement of Russia’s hydro-carbon fueled economy, opinion appears divided as to the meaning of the statement. Does Crystal Island speak to Russia’s resurgence as a cultural and political force? It’s self-confident faith in a radiant future? It’s penchant for hubristic excess? All (or none) of the above?

Interestingly, few seem to be aware that Crystal Island is simply the latest (though, admittedly, largest) in a series of Putin-era architectural mega-projects recently completed or still under way. Others include Triumph Palace, the “Moscow-City” business complex, and the Kurkino micro-region. Then again, ambiguously symbolic, large-scale architectural projects are hardly unique to the government of Vladimir Vladimirovich. The Yeltsin administration oversaw the completion of several as well. The most famous of these was the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: a concrete and plastic reproduction of Imperial Russia’s largest church. The original Cathedral was itself obliterated in 1931 to make room for a colossal Stalinist-era architectural project: the never completed Palace of Soviets.

As far as Russia’s architectural legacy is concerned, Crystal Island is certainly news. But it isn’t exactly new.

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.

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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.

I spent Saturday and Sunday in Washington, DC at the national conference of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). I was invited to participate on a panel devoted to “Revisiting Debates on Dictatorship and Technology”. The panel was organized by Dolores Augustine, author of the soon to be released book Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1950-1990 (MIT Press). Although the other two originally scheduled presenters were forced to cancel, the room was full, the audience engaged, and the discussion that followed lively. In short, it was just what one hopes for at these things.

My contribution was titled “Reassessing the History of Soviet Aviation Technology.” The short presentation summarized some of my major findings from DotA. As a backdrop, I argued that current Russian aviation policies reflect assumptions about modernization and state-directed development nearly identical to those that shaped both Soviet and Imperial-era policies. In short, I discussed the sorts of things that regular readers of this blog would have expected.

What I did not expect was the audience’s reaction.

The gist of the post-presentation comments was that I appeared not to appreciate the unique character of the Soviet period. More than one individual objected that I was “flattening” the differences between the Soviet and Imperial eras by failing to account for the role of Communist ideology in shaping society, culture, and politics. The result, one senior colleague suggested, was that I “seemed to be rationalizing Stalin’s policies.”

I was gob-smacked.

As I mentioned above, I’ve been presenting at conferences for more than a decade. For most of that time, my talks have focused on my Soviet-era research. Never, not once, have I ever been faulted for downplaying the significance of ideology in Soviet history or “rationalizing Stalin’s policies.” If anything, colleagues in Russian history have argued the opposite: that I devote too much attention to ideology while being too critical of Stalinist excesses. [I disagree, but that's another post.]

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As the post-presentation discussion unfolded, two things occurred to me.

The first was that I had not summarized my views as effectively as I had hoped. To ensure that there would be plenty of time for Q&A I had to condense the longer paper I had written to right around twenty minutes. So I announced the argument, hit the broader points, and worked backward, from present to past, “unraveling” the origins of contemporary aviation policies by highlighting past precedents. As it was, I rushed through the last quarter or so of my presentation (on the Imperial era) to avoid exceeding my time limit.

Later, during the exchange with the audience, I defended my apparent short-shrifting of Stalinist politics by filling in the gaps. I also noted that I devote considerable space in DotA to discussing ideology’s role in shaping Soviet aviation. I urged folks to suspend final judgment until they’ve had a chance to read the book. Fair enough.

The second thing that occurred to me (though I didn’t mention it at the time) is the extent to which the nature and direction of that Q&A period suggests how differently scholars in separate historical sub-fields conceive and approach essential questions. Until rather recently, discussions of politics and ideology (or, “that ‘i’ word,” as I once heard it called) were highly unfashionable among professional Russian historians. [Again, a topic for another post]. Even today, the mere mention of the word “totalitarianism” is all but certain to induce snickers and groans from most quarters (and paroxysms of moral indignation from others). To avoid scandal, you’re better off not even mentioning it. But if you must, your only safe bet is to cover yourself by tying the word to a phrase such as “and other Cold War-era fantasies.”

That the SHOT audience was so keen to focus on ideology (and that references to totalitarianism slipped continuously and un-ironically off the tongues of almost everyone in the room) suggested to me how much differently these professional historians conceive Russian history. For all of the ink Soviet specialists spill trying to convince other Soviet specialists to accept their interpretive approaches, it seems that they have done little to influence how non-Russian specialists view Russia’s past.

It may be that I’m making more out of the exchange that is warranted. If not, I can’t help but think that this reflects negatively on how specialization can undermine history as a whole. Either way, I’d be curious to learn what books in Russian/Soviet history non-specialists are reading and what non-Russian histories Russian specialists are reading.

In light of the encounter in DC, I think we may want to consider spending less time revisiting historical debates and spend more time revisiting how we communicate with historians outside our subfields.

