Dawn of the Soviet Jet Age: Aeroflot Passengers and Aviation Culture under Nikita Khrushchev

Abstract

Dawn of the Soviet Jet AgeAeroflot Passengers and Aviation Culture under Nikita Khrushchev Steven E. Harris (bio) In the short story “Aeroflot,” an old woman sees an ad for the airline: “Fast, inexpensive, comfortable, saving time. Fly north, fly south, fly on business, fly for pleasure, fly to all corners of the world.” The narrator describes the ad’s image of a jet-plane interior as a domestic space promoting internationalism. “A young woman gives her baby tea to drink and looks through the small window onto the sugar-like clouds. A black man with a large forehead holds a newspaper in his large hands, while passengers play chess as if they were at a table at home.” One day, the old woman is gripped by the ad’s message. She yearns to be young and healthy again, to visit her children and grandchildren. In a dream that night, she projects herself into the ad “in the wonderful machine [where] she gave her child tea to drink, the black man with the large forehead smiled at her with his big teeth and big lips. You could just touch the clouds outside the airplane’s window. What happiness! She’s flying!” Suddenly, a doctor wakes her and says she’s had a heart attack. “Did something happen to you?” he asks. “No,” she mumbles, but the narrator concludes, “How could he have known that the old woman had been flying?”1 With this story, the Soviet writer Ida Shuĺkina updated the Icarus myth for the Jet Age, which passengers began to enjoy in 1956 on the Tupolev-104. In the early 20th century, visionary inventors and reckless pilots had played the role of the Greek hero for audiences who largely experienced flight [End Page 591] vicariously through their heroic feats. The old woman who replaces them in Shuĺkina’s story was a passenger, one of millions who flew Aeroflot annually and experienced the mobility and anxieties of jet travel. This article explores how representations of Aeroflot’s passengers became a critical source of information about the Soviet Jet Age and moved from the margins of aviation culture under Iosif Stalin to its center under Nikita Khrushchev. With the emergence of the passenger as the chief subject of aviation culture, the public not only received practical information on flying but learned what it meant to be a Soviet citizen in an age marked by rapid technological changes and improved mass consumption, the ideological stakes of which were accentuated by the Cold War. Echoing the superpower conflict, Aeroflot’s rivalry with Pan American World Airways shaped the socialist values of jet travel but also revealed the tension between expanded aerial mobility at home and strict limitations on foreign travel. Although Shuĺkina’s story intimated travel “to all corners of the world,” aviation culture tempered such aspirations by celebrating air travel as a domestic affair and reframing international routes as signs of Soviet prestige and prowess on the world stage. As proposed in this article, aviation culture provides a good entry for understanding how the Jet Age shaped the Khrushchev era. In his pioneering work on aviation culture in the first half of the 20th century, Robert Wohl opened this field for American and West European history by using a variety of sources from poetry and advertisements to film and memoirs to reveal the cultural and political meanings airplanes generated.2 In Russian historiography, scholars have similarly examined aviation culture, focusing primarily on the Stalin era but also late imperial Russia and the 1920s. Examining all three periods, Scott Palmer has shown how aviation culture bolstered the state’s legitimacy and helped define a Soviet path to modernity despite dependence on Western technology.3 Aviation culture after Stalin, however, remains [End Page 592] largely unexplored. Scholars have provided specialized studies on airplane design, military aviation, air routes, and administration but not the social and cultural roles of aviation in the Khrushchev era.4 Only one scholar, a US historian, has studied Aeroflot flight attendants and how their representations intersected with those from Pan Am.5 Although the closely related Soviet space program has attracted scholarly attention, the role of passengers...