Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Non-stop to America

  In the summer of 1937, three aeroplanes flew one after the other on the polar route from Moscow to North America. That was almost exactly ten years after Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. On 18 June 1937, the crew, consisting of Chkalov, Baidukov and Beliakov, set out in their ANT-25 on Flight SSSR No. 25. After more than 63 hours, they reached Pearson Airfield, near Vancouver (Washington), to the north of the town of Portland, Oregon. The pilots, who were supposed to have landed in Oakland, were welcomed by the commander of the base, General George C. Marshall, and put up in a hotel, after which they started out on a celebratory tour through the United States – via San Francisco and Chicago to Washington, DC, where they were received at the White House – ending up in New York. On 12 July they embarked on board ship for Le Havre.

  On the same day, 12 July 1937, a second aircraft took off from Moscow, another ANT-25 – Flight SSSR No. 25-1, piloted by Mikhail Gromov, Sergei Danilin and Andrei Iumashev, who set a new distance record of 6,300 miles when they landed in San Jacinto in southern California on 15 July.13

  The third flight took off on 12 August. This was manned by the crew of Sigizmund Levanevskii – Flight SSSR-H-209 – which was attempting to set a new world record for long-distance flight. The celebrated and popular hero of the Cheliuskin rescue disappeared, however, after sending radio signals about engine problems in the polar region and could not be found, despite large-scale searches involving international rescue teams.14

  And, as if this series of flights were not sensational enough, a further report caused a stir even before the transpolar flights to North America. On 21 May 1937 a plane coming from Novaia Zemlia deposited a manned polar station on an ice floe at the North Pole, which then drifted for almost a year in the Arctic Ocean towards the south-west and on to the coast of Greenland, where it was rescued in February 1938 and returned to the USSR.15 Everything the Soviet pilots had achieved until then seemed to be no more than a rehearsal: the flight of an ANT-4 – ‘Land of the Soviets’ (Strana Sovietov) – in 1929, lasting four weeks and leading from Moscow to New York via Siberia, Alaska, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Detroit and Chicago. Soviet pilots made demonstration flights to the Aérosalon in Paris or to Germany in the early 1930s; as the icon of progress and modernity, the aeroplane was the best vehicle for conveying the message of Soviet efforts to modernize at the time of the First Five-Year Plan. Since then there had been great advances in the development of a Russian aircraft industry – the development of new aircraft types – but also dramatic setbacks, such as the crash of the largest plane in the world, the Maxim Gorky, an ‘airplane colossus’ (samolet-gigant), in an air show on 18 May 1935, with forty-eight dead. This was followed by a public funeral at which over 100,000 people filed past the urns with the ashes of the victims in the Hall of Pillars, an event that remained stamped on the memory of an entire generation.16

  In the same way, following Levanevskii’s first failed attempt in August 1935, the non-stop flight to America via the Pole continued to be a prestige project of the first rank. Especially so ten years after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, twenty years after the October Revolution, and in the year of the International Exhibition in Paris. Many countries, the USSR in the lead, took part in the race to fly the fastest and shortest route. All the achievements that have now become routine in international air travel were still a step into the unknown – a risk, a ‘first’, an adventure. Planes had to be specially modified and fitted out; new navigation equipment and compasses had to be tried out. Problems such as ice on the wings, the loss of air pressure at greater heights, passing through clouds and storms, shortage of oxygen – these were the adventures of the Lindbergh era.

  Figure 19.2 Postcard with the route of the transatlantic flight and the pilots M. Gromov, S. Danilin and A. Iumashev

  ‘As the icon of progress and modernity, the aeroplane was the best vehicle for conveying the message of Soviet efforts to modernize at the time of the First Five-Year Plan.’

  The conquest of the Arctic

  A different race, a race for the North Pole, had begun and, at least from the internal Soviet point of view, 1937 was the year of the Papanin expedition, which had landed on the Pole in planes – and was now drifting south on an ice floe. Up to then no one had ventured to spend an entire year drifting through the ice. Since the end of the nineteenth century the North Pole had entered the minds of the international public as one of the very last regions of the world to be opened up and conquered. Explorers kept coming ever closer to the Arctic. Soviet explorers were quite conscious of seeing themselves following in the footsteps of their predecessors, the English seafarers who had sailed as far as Spitzbergen in 1827 and advanced from there to 82° 45'N; or the Austrian expedition under von Weyprecht and Payer, who had sailed the Tegetthoff into the Kara Sea in 1872 and, trapped in the ice, had landed on an archipelago that they named ‘Franz Josef Land’; or the expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen, who had set out between 1893 and 1896 and discovered that there was no ‘continent’ at all and that the Arctic Ocean was covered with ice; and, lastly, the Italian expedition that tried to reach the Pole in 1900–1 in their ship, the Stella Polare. Expeditions set out for the North Pole with dog sleds and balloons or airships. The American Robert Peary was the first person actually to reach the Pole, on 1 March 1909. A number of people had perished ‘on the battlefield of polar exploration’, including Salomon Andrée, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Some had been saved from the ice by rescue attempts that became famous the world over – one example was in 1928, when Umberto Nobile was rescued by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin.17

  The race for the North Pole had a dramatic pre-history, and by 1937 the main issue had ceased to be the discovery of the Pole: ‘It is no longer necessary to discover the Pole as a single point. So why do we strive to reach the Pole? Simply to repeat the work of our predecessors? No, our task is different in principle.’ The point of the expedition was now to produce scientific results – above all, to discover how and where the weather was ‘made’.18 The process of setting down on the ice and drifting in the months to follow all took place in full view of the public – unlike the American flights, which had simply been announced after the event. Evidently, the idea was to encourage the entire country to share in the experience for almost an entire year. It began with a report from TASS on 22 May 1937 by Otto J. Schmidt, the scientific leader of the polar expedition, a member of the Academy of Sciences and the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, as well as a leading figure of the Cheliuskin adventure, to the effect that a reconnaissance aircraft and four large aeroplanes with members of the expedition, representatives of the press and film industry had landed at the Pole.19

  North Pole, 22 May. We have spent our first day on the Soviet polar station at the North Pole. Five tents have gone up on the drift ice alongside the plane. Two radio aerials reach up into the sky. The weather station has been established; a theodolite is standing on a tripod to observe the height of the sun, determine our location and changes in location as a result of the drifting ice. It is relatively warm here (–12°), the sun is shining; there is a light fall of snow. Together with the crew of the SSSR N-170, the four over-winterers have offloaded equipment that has been brought by the plane, chiefly the transmitter and scientific equipment. The remaining eight tonnes, including a wind motor, a year’s food supplies and iron rations, fuel and the winter tent, are waiting on board the three other planes, ready to be transported on from Rudolf Island as soon as the weather permits flying. We are all in excellent spirits. After 24 hours uninterrupted work, we have all slept well in our warm sleeping bags. The five Cheliuskin people in our group are inevitably reminded of life on the ice floe. We have now taken our revenge on the forces of nature for the sinking of the Cheliuskin.20

  In the days that followed, the remaining cargo was brought over from Rudolf Island; the station was completed, and the four staying there – Ivan Papanin, Er
nst Krenkel', Petr Shirshov and Evgenii Fedorov, who also called themselves the ‘Soviet Plan Workers’ – remained behind. The others, including the scientific leader Otto Schmidt, flew to the mainland and back to Moscow. The experiences of those who stayed, the papanintsy, would hold the entire nation spellbound.

  The establishment of a polar station was designed to chart the meteorological and climatic conditions in the polar region – its variations, its seasonal changes and the atmospheric pressure. Improving weather forecasts in general was the aim. The explorers also hoped to gain more accurate knowledge of submarine topography, the layout of underwater mountain ranges, and the direction of currents in the lower and middle depths of the ocean, which were of great importance for the development of navigation through the Arctic waters and for the analysis of the movements of the ice along the coast. Further questions for which they hoped to find the answers concerned the strength of terrestrial magnetism in the polar region, a matter of great importance for cartography and the orientation of air travel. Finally, the explorers hoped to gain new knowledge of the flora and fauna of the polar region. The station in the drift ice was to be a sort of ‘moving expedition’ which would make scientific study possible over a longer period of time.21

  The decision to approve the expedition had been taken at a meeting of the Politburo on 13 February 1936. Those present were Schmidt, the leader of the expedition, the pilots Chkalov, Levanevskii and Gromov, as well as aircraft designers and representatives of the People’s Commissariats for Heavy Industry and the Head Office of the Northern Sea Route.22 Outside Moscow full dress rehearsals were held with a tent named ‘USSR: Drifting Expedition of the Head Office of the Northern Sea Route’, which was fully fitted out for the occasion.