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

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

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

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

Which is to say, it didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Researchers in Russia require special papers to gain entrance into the reading rooms of the archives in which they want to work. One special paper is the “archival pass” (пропуск). However, before obtaining the archival pass the researcher must produce two other special papers: the passport (of course) and the “credentialing letter” (or, данное письмо).

Although it’s probably best to obtain your passport from your government, you can make up your own credentialing letter(s). If you choose to do so, your goal should be to maximize the potential power of your “papers” by imparting to them a truly Magical Aura. It’s rather easy to do and it can be fun. Here are some guidelines:

The letter must state your name, position, and institutional affiliation. It should also indicate the topic of your research and your goal (i.e. dissertation, book, article, etc.). The letter should be written in Russian and should appear on official letterhead. It should also contain the names, titles, and signatures of two (or more) bosses from as high as possible in your institution’s bureaucratic feeding chain “authorizing” your request for archival access.

Dress-up your letter with a stamp of some type. The more fetching it appears, the better. This will help you when you invariably encounter a Russian susceptible to the charm of “papers.” I have found that round gold-colored stickers embossed with a logo can be highly effective. Add a couple of ribbons (color-coordinated with the letterhead, of course!) and you may just have made yourself a real Magic Key. I have received more than a few compliments on the striking quality of my credentialing papers. I am certain that in one case, several years back in a provincial archive, their magical appearance garnered me special treatment.

“Now wait a minute,” you say. “This is pure nonsense. Gold foil, colored ribbons, and embossed stamps are silly excesses. Russians don’t really give a damn about these things. And all this talk of folkloric charms and “Magic Keys” is just dumb. There’s no need to do any of this! It won’t make a difference!”

And, indeed, all of your objections would be right, if they were not, in fact, wrong.

I learned this (again) two days ago as I tried to exit the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

As procedure demands, I handed off my papers to the on-duty officer guarding the entry way. The officer glanced at my archival pass and then turned to my passport to verify that the names appearing on both sets of documents matched. As he opened the passport booklet, his eyes grew wide. Pulling the passport closer to his face he let out a gasp and exclaimed: “Это какая штука?” (“What’s this we have here?”)

“It’s a passport,” I dully replied.

“Wow! I’ve never seen one like it…”

Then, it dawned on me what I had just done…

I had unknowingly handed the guard a Magic Key!

[I must note here that my passport is brand new. I was forced to obtain it at the very last minute when the Russian embassy in Washington, DC initially refused to grant me a visa citing that my older (though still valid) passport was “too worn” to accept. As it turns out, new US passports contain a number of new security devices. The most obvious are multi-colored background illustrations which extend across both the left and right hand portions of each opened page.]

I stood alongside the officer as he intensely studied my papers, thumbing through the booklet several times. At first, he focused on the illustrations: landscapes of the desert Southwest, the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Hawaiian beaches, the Rocky Mountains, [“Красота. Да, очень красывый.” -- “That looks nice. Yeah, really nice.”]; historical scenes of nineteenth-century railroad engines, cattle trains, and Midwestern farmers, [“Вот такая штука.” -- “This really is something.”] and patriotic montages including such monuments as Mount Rushmore [“Это что какое?” -- “What’s that?”] and the Statue of Liberty. He expressed considerable disappointment when he discovered that the Russian visa affixed inside had covered up half of the two-page spread depicting the Liberty Bell. [“Жалько. Хотел бы посмотреть.” -- -“That’s too bad. I’d have like to have seen it.]

I hadn’t given it much thought before, but he was right. The passport images really are well done.

After several minutes of slowing paging through the booklet, soaking up the pictures, and asking questions, the guard began to study the papers intently, gently running his fingers over the pages. “Look, feel here,” he said, not letting go of my passport, but allowing me to touch it. “The paper’s slightly embossed.” [Sure enough, it is.]

Then, he really got down to business, seriously examining the thing by holding the booklet at different angles and at different distances from his face in an attempt to discern what other hidden secrets the Magic Key held in store.

“Oohhh, look, look! Here, along the edge…there’s a hidden stripe!”

[Another security element I hadn’t bothered to notice.]

“And, here…you have to look close. Each page has a different pattern of lines. See, how they change!”

[Hmm, they do indeed.]

Finally, as the inspection neared its end, the officer’s attention turned to the center of the page. There, to his delight he discovered what was (given the lighting) a very difficult to discern watermark.

“What’s this? In the middle? I think it’s an eagle…Yes, yes…it’s definitely and eagle. Look! Here’s his beak, here’s his wings, and talons!”

And with that, having subjected my passport to more than ten-minutes of intense scrutiny (during which time, much to his obvious annoyance, he was interrupted several times by Russian researchers needing to enter and exit the building), the guard finally handed the passport back to me with the parting compliment:

“You are lucky. You have very beautiful papers.”

ScP