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.

MAKS is, by definition, an international event. However, its primary purpose has always been to showcase and promote the accomplishments of the Russian aerospace industry. President Putin’s opening day assertion that his government’s main task “is maintaining our leadership in the production of military aviation technology,” [emphasis added] should be understood in this light. It’s a classic example of “compensatory symbolism:” the historic propensity of Russian officials to exaggerate technological accomplishments and military standing in order to mask weakness and deficiencies vis-à-vis foreign rivals. That President Putin should sense a need to embellish the truth doubtless stems from the precipitous decline in Russian air power that followed the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and from continuing doubts about the current status of the post-Soviet air weapon.

Recent innovations on display at MAKS-2007 such as the S-400 air defense system, the 3M25 “Meteorit” cruise missile, and the latest models of Su-35 and MiG-29 aircraft notwithstanding, the Russian military’s current aviation inventory hardly garners the full respect of aerospace observers. Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer dismissed the Sukhoi and MiG aircraft appearing at the Salon as “flying toys that have not been launched for production.” Commenting on Moscow’s decision last week to resume long-range bomber patrols, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack brushed off the development stating that “If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that’s their decision.” Meanwhile, in separate editorials published Wednesday in The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings and David Blair dismissed out of hand Russia’s pretensions at once again becoming a major military power citing, among other things, the country’s underlying poverty, economic inequality, and industrial backwardness.

While Hastings may be correct that Russians “cannot make toasters or microwaves, washing-machines or cookers that could find an export market anywhere outside Cuba,” he and other Western observers would be well advised not to underestimate the abilities of Russian aerospace engineers. Likewise, they should not underestimate the value that the Russian state places on air power. It is not happenstance that Putin has presided over the opening ceremony at every MAKS event held during his presidency. He is keenly interested in aviation. And he has repeatedly expressed his goal of re-establishing Russia as a key player in the international market. His administration has undertaken concrete steps to realize that goal. Chief among these has been the formation of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), an umbrella organization that has brought previously independent Russian aircraft firms like Suhkoi, MiG, and Tupolev under a single administrative entity controlled by the state. This, too, has clear parallels in Russia’s Soviet and Imperial pasts. Throughout the course of the twentieth century it was the state, not private enterprise, that controlled, promoted, and sustained domestic aviation. It appears that the same may be set to happen in the twenty-first century.

Having survived very difficult times in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian aviation is currently experiencing a renaissance. And once again, the Russian state is serving as mid-wife. Flush with cash thanks to the revenues generated from the sale of oil, gas, and other natural resources, the Putin administration is sinking billions into the refurbishment of aviation infrastructure, the design and construction of new aircraft, and the creation of international partnerships with companies like Boeing and Airbus. These partnerships will provide Russia access to the advanced technology it needs later to compete independently against American and European manufacturers.

In mid-August UAC President Aleksei Fyodorov proclaimed that the Russian Federation will surpass Soviet-era production levels by building 4,500 civilian aircraft over the next 18 years. If the government is to make good on this audacious target, it will have to find buyers for these new planes. Recent announcements regarding the pending sale of advanced Sukhoi fighters to Iran and Venezuela suggest still further ties to past precedent. While many in the West view these new deals as efforts designed to score geopolitical points at the expense of the US, such contracts are far more important as inroads to negotiating sales of the new civilian airliners expected to roll out of Russian factories beginning in 2015. It’s a strategy that hearkens back to the 1950s and 1960s when, unable to find buyers for their civilian aircraft in the West, the Soviet Union secured passenger aircraft contracts with Third World governments by sweetening deals for Ilyushin and Tupolev carriers with offers of MiG and Sukhoi fighters.

When analysts like Felgenhauer and Hastings characterize Putin’s agenda as a Cold-War throwback destined to fail owing to economic weakness and industrial backwardness they are mistaken. Putin’s approach, in fact, is a well-tested model that has very deep roots in Russian history. At the turn of the eighteenth century Imperial Russia’s “Westernizing” tsar Peter the Great borrowed heavily from Europe, importing technology, expertise, and equipment while using state authority and finances to spur development at home. In very short order he transformed Russia from a backward, impoverished, and peripheral also-ran into one of Europe’s leading military powers. The Soviet Union accomplished much the same thing in the 1930s through the state-directed industrialization campaign launch by Josef Stalin. Although the modernization programs under both Peter and Stalin came at a steep price for the country’s ordinary citizens and ultimately proved only qualified successes, they radically altered Europe’s military and political landscapes by quickly vaulting Russia into the ranks of the major powers. The events surrounding MAKS-2007 suggest that Russian officials are hoping to alter radically the aerospace landscape in the years to come. They also suggest that Russia’s approach to rebuilding its air arm will follow tried and true patterns derived from its history.

Peter the Great is alleged to have quipped: “We need Europe for a few decades, and then we must show her our ass.”

It is not difficult to imagine that Vladimir Putin is thinking the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the opponents of backwardness are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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