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.”

“The Great Flight” (Великий перелет) was flown by a squadron of six airplanes: two German Junkers F-13s, an AK-1, a Polikarpov R-2, and two Polikarpov R-1s. According to the officials who organized the flight what made these airplanes unique was the fact that each had been manufactured “either in whole or in part by Soviet factories.”

By contemporary Soviet standards the Great Flight was an immensely ambitious undertaking. Only two years removed from the founding of the Soviet aviation program in 1923, the Great Flight was intended to demonstrate how “Bolshevik audacity and the persistence of Soviet workers” had enabled the USSR to overcome the “principal difficulties that lay in the way of conquering the aerial elements.”

The six airplanes left Moscow on 10 June 1925. They were accompanied by military spokesmen and journalists from major newspapers as well as a representative from the State Telegraph Agency (Rosta). The journalists went along to monitor the progress of the Great Flight and to compose the feature stories that appeared daily in the country’s press. Two cameramen also flew aboard the aircraft in order to provide a visual record of the expedition. At each designated landing site, these representatives organized rallies, delivered speeches, orchestrated tours of the airplanes, and disseminated the large amount of propaganda material carried aboard the aircraft.

The flight came to an end on 13 July 1925 when four of the original six planes landed in Peking.

The Great Flight was, in fact, much more than an “expedition” organized to test the abilities of Soviet air crews and airplanes. It was the USSR’s first “prestige flight” — the precursor and model for the European tours of the late 1920s and the far more famous trans-polar flights of the 1930s.

Jim graciously agreed to upload the clip to his YouTube channel (where you can find a large collection of other aviation videos, too).

Here it is:

The first part of the clip shows the 4 July 1925 arrival of Soviet airplanes in Ulan Bator, Mongolia [AKA "Urga"]. The monoplanes that you see are the Junkers F-13s. The biplane is an R-1. In the last portion we see footage of the reception the fliers received following their landing in Peking. Incidentally, the Junkers F-13 appearing at the beginning of the clip didn’t make it to the finish line. It crashed five days after arriving in Ulan Bator.

I discuss the Great Flight in more detail in Chapter 6 of Dictatorship of the Air.

ScP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

The lackey of Curzon will rue the day that he launched his sneak attack! My vast reserves of airplane songs will (metaphorically) darken the heavens above! He and his minions will cower beneath my air-music armada just like the sub-human creature-things in Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky”:

Panic and despair will seize his very being! Woe will befall his blighted website as I unleash a campaign of total sonic war! The belligerent saber-rattler well knows that “the bomber will always get through.” And the devastation that I inflict with Motörhead’s “Bomber” is fearsome, indeed!:

Holman shall find no shelter from my wrath in the wake of his predacious first strike! My Dictatorship of the Air is well armed with a vast stockpile of deadly weapons and warriors, none more lethal than this “Jet Pilot” from System of a Down!:

SURRENDER, Holman! ALL IS LOST!

“I am become deaf, the destroyer of bandwith…”

As the clip’s voice-over notes (albeit in French now in Russian — 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!

ScP