‘The giant first came droning over at midday, high up in the heat haze – a swept-wing monster, obviously extremely powerful, although by no means noisy,’ a reporter for the British aviation weekly Flight wrote in August 1959, introducing the ‘mighty Tu-114 Rossiya.’
… Some minutes later it snarled its ponderous way up to the control tower and stopped, looming over the buildings and dwarfing everything about it. Conventional airline stairs which were brought up and fully elevated got nowhere near the passenger doors. A narrow 10ft ladder, let down by the crew from the forward door, just made contact; and down this stairway from heaven, after a time, came thirty or forty Russians, including Mrs. Tupolev.
Writing from the 1959 Paris air show, the journalist regarded the demonstration of the new Soviet long-range liner as a ‘crowning event’ of the whole fair.1 On the other side of the Atlantic, Robert Hotz, an editor at the magazine Aviation Week, was equally astonished. Summing up his impressions on aviation aspects of a recent visit to the US by the Soviet First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, he wrote that ‘certainly nobody who saw the now familiar Tu-114… hurtle down the 9,000 ft. runway at Andrews A[ir]F[orce]B[ase], grossing 367,000 lb. including Mr. Khrushchev, and saw it come unstuck at 8,700 ft. will ever forget the sight.’2
Albeit rather troubled by the necessity to exit the plane in an ‘un-dignifying’ way and one far away from normal protocol by an on-board emergency ladder, which connected with the standard stairs in mid-air, a bulky ‘Mr K’ enjoyed the triumph. Unlike during the 1955 Geneva Summit when his plane ‘looked like an insect next to the planes that delivered Dwight Eisenhower, Anthony Eden, and Edgar Faure,’ four years later he flew to America non-stop, aboard the largest passenger plane of the day.3 But this was not all. In a frivolous and opulent style reminiscent of the Tsars, ‘Aeroflot operated two Tu-114 giant turboprop transports…, an Il-18 with an executive-type interior and shuttled four Tu-104 twin-engine jets back and forth between Vnukovo and Andrews AFB as courier planes swishing Soviet state papers to Mr. Khrushchev and his entourage and returning with mail, movies and still pictures of the American tour for Soviet audiences. As a result, Moscow television audiences saw Mr. Khrushchev’s arrival in Washington just two days after the event.’ In a final blow to the Western sense of technological superiority, two days before Khrushchev and his court came to Washington, the Lunik II capsule was the first man-made object to hit the Moon: a technological masterpiece. The Soviet press agency TASS reported, this was just ‘a precursor of more sophisticated devices which in the years to come will achieve “soft” lunar landings, go into orbit around the Moon and explore several other bodies within the solar system.’4
It was a perfect promotional storm and demonstration of power. In today’s globalised world of ‘open skies’ and mass air travel carried out by ‘super-jumbos’ like the Boeing B-747 or Airbus A-380, much of the ‘power allure’ which planes used to have in the past has now vanished. In the end, in an environment of ever-increasing oil prices and ever stricter environmental regulations because of the global warming, more mundane matters govern these days rather than aviation challenges. To borrow a famous headline of Bill Clinton’s 1992 US presidential campaign now ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’
However, while the connection between ‘the prestige, the fascination [with aeroplanes] and the “national interest”’ might have weakened, it was at the heart of why ‘international civil aviation [became] a serious problem in international relations.’5 As against this, it is a significant omission that Cold War historians have paid only a limited amount of attention to East–West relations in the civil aviation sector. In fact, in the ever-growing number of books and articles, there are only a few works which broach the topic. Thus, from the Western perspective, Jeffrey A. Engel analysed the sale of aircraft and aviation equipment to the Soviet Union and China within the context of Anglo-American infights for aviation supremacy; Jenifer van Vleck dealt with the US civil aviation aid to Ariana Afghan Airlines from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s and with US civil aviation diplomacy throughout the twentieth century and James L. Gormly has focused in two studies on US civil aviation policies towards the Soviet bloc.6 From the opposite, Eastern perspective, Stefan Albrecht described the development of Czechoslovak civil aviation policies within the Soviet bloc context from the mid-1940s to late 1960s; Philip Muehlenbeck furnished details on Czechoslovak civil aviation assistance to African countries in the 1960s and Phil Tiemeyer contributed with a study on how Josip Broz Tito’s regime attempted to position the country’s national carrier Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (JAT Yugoslav Air Transport) at the crossroads between the West, East and South.7 Finally, from an international perspective, David Mackenzie addressed the issue of East–West relations within the context of the International Civil Aviation Organization.8 None of the published studies has, however, studied civil aviation affairs from a larger East–West perspective, nor have the authors approached their respective research from a consequently transnational or global viewpoint.
This monograph takes a different line. Utilising both Western and Eastern sources, it details how East-West rivalry utterly shaped and transformed civil aviation during the Cold War. From the birth of the global route structure, through the development of engines to the design of aircraft, it was primarily Cold War security concerns as well as prestige and economic considerations that stimulated these processes. This in turn enabled a rapid spread of globalisation in the 1990s but, as this book details, it was East-West technological competition that laid down the foundations which were essential for this.
In its research design and methodology, the monograph draws on three sources of inspiration. The first is Cold War historiography which nowadays seems to be at the crossroads and is characterised by a number of rather disparate approaches. As the Italian historian Federico Romero has put it, ‘historians are… expanding, dissecting, and complicating the very notion of a Cold War into a kaleidoscopic multiplication of prospects, contextualisations, methodological approaches, and meanings.’ Yet, despite all the centrifugal tendencies and indeterminacy, two paradigmatic approaches seem dominant. One current of historians still leans towards the traditional paradigm and understands the Cold War as a ‘highly specific bipolar conflict’ which was based either on ‘security rivalry or pivoted on the projection of ideological and socio-economic models.’9 In this vein, the distinguished Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad called in his 2000 Bernath Memorial Lecture for a new international history of the Cold War and proposed three interpretation patterns, which he later fully elaborated in his seminal book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. According to Westad, the Cold War was a clash of two hegemonic universalist ideologies (democratic capitalism v. communism) and was dominated by the US–USSR struggle for technological superiority and supremacy over the so-called Third World.10
In recent years, however, a brand new research stream has emerged which ‘decentre from a primarily Euro-Atlantic focus to the complex heterogeneity of the Global South, and from a close frame on the superpower decision-makers to the agency of a variety of actors in Latin America, Asia or Africa.’ Also, the very subject matter is changing and historians have chosen to ‘enlarge the field from the customary subjects of diplomacy, security and ideology onto a bracing assortment of trans-national and domestic, cultural and social, human right and media, economic and intellectual history approaches.’ In consequence, the ontological consensus is vanishing and the traditional bipolar view is being ‘superseded by a complex fabric of disparate interactions (local, national, transnational and global) with multiple actors operating in many intersecting fields, and assorted interpretative paradigms often mixed together.’11 Scaling down from a global to a European Cold War arena, this group of historians sees the supposed bipolarity as over-simplifying and the superpower angle over-accentuating ‘the extent to which the superpowers shaped the course of world events.’ Also, East–West relations were not exclusively based on confrontation and mutual distrust, but ‘beneath the bipolar structure, multileveled interaction was taking place between different types of actors, between people, institutions and states. These lower-level actors below the great powers’ arena engaged in mutually beneficial cooperation, which quite often ran counter to the ambitions of the bloc leaders.’12
The second stream of historical research on which this book builds is that of the historians of technology who focus on the evolution of techno-based societies and address the role technology, expert networks and international organisations played in the globalisation and integration of Europe. According to these scholars, technologies and technological networks created and continue to create the structures of interconnectedness and interdependence that go ‘beyond nations and states,’ thus fundamentally accelerating the processes of globalisation and Europeanisation.13 Nonetheless, these inspiring inquiries make only brief and occasional excursions to the developments on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Furthermore, the works that deal with technology flows across the curtain, or those that pinpoint the (eventual) agency technology may have had for the Cold War’s outcome from a transnational perspective are rare and exceptional.14
This monograph attempts to remedy these shortcomings in scholarship. In a multi-faceted analysis, it strives to synthesise the above-mentioned approaches into a single, internally coherent framework which keeps a delicate equilibrium between the description of events from a macro and micro perspective. By mapping and reconstructing the cross-Curtain contacts and interlinkages in the civil aviation sector, this work reaffirms the importance of these transnational links, but it attempts to establish more precisely their proper relevance and place in influencing decision-making at higher levels of the power pyramid in both Western and Eastern countries. In this respect, as an essentially high-tech industry which was considered by the general public and all relevant...