  Matters now took a serious turn for the Papanin team. ‘From now on we were enveloped in a silence such as I have never before experienced and to which we were forced to accustom ourselves. We found ourselves at the end of the world – where there was neither east nor west. Wherever we turned our gaze, it was south.’23 The four members of the expedition were now fully occupied organizing their survival, installing and maintaining the wind engines, and recording their meteorological observations, deep-water measurements (on 17 July 1937 they recorded a depth of 4,395 metres), astronomical observations and the speed of the drifting ice (in June 1937 it was 20 kilometres per day). And from the beginning of October all of this was carried out in the utter darkness of the polar night.24

  Though far from their homeland, the station gradually developed into a USSR in miniature, which was in active contact with the outside world. It received news by radio and provided information about the weather. It sent up-to-date readings of its deep-sea measurements to the International Geological Congress meeting in Moscow. The explorers listened to the jazz records of Leonid Utesov and kept themselves informed about events back home. They heard about the triumphal reception of Gromov, Danilin and Yumashev in Moscow; they consulted the doctors on Rudolf Island; they listened to the news broadcast by the Comintern radio and enjoyed a concert transmitted from the Moscow conservatoire. They took part in the political life of Russia at one remove. They listened with earphones to the transmission of the festivities commemorating the October Revolution for hours on end and followed it up with their own parade on the ice floe.25 During the preparations for the elections to the Supreme Soviet, their names were put forward as deputies, and they expressed their regret at not being able to cast their vote in person: ‘The ice floe prevents us from casting our votes and from being present at the first session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.’ Even though they were drifting thousands of kilometres away in the polar night – this was the tenor of their reports – they were nevertheless present in spirit and involved at every instant in the events back home. Furthermore, Soviet man had succeeded in making a home even at the North Pole. ‘On the New Year’s Eve preceding the first day of 1938, Krenkel' tuned in to Moscow and we heard the celebrations in Red Square in our tent – the “Internationale” and the striking of the clock in the Kremlin Tower.’26 It will be crystal-clear by now that there was much more at stake here than a scientific expedition.

  As the ice floe gathered speed, the situation became increasingly complicated and even dangerous. The ice floe, now detached from the drift ice, became smaller and smaller as it melted and pieces broke off. The four explorers had to move their tent with all their gear several times so as to avoid the fissures. ‘Our ice floe is now drifting in open water and has lost all contact with neighbouring floes. From our tent to the nearest edge is no more than 300 metres.’ They had to prepare themselves for the possibility that their ice floe might break up at any moment, and they lay down fully dressed, ready to jump into their paddleboats. The ice made grinding sounds, new cracks appeared, stores on lumps of ice that had split off drifted away. On 1 February 1938, they reported:

  We are now on a piece of ice that has split off from the floe; it is about 300 metres long and 200 metres wide. Two storage dumps were cut off, as well as a technical stockpile with some less important equipment. When the sheds with the provisions were flooded out, we were able to rescue all the valuables. We also found a fissure under the tent, so we are moving into a snow house … The whole giant field, where planes with several engines could land eight months ago, was now just full of treacherous spots. Not even a light training plane could land there any more.27

  The moment for a great rescue attempt had now arrived. Icebreakers and whale trawlers set out from Kronstadt and Murmansk – as many as 1,700 sailors from the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. After drifting for nine months the explorers were discovered on 19 February 1938 by the crews of the Taimyr and the Murman and taken on board.

  At this moment we are leaving the ice floe at coordinates 70°54'N, 19°48'W. Drifting for 274 days, we covered 2,500 kilometres. Our radio station was the first to announce our conquest of the North Pole; we owe this to our reliable connection with our homeland. With this announcement we suspend the work of the ‘North Pole’ radio station. The Red Flag of our nation will continue to fly amid the vast expanses of the ice mass.28

  The Papanin expedition and its rescue appears like an astonishingly exact re-run of the Cheliuskin rescue in the winter of 1933–4. The boat, trapped in the ice and under pressure, seemed to embody a miniature version of the USSR, a mini-town on ice whose crew built runways, organized their work, ran sports competitions, arranged music evenings with records of Tchaikovsky and Josephine Baker, and ran lecture courses on economic geography and German literature. The ‘Schmidt camp’, with its daily routines, its rituals, its personal dramas, even including the birth of a child, was a mini-Soviet society in exceptional circumstances: Soviet society in a state of emergency in the eternal ice. ‘In the north you came to know people utterly. It was impossible to hide anything.’29

  Twentieth-century adventures

  The flying craze was an international phenomenon and not just a Soviet one. Following the age of iron and the railway age, planes became the symbols of speed and modernity.30 New routes were now included on world maps: the routes of transcontinental flights that encircled the globe and made it smaller. Civil air travel developed with great rapidity, so that it was easy to overlook the military origins of flight in the First World War. The war in the air and chemical warfare preoccupied the imaginations of novelists, newspaper readers and cinemagoers. A new international hero was born: the pilot in his leather outfit, with goggles and map-case, with clean-cut, sporting, manly features – soon to be followed by the no less sporting woman pilot. Their names were Charles Lindbergh, Hannah Reitsch and Valerii Chkalov – they were as familiar as those of famous film stars. Progress was measured by new records: higher, faster, further.