Table Of ContentSECURITY, CONFLICT AND COOPERATION
IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
Civil Aviation
and the Globalization
of the Cold War
peter svik
Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the
Contemporary World
Series Editors
Effