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

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

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).

While post-1991 revelations have provided us with a clearer picture of the material aspects of Lend-Lease, there hasn’t been as much written about Lend-Lease as “lived experience” in the USSR. Just what was life like for the Soviet airmen, soldiers, and civilians who helped transport American supplies to the front lines from isolated outposts in the Far East?

The subject has garnered some attention as of late at least in Russia. The Lend-Lease program provided the backdrop for the 2006 motion picture, Перегон: a “detective-drama” set in 1943 at a transit airfield in the desolate and icy Chukotka peninsula. (Unfortunately, the recently released DVD version is not available with foreign subtitles.)

If you’re not willing to drop $22 on the Russian-language DVD, you can still catch glimpses from the daily life of Soviet “lend leasers” for free on-line. Earlier this month, a personal collection of more than 150 photographs from the period were uploaded to the Internet. The photos belonged to Nikolai Ivanovich Aleksandrov, a VVS pilot who was based in the Far Eastern city of Yakutsk during the latter half of the war. You’ll find plenty of photographs of Lend-Lease airplanes (including American B-25 “Mitchells” and P-63 “Kingcobras”). More interesting, I think, are the fascinating images of the “everyday life” experienced by fliers, support staff, and local civilians during the War. Although non-Russian readers will find themselves at a disadvantage (the captions are in Russian), the photos are well worth one’s time. If you’re interested in these things, I’d suggest that you take a look at the collection sooner rather than later. There’s no telling how long it will be available.

The collection bears the title “Peregon” (roughly, “The Transit Station”) after the movie. A more accurate title might be: “Lend-Lease Photos: A Private Archive.”

ScP

[Many thanks to Ray Finch of KU's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies for brining the Aleksandrov photos to my attention]

From under the rubble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 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.

“Unique Flying Apparatuses”

Located in a hangar opposite the entrance to the open-air collection of planes, the Museum’s display of “Unique Flying Apparatuses” contains a sizable number of historic and replica aircraft representing machines largely constructed during the decades preceding the Great Patriotic War.

The “oldest” plane in the collection is a Farman IV, a box-kite pusher biplane (patterned after a slightly earlier Voisin model) that first debuted in 1909. Notwithstanding its light weight and flimsy appearance, the wood, wire, and lacquered canvas contraption proved both sturdy and highly modifiable. This model was the first one to emerge from Moscow’s Dux aircraft factory. Dozens more were assembled by other enterprises and amateur constructors. Although the precise number built is impossible to ascertain, the Farman IV was arguably the most popular airplane among Russia’s first generation of aviation pioneers.

The Farman IV housed in the Museum’s collection is a working replica built on order of the Lenfil’m studio for use in The Aviator (Воздухоплаватель), a 1975 feature film loosely chronicling the life of Ivan Mikhailovich Zaikin (1870-1948). An Odessa-based circus strong-man (and later champion Greco-Roman wrestler), Zaikin was a noted celebrity in pre-WWI Russia. He earned initial fame for public demonstrations of strength in which he broke iron chains with his hands and bent steel bars across the back of his neck. In 1910 he became one of the first Russians to fly a biplane when he took to the air aboard a Farman IV. According to the Museum’s official guidebook, the replica housed in the VVS collection completed fifty flights before being donated by the film studio in September 1975.

In addition to the Farman IV, the Museum’s collection of unique planes includes a full-scale mock-up of Imperial Russia’s most famous native aircraft: the Il’ya Muromets. The brainchild of Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (1889-1972), (the pioneering constructor who would later develop the world’s first functional helicopters) the four-engine Il’ya Muromets is justly recognized as one of the most innovative and revolutionary airplanes ever built. The plane was also colossally large by the day’s standards. The initial version measured 62 ft. in length and possessed a wingspan of just over 101 ft. It was capable of lifting more than 2,000 pounds and could cover more than 350 miles while staying aloft for upwards of five hours.

Although the Muromets was not the world’s first multi-engine plane — that honor belonged to Sikorsky’s 1913 Russian Warrior — (aka Big Baltic or Grand), the flying behemoth introduced numerous ground-breaking components. The plane’s most distinctive feature was that its passenger hold was incorporated into the fuselage: a design innovation that served as a model for nearly all subsequent military and civilian aircraft. Over five feet wide and six feet high, the passenger compartment was capable of comfortably accommodating up to one dozen people. The plane also possessed a sleeping cabin and an observation platform as well as a generator for producing electric light to illuminate the cabin, a heating system, and, in another aviation first, a toilet.

In addition to being the first true passenger aircraft the Il’ya Muromets also served during the Great War as the world’s first strategic bomber. In December 1914, the Russian General Staff ordered the formation of a group of twelve Muromtsy which it designated the “Squadron of Flying Ships.” Initially employed as reconnaissance platforms, the planes were soon utilized to bomb enemy positions. The Squadron was responsible for history’s first effort at mass bombing. It also undertook the first nighttime bombing raids and the first bomb damage assessments using photographic equipment. Before Russia exited the war in April 1918, Sikorsky’s giants amassed an impressive service record. Despite flying more than 400 sorties, only one of the 73 airplanes deployed was lost to enemy fire.¹

The Museum’s standout example of a unique Soviet “flying apparatus” is its copy of the famed Tupolev ANT-25 Stalin’s Route (Сталинский маршрут), the most celebrated Soviet airplane of the pre-WWII era. Stalin’s Route first garnered recognition in July 1936 when a flight crew consisting of pilot Valerii Chkalov, co-pilot Georgii Baidukov, and navigator Aleksandr Beliakov set a world distance record by flying just over 5,800 miles non-stop from Moscow to the Pacific rim island Udd. The next year, the same crew and aircraft made history again when they successfully completed the first trans-Polar crossing on a flight between Moscow and Pearson Air Field in Vancouver, Washington. A second ANT-25 flown by pilot Mikhail Gromov, co-pilot Sergei Danilin, and navigator Andrei Iumashev followed up the success of Stalin’s Route by completing an even longer (6,300 mile) non-stop trans-Polar flight from Moscow to San Jacinto, California one month later.

“History of Russian Aviation Exhibition”

The final stop in our tour of the VVS Museum is the history of Russian aviation exhibit normally housed in the main administrative building. When open, the exhibit is a treasure trove of fascinating information, models, and artifacts. If you read a bit of Russian, you can get a sense of the presentation by taking a look at the Museum’s official homepage where you’ll find detailed descriptions of the Museum’s fixed displays. Unfortunately, the descriptions are only available по-русски. The on-line guide suggests that the Museum collection is divided into ten so-called “halls.” It should been noted, however, that only nine are described on the site (the list is mis-numbered, skipping “hall” seven). Moreover, the “halls” described on-line include the aircraft parked in the open-air display [previously described in parts 3-5 of this series] and the two hangars.

Here, I will limit coverage to general descriptions of the types of materials displayed in the five rooms typically located in the Museum’s main building.

Display One: “Development and Growth of Aeronautics and Aviation in Russian to 1917”

Not surprisingly, the first display area in the Museum’s history of aviation exhibit is devoted to the dawn of Russian aviation. Here, visitors are introduced to scientists like the great Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) who (among other things) conducted early experiments on atmospheric properties and Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834-1907), the inventor of the Periodic Table of Elements, who took part in a hot-air balloon ascent in 1887. More directly, the Museum devotes considerable attention to the life and work of Nikolai Zhukovskii (1847-1921) the pioneering mathematician who founded the Russian study of aerodynamics.

Although the history of aeronautics is covered in sections devoted to the Russian military’s use of observation balloons during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the ensuing deployment of military dirigibles, most of the coverage is given over to the development of Imperial Russian aviation. Visitors are introduced to early constructors including Ia. M. Gakkel’, D. P. Grigorovich, and A. A. Porokhovshchikov as well as early Russian airplane firms like Dux and the Russo-Balt Carriage Factory. While most Russian constructors relied heavily on the importation and licensing of engines from foreign companies like Nieuport and Wright, the Museum devotes considerable space to the first Russian-made motors. Early “sportsmen-aviators” including Mikhail Efimov and Nikolai Popov, their airplanes, and the air shows in which they participated are also described.

The first display room concludes with materials relating to Russian aviation during the Great War. Particular attention is given, of course, to Sikorsky’s giant airplanes. Well-worth noting is the section on Russia’s most celebrated WWI aviator Captain Petr Nikolaevich Nesterov (1887-1914). In addition to being the first pilot in history to loop an airplane (1913), Nesterov was the first Russian pilot to down an enemy aircraft. He accomplished this feat in early September 1914 when he rammed the unarmed Albatros he was flying into an Austrian reconnaissance plane. Both he and the two fliers aboard the enemy aircraft were killed in the resulting crashes.

Display Two: “Continuing Development of Aviation to June 1941”

The second room in the Museum’s historical display contains materials relating to the development of Soviet aviation between 1917-1941. The exhibits here address subjects ranging from Civil War aviation and the founding the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet, to the expansion of Soviet aircraft industry during the first Five year Plan (1928-1932) and the earliest years of Soviet civil aviation.

Particularly interesting are the materials relating to aerial propaganda missions like the 1925 “Great Flight” from Moscow to Peking (and then Tokyo) and the visit of the ANT-4 Land of the Soviets to the United States in 1929. Here, too, is where the Museum provides background information (and some rare photographs) relating to famous prestige airplanes such as the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky and the ANT-25 Stalin’s Route. There’s also a good deal of material on “Stalin’s falcons” (including pilots Valerii Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov) and the various world records set by Soviet airmen (and women) during the 1930s.

Displays Three & Four: “The Great Patriotic War”

Not surprisingly, the centerpiece of the Museum’s history exhibit consists of the two separate rooms devoted to the accomplishments of the VVS during the course of the Great Patriotic War.
What may strike foreign visitors as a bit odd is the extent to which the presentation and tone of these materials reveal ideas and attitudes seemingly held-over from the Soviet era. These tendencies are likewise reflected on the Museum’s web site which proclaims, in characteristic fashion, that “the first days of the Great Patriotic War clearly revealed the guiding organizational role of the Communist Party and its close and unbreakable bond with the masses.”²

Even if your knowledge of Operation Barbarossa is limited to a single show that you once saw on the History Channel, you know that this claim is utter nonsense. Those a bit more familiar with the contours (and content) of Soviet history, will recognize statements like this for what they really are: propagandistic boilerplate that Party leaders used to maintain their legitimacy in the years that followed 1953.

In addition to echoing from time to time Soviet-era propaganda, the Museum’s materials occasionally cite misleading figures in advancing dubious claims about the performance of the VVS. For example:

“From the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the enemy encountered the powerful blows of Soviet aviation. In the first three months of combat in the air and at aerodromes upwards of 3,500 fascist planes were destroyed. During this period 250,000 sorties were flown of which 47% resulted in the destruction of enemy tanks, motorized columns, and infantry on the field of battle.”³

While it is certainly true that the fall campaign strained the Luftwaffe to the breaking point, German air losses were closer to 2,500 than to 3,500. Moreover, the Museum’s account glosses over an equally important aspect of invasion: the more than 21,000 Soviet aircraft destroyed between June-November 1941.

Given the vast scope of the Museum’s Great Patriotic War display, it would be futile to try countering all of the questionable statements appearing in the exhibit. It’s also unnecessary. Despite the tendentious language, discerning visitors stand to learn a lot about the wartime experiences of the VVS. Still, you’d be well-served to read-up a bit on the war before and after visiting the Museum. [In an upcoming post, I’ll recommend some good recent books on the Russian Front]. Whatever the case, the Museum’s displays contain a great deal of information with which even aviation junkies are probably not familiar.

Much space is understandably devoted to the USSR’s wartime heroes including Nikolai Gastello who sacrificed himself by flying his damaged plane into an advancing column of tanks in the open days of the War and Aleksei Maresev who went on to become an ace despite having his feet amputated after being shot-down. The stories of other individual pilots are also recounted in detail. Particularly noteworthy were Ivan Kozhedub, Aleksandr Pokryshkin, and Nikolai Gulaev (who lead all Allied aces with 62, 59, and 57 kills, respectively) and the women pilots of the “Night Witches” regiment who played essential roles in the skies over Stalingrad.

Display Five: “Recent Aviation Developments”

The last section of the Museum’s historical display covers the period from the end of the Great Patriotic War to the present day. As one might expect, given the rather long time frame this segment addresses (and, no doubt, state concerns regarding the release of sensitive information), this section lacks some of the found in the previous rooms. Certain subjects are, again, given short shrift (such as the German origins of the Soviet jet program). Still there’s good material here on things like the downing of Gary Power’s U-2 (1961) and the development of Soviet SAM technology.

And there you have it.

If you’ve managed to work your way through all six of the posts in this series, I hope that you found them to be informative and helpful. If so, please let others know about the “field guide.” If there’s something you thought particularly interesting (or, if you have questions about something you read), post a comment and let me know. Likewise, if you’re privy to updated information on the ongoing reconstruction at the Museum, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll post updates as I receive them and will add a bit more during my next trip to Moscow.

Oh, one more thing for those of you who actually have the chance to visit the VVS Museum…

Before heading back to Moscow you might want to stop off at the white tent located in the wooded area between the administrative building and the entrance to the outdoor aircraft display. There’s a counter inside where you can purchase drinks and snacks. The choices are a bit limited, but if you want some water, soda, or are in the mood for ice cream or a candy bar you can get it there.

Most importantly, the snack tent has Baltika Seven on tap (or, at least it did when I was there in late June). They also sell Baltika’s ideal “pairing:” кальмар.

1. For a complete discussion of Sikorsky and his behemoth airplanes, see Dictatorship of the Air, pp. 55-71
2. The Russian reads: “С первых дней Великой Отечественной войны еще полнее раскрылась направляющая и организующая роль Коммунистической партии, ее тесная и неразрывная связь с массами”
3. ”С начала Великой Отечественной войны враг узнал силу ударов советской авиации. За первые три месяца войны в воздушных боях и на аэродромах уничтожено до 3500 фашистских самолетов. За этот же период произведено 250 тыс. самолето-вылетов, при этом 47% всех вылетов совершено на уничтожение танковых и моторизованных колонн противника и его войск на поле боя”

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.

Aircraft of the Tupolev OKB:

The Soviet Union’s premier airplane designer during the 1920s and 1930s, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev was responsible for many of the USSR’s earliest aviation successes. In addition to constructing the country’s first all-metal combat airplane (ANT-3), Tupolev lead the design and construction of such milestone aircraft as the ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky” and ANT-25 (the first airplane to make a trans-Polar crossing).

Arrested at the very height of his success in October 1937, Tupolev continued to design airplanes for the Soviet state while working as a virtual slave laborer in a “special design bureau” run by the NKVD (later, the KGB). Freed in 1941 following the German invasion, Tupolev subsequently played an instrumental role in the development of post-War Soviet military and civilian jet aircraft.

Two airplanes highlight the VVS Museum’s Tupolev OKB collection.

