Modernizing Russia in the aeronautical age: Technology, legitimacy, and the structures of air-mindedness, 1909-1939

This dissertation examines the fundamental relationship between national culture, technology, and the idea of modernization through reference to Imperial and Soviet aeronautical culture. Utilizing contemporary newspapers, journals, films, private papers, military records, and recently declassified materials from Russian state archives, it identifies how successive governments in both Imperial and Soviet Russia appropriated aviation to strengthen political authority and to develop public support for new policy initiatives. The dissertation concludes that although private and state observers during the Imperial and Soviet eras shared certain fundamental assumptions concerning aviation's importance to Russian modernization, their approaches to the task of aeronautical development were radically differentiated by the ideological imperatives and social realities that conditioned the choices of Soviet rulers.;In addition to identifying the essential characteristics of Imperial and Soviet aeronautical culture, the dissertation offers new insight into the nature and direction of Russian society, culture, and politics in the years surrounding 1917. Through documentation of the interactive efforts of Imperial state officials and private citizens to raise public awareness of the importance of aviation, the dissertation contributes to the scholarly view that an emergent civic arena, independent from the tsarist state, was a salient feature of late Imperial Russia. In contrast, the Soviet approach to aeronautical modernization demonstrated the essential commitment of Party leaders towards a comprehensive program of forced modernization directed exclusively "from above" that sacrificed private associations and individual initiative in favor of centrally-planned collective action. Soviet officials' concurrent efforts to employ aviation as a symbol and instrument of the Party's scientific accomplishments, point to technological legitimacy as a constant and essential feature of Soviet culture.