Stalin's Aviation Gulag: A Memoir of Andrei Tupolev and the Purge Era

Andrei Tupolev (1888–1972) was one of the world’s leading aviation designers. Through a combination of dogged devotion to his craft, headstrong capability, fearless innovative drive, and good connections with leading officials, Tupolev pushed the Soviet aeronautical industry from its infancy and reliance on Western technology to a position that rivaled American industry. He designed bombers, fighters, and passenger airplanes, turboprops and jets. Like many other talented engineers and scientists, he also fell prey to Stalin’s Terror. As if calculated to deprive the USSR of its most talented thinkers, the Terror consumed citizens almost indiscriminately. Stalin’s secret police arrested not only Old Bolshevik rivals but the military leadership, not only unfortunate peasants and workers but the scientific intelligentsia. Millions of innocent persons were interned in labor camps (or gulag) by the mid-1930s. Tupolev himself and many of his closest colleagues, though vital to the country’s nascent aeronautics industry, were arrested, and a number were executed or perished.

Stalin’s Aviation Gulag, a translation of Leonid Kerber’s memoir of Tupolev’s life and work, provides a long-awaited insider’s view of this crucial Soviet industry. Originally circulated samizdat (underground) in the Soviet Union before reaching Germany at the beginning of the 1970s as Tupolevskaia sharaga, the book was attributed to other authors before Kerber could take credit for his work after Mikhail Gorbachev set perestroika and glasnost in motion. In Stalin’s Aviation Gulag, Kerber provides a firsthand account of Tupolev’s life, from his student days through his rise to the top of the aeronautics industry. Kerber describes the tensions Tupolev wrestled with: a successful career with access to homes, automobiles, and Western goods, but great personal risks of dismissal, prison, and execution. The circumstances surrounding Tupolev’s arrest, his release, and his renewed ascent in aeronautics in the Khrushchev era complete the saga.

The early periods of Tupolev’s career are fascinating. During this time the Soviets developed one-of-a-kind airplanes to challenge international distance records, part of a campaign for technological display to support the legitimacy of the regime. National loss, for example, the 18 May 1935 crash of the Maxim Gorky, perhaps the largest plane in the world at that time, tempered the joyful feelings of patriotism connected with the engineers’ and pilots’ many achievements. Later Nikita Khrushchev, too, recognized how Tupolev’s creations might be used for propaganda effect when he visited the United States in 1959. Kerber’s reminiscences of preparations for the flight and his impressions of America reveal the ambivalent feelings of the Soviet leadership toward the United States both as an ideological rival and as a technological wonder. Kerber himself was amazed by America’s roads and skyscrapers, which suggested even to the most hard-line communists—and Kerber was not—that the United States had something to offer the USSR. Yet when Soviet aviation specialists reverse-engineered a B-29, they were pleased to discover that their planes were no worse.

The most gripping sections of Kerber’s account concern Tupolev’s life in the gulag, akin to the experience that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn captured vividly in his novel The First Circle. In the special science and technology facilities often located within large cities, the arrested engineers lived schizophrenic lives. They had relative autonomy in prison barracks. They were well fed. Yet they had no doubt that they were in a Stalinist labor camp. Arbitrary acts of the terror, such as the sudden removal of a prisoner from the workshop, might intrude at any moment. The obsessive secrecy that operated in Soviet society slowed the flow of information in prison, too, halting projects at crucial junctures even though the police ought to have recognized that their control of every prisoner and his information was absolute.

In any event, life in the camps was no...