Russian Aviation, Space Flight and Visual Culture

Vlad Strukov, Helena Goscilo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317359449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Among the many successes of the Soviet Union were inaugural space flight—ahead of the United States—and many other triumphs related to aviation. Aviators and cosmonauts enjoyed heroic status in the Soviet Union, and provided supports of the Soviet project with iconic figures which could be used to bolster the regime's visions, self-confidence, and the image of itself as forward looking and futuristic. This book explores how the themes of aviation and space flight have been depicted in film, animation, art, architecture, and digital media. Incorporating many illustrations, the book covers a wide range of subjects, including the representations of heroes, the construction of myths, and the relationship between visual art forms and Soviet/Russian culture and society.

Part I

Art and architecture

1 Ever onwards, ever upwards?

Representing the aviation hero in Soviet art

Mike O’Mahony

“[T]he invention of the airplane was at first perceived by many as an aesthetic event with far-reaching implications for the new century’s artistic and moral sensibility.”

(Wohl 1994: 1)

Introduction

The emergence and development of aviation in the years between 1903 and 1927 undoubtedly marked one of the major transformations of the early twentieth century. In less than a generation, powered flight rapidly advanced from the first tentative experiments of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Charles Lindbergh’s epoch-shifting crossing of the Atlantic. Yet early aviation achievements did more than transform the technological landscape of the modern world, heralding a new age of movement and speed. They also facilitated a significant transformation within the broader field of cultural production. Thus while technicians and designers were striving to develop the capabilities of the earliest airplanes, writers and artists were similarly striving to find new ways to articulate, in both word and image, the shifts in consciousness brought about by flight.

Painters were among the earliest cultural practitioners to explore and embrace the implications of aviation. In Paris, for example, then the epicenter of artistic experimentation, aviation’s capacity to alter the way in which both time and space conventionally had been conceived had a direct impact upon the most innovative artists of the era. Among these, both Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) consciously exploited the implications of powered flight in their search for new visual vocabularies to express the experience of modern life.¹ In Italy, too, the heady, intoxicating speed, energy, and sheer danger of early aviation similarly inspired Futurists such as Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), whose belligerent, nationalist, and militaristic Patriotic Festival of 1914 drew explicitly upon the vortex-like, spinning form of an airplane propeller.

Given the Russian Empire’s industrial backwardness in the early years of the twentieth century, it is perhaps surprising that this rich dialogue between technological advances in powered flight and avant-garde cultural developments was established from the earliest days of aviation history. For example, one of the nation’s earliest aviators, Vasilii Vasil’evich Kamenskii (1884–1961), was also a major figure in both the verbal and the plastic arts. Working alongside such influential pre-revolutionary members of the Russian Futurist circle as David Davidovich Burliuk (1882–1967), Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich) Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh (1886–1968), and Vladimir Vladimirovich Maiakovskii (1893–1930), Kamenskii explicitly drew upon his personal experiences as a pilot in much of the work produced during this period. Defining himself as a “poet-aviator,” Kamenskii reinforced the strong bond between the technological and aesthetic dimensions of flight in his declamatory poems and public performances, seeking to evoke the sensations of flight in both verbal and visual form.² Other pre-revolutionary artists similarly attempted to re-conceptualize the physical world in the wake of the aviation breakthrough, as evidenced in Kazimir Severinovich Malevich’s (1879–1935) Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Airplane and at the Railway (1913) and The Aviator (1914), both of which can be included among the artist’s early attempts to reconfigure the representation of time and space in art (Wohl 1994: 166–71). Further, as the vital role that aviation would come to play in the military sphere became more evident, Natal’ia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881–1962) also invoked aviation—for example, in Angels and Airplanes, one of fourteen lithographs collectively published under the title Mystical Images of War in 1914. Here, Goncharova intriguingly embraced the apocalyptic potential of flight as she sought to articulate visually a link between the traditional folk culture of ancient Russia and the modern world of aviation. It is thus clear that, from the outset, aviation provided much more than merely a new subject matter for artists to exploit. Its potential to invoke such metaphorical concepts as ascension and descent, or fall, and conflate these with a modern reconceptualization of time and space ultimately signaled that aviation could indeed provide a rich seam for artists to mine.

Imaging aviation after October

Despite the endeavors of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde, early Bolshevik artists initially proved slow to respond to the challenges posed by aviation. As Scott Palmer has demonstrated, the new regime certainly sought to exploit the symbolic significance of aviation to promote Soviet technological advances (Palmer 2006: 85). However, artistic attention at this time was focused predominantly upon the production of official posters celebrating what Palmer has referred to as “air-mindedness” (Palmer 2006: 2). In this context it is perhaps surprising that throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, relatively few paintings or sculptures on the aviation theme found their way into major exhibitions and the growing public collections of official Soviet art. The emergence of Socialist Realism, however, would begin to alter this pattern, not least as the first tentative steps in this new, if ill-defined, artistic method coincided with what was to become the golden age of Soviet aviation. Accordingly, in this chapter I want to examine representations of aviation produced during the mid- to late 1930s, specifically under the aegis of Socialist Realism. My purview includes both painting and sculpture, and highlights works that were proposed and rejected as well as those that were successfully executed and achieved popularity. As key products of Socialist Realism, representations of aviation are frequently dismissed as little more than officially endorsed paeans to state policies. What I aim to demonstrate, however, is that these works engaged in complex and diverse ways with the ever-changing significance of both aviation and artistic developments. As such, they can be regarded as fascinating and intriguing documents providing visual evidence of the fluctuating, rather than stable, political and cultural environment of the time. In particular, I focus on three forms of artistic response to the aviation theme: portraits of the famous pilot, Valerii Chkalov; monuments to the aviation heroes of the Cheliuskin mission; and representations of other major successes and failures in Soviet aviation.

