Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (review)

Robert Wohl, Joseph Corn, Bayla Singer, and others have shown that the advent of machine-powered flight generated a common set of referents across cultures, fundamentally altering human perceptions of time and space. At the same time, the arrival of the airplane was also appropriated for mythos, iconography, and purposes peculiar to national contexts. Now, Scott W. Palmer looks at one particular national setting, asking “What is ‘Russian’ about Russian aviation?” More specifically, he seeks to identify the “social, cultural, and political conditions” that fostered a Russian form of “air mindedness,” which he describes as a “particular set of cultural traditions, symbols, and markers that, combined with existing political culture and social institutions, constitute a given nation’s response to the airplane” (pp. 2–3).

Palmer’s main focus is on the Soviet period up to 1945, but he begins his story in the imperial era, in 1909, when Louis Blériot’s crossing of the English Channel led to a flowering of Russian interest in the airplane. Although the imperial government pinned its hopes on the airplane both as a vehicle and as a metaphor for modernization, a major aviation industry did not arise prior to the Russian Revolution. Like many recent Russian historians, Palmer sees the divide of 1917 as embodying both disruption and continuity. He argues that the unique characteristics assumed by Russian aviation during the imperial era not only survived the revolution but were amplified. These included “compensatory symbolism,” a propensity to exaggerate or fabricate their accomplishments (p. 7), and an enduring faith in a single transcendent event that could “transform Russia from its current state of underdevelopment and dependence into a position of dominance” (p. 34). Both of these traits were connected to what Palmer sees as the chronic dependence of Russian (and later Soviet) aviation on Western technology, a vulnerability that, combined with an inefficient industrial system, effectively crippled aeronautical innovation.

Palmer’s account of the early years of Soviet aviation is full of insight. He tracks the evolution of the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet (ODVF in its Russian abbreviation), an ostensibly voluntary and mass organization whose goal was to inculcate air-mindedness among the Soviet populace in the 1920s. Bolshevik leaders saw aviation as an “instrument of the future” that would help the Soviets conquer the “vast space” (prostranstvo) of their new world. For the ODVF and similar organizations, overcoming the problems of prostranstvo was not simply about connecting points on a map: aviation would bridge the literal and metaphorical distances between the proletariat and the peasantry. Palmer shows how the Bolsheviks sought to introduce aviation to peasants, partly because they believed that it would effectively displace entrenched religious sensibilities. Ironically, these efforts invoked tropes appropriated from the Russian Orthodox Church to describe flying in transcendental terms.

As Palmer’s narrative moves into the 1930s, his arguments have less to stand on. Palmer’s ubiquitous use of descriptors such as “Party leaders,” “Party authorities,” and “the Party” as actors elides a range of complex individuals, factions, and constituencies within the Soviet leadership. His narrative suggests that the Soviet national policy on aviation, especially in the 1930s, emerged fully formed as a monolithic quantity, and that the underlying qualities of the period—the focus on heroic aviation exploits, the fascination with gigantism, the desire (almost pathological in Palmer’s view) to steal foreign technology—were never up for negotiation. This might have resulted from a limitation in sources. Hardly any use is made of 1930s-era archival sources from Osoaviakhim, the mass paramilitary organization for Soviet youth that evolved out of ODVF and which played a critical role in giving Soviet aviation its distinctly militarized nature. And there is a second shortcoming. We hear hardly any voices of ordinary people. How did the millions of Osoaviakhim members—or the many thousands of engineers and factory workers who built Soviet airplanes in the 1930s—contribute...