The first is a Tu-4 a Soviet copy of the American B-29 Superfortress. The Tu-4 was reverse-engineered on the basis of three B-29s forced down over the Soviet Far East in the summer and fall of 1944 following bombing runs over Japan. The plane’s inaugural flight took place on 3 July 1947. The existence of the Soviet Tu-4 gave American leaders pause at the outset of the Cold War as they recognized that among the world’s then-existing airplanes, only the B-29/Tu-4 was capable of delivering an atomic bomb. In reality, the Soviet version was considerably inferior to the American original. The Tu-4’s range was so limited that any effort to bomb the continental USA would have necessitated a one-way mission on the part of the plane’s crew. Even then, success was far from certain.¹

A second noteworthy plane is the Tu-16. The Tupolev OKB’s first jet bomber, the Tu-16 debuted on 27 April 1952. The aircraft entered serial production in December of that same year. By the time that production ended in 1963, 1,509 had been built. The Tu-16 proved to be a highly adaptable aircraft. During the four decades that followed its maiden flight, nearly fifty different modifications were made to the airplane. The most significant of these was the transformation of the military bomber into the USSR’s first jet passenger airplane, the Tu-104.

The majority of the aircraft in the VVS Museum’s outdoor collection are parked within and around a large rectangular walkway (or, “quad”) one “short” side of which runs more or less parallel with the row of planes from the Tupolev OKB. As you turn away from the Tupolev planes and look down the “long” path, you see a large group of aircraft situated in an “L” pattern along the “lower right-hand” corner of the central “quad.” These are Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War.

Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War:

Nazi Germany’s surprise launch of “Operation Barbarossa” on 22 June 1941 was marked by the near-complete destruction of the Soviet Air Force. In the first two weeks of combat alone, the USSR lost well-over 4,000 aircraft (as opposed to only 150 losses suffered by the Luftwaffe). The ability of the VVS to weather the storm of the initial German offensive, regroup, rebuild, and ultimately help repel the invading Nazi forces stands as the brightest chapter in the history of Russian aviation.

Not surprisingly, the Museum possesses a wide array of combat aircraft from the Great Patriotic War. Among these is one of the first fighter planes to emerge from the Mikoyan-Gurevich OKB, the MiG-3. Small, nimble, and fast, the airplane represented a major step forward in Soviet aviation design when it was unveiled in the spring of 1940. During early high-altitude test flights the “I-200” (as it was then officially known) was reported to have reached a top speed of 404 mph (651 km/hour) making it, according to Soviet officials, “the fastest fighter plane in existence.” However, in actual combat conditions at lower altitudes the MiG-3 did not match the performance of Germany’s frontline fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-109. Still, the airplane was one of the few bright spots for the VVS in the opening months of the war. 3,500 MiG-3s left Soviet factories before production was halted (in order to increase the output of other aircraft) in November 1941.

The Petliakov Pe-2 is one of the standouts in the Museum’s collection of World War II-era bomber aircraft. First tested in May 1939, the Pe-2 was the quintessential example of the Soviet emphasis on “frontal” bombing operations in the years immediately preceding WWII. The plane was designed to provide close air support and attack capabilities in conjunction with ground offensives. During the War, the Pe-2 served as the mainstay bomber of the VVS (just over 11,400 were produced). Modified versions of the plane played a role in aerial operations from the outbreak of hostilities in June 1941 until the fall of Berlin in May 1945.

The contributions of the Lend-Lease Program to the Soviet effort in the Great Patriotic War are implicitly acknowledged through the presence of several American aircraft in the Monino collection. Chief among these are a P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Warhawk. Considered obsolescent by the Allied Air Forces at the outbreak of World War II, these planes nevertheless provided valuable service on the Eastern Front flying ground attack and air interdiction missions. (Interestingly, three of the USSR’s top four aces recorded the majority of their kills while aboard P-39s.) The Museum also has a Lisunov Li-2. A license-built version of America’s justly famous Douglas C-47 (DC-3), the Li-2 comprised the bulk of Soviet air transport capacity during (and well after) the War.

In Part Four of this series, we’ll take a look at a huge helicopter, a super fast passenger jet, and airplanes from the Sukhoi OKB…

[ For the next installment in this series of posts, click here: 4]

1. For more on the Tu-4 see, Dictatorship of the Air, pp. 276-278.