Imaging the heroic pilot: portraits of Chkalov

The early days of Soviet aviation can be characterized by the fetishization of the machine. Here, the airplane, rather than its operator, was prioritized as a dominant symbol of Soviet technological and industrial progress. While the pilot was recognized as a valuable cog in the greater socio-political machine, his or her role, like that of the worker, remained essentially subordinate to the collective will of the masses. By the mid-1930s, however, Socialist Realism’s promotion of the positive hero was beginning to leave an indelible mark on Stalinist culture. Celebrating the exemplary achievements of individuals, the most notable example being the famous shock-worker Aleksei Grigor’evich Stakhanov (1906–77), was now given precedence, deflecting attention away from the technological to the human. Aviation similarly witnessed a shift of emphasis toward the celebration of the heroic pilot. Record-breaking flights were planned and executed, as much, it seems, for their publicity as for their scientific value, and the pilot rapidly came to symbolize the archetypal Soviet New Person [novyi chelovek]. Despite the fact that the record-breaking flights of the late 1930s were all achieved through the efforts of a team of engineers, aircraft designers, back-up and auxiliary staff, and flying crews of at least three, most of the media adulation was reserved for the individual. This provided both an opportunity and a challenge for artists to develop a new mode of portraiture focused on a new kind of hero. Here, the artistic representations of one pilot in particular, Valerii Pavlovich Chkalov (1904–38), offers an interesting insight into contemporary attitudes toward the aviator-hero and the artistic conventions adopted to represent this new character.

Chkalov was the best known, and most frequently represented, of all Soviet pilots. Born to a humble peasant family in the town of Vasil’evo, he rose to become one of the Soviet Union’s most famous citizens. During his lifetime Chkalov received two Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner, and became an elected Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He even had two regions renamed in his honor.³ Chkalov’s aviation career began while he was still in his teens, working as an airplane assembler for the Red Army during the Civil War. He soon graduated to flying school, joining the Red Banner Fighter Squadron in 1924. By the end of the decade he had become a fully fledged test pilot for the Soviet Air Force. Chkalov first achieved widespread public recognition in 1936, when, together with co-pilot Georgii Filippovich Baidukov (1907–94) and navigator Aleksandr Vasil’evich Beliakov (1897–1982), he completed a record-breaking long-distance flight that captured the headlines in the Soviet press. Taking off from Moscow in an ANT-25 aircraft strategically named Stalin’s Route [Stalinskii marshrut], the crew flew along the edge of the Arctic Circle and down over the Kamchatka peninsula before landing on the island of Udd. Airborne for a total of 56 hours and 20 minutes, Chkalov’s airplane covered a total distance of 9,374 km (5,825 miles). Yet it was not simply the achievement that catapulted Chkalov into the public eye. On his return to Moscow, the successful pilot was greeted by none other than Stalin. The intimate embrace of the Soviet leader and hero-pilot, captured by a press photographer and subsequently published on the front page of Pravda, rapidly became an iconic image symbolizing the close bond between Stalin and Chkalov as the most favored of all Soviet aviators (McCannon 1998: 107). The following year, Chkalov and his team undertook an even more daring mission, flying directly over the North Pole to the United States. Although the distance covered was less than the flight of the previous year, the nature of this achievement, traversing the most inhospitable terrain on the globe, confirmed for Chkalov a celebrity status subsequently matched in the Soviet Union only by the achievements of cosmonauts.

By now Chkalov’s media popularity was fully established. He was fêted in the Soviet press, and his life story, largely conforming to the standard precepts of an emerging Socialist Realist biographical literature, made frequent appearances in articles and books. In 1941, Lenfilm studio released a dramatic movie recounting his exploits.⁴ While such literary and cinematic representations of Chkalov have attracted scholarly attention, portraits of the pilot by contemporary artists have largely been overlooked. Yet these compelling images, in their specific attempt to find a visual vocabulary to convey Chkalov’s public reputation and to epitomize his capacity to overcome all obstacles in his unswerving dedication to the state, can reveal a great deal about the Chkalov myth and contemporary attitudes to aviation. They also offer fascinating insights into the artistic representation of Soviet heroes in the early period of Socialist Realism.

Among the numerous contempora...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture
• Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: The Aerial Ways of Aspiration and Inspiration, or the Russian Chronot(r)ope of Transcendence
• PART I Art and Architecture
• Part II Film, Animation, and Computer Games
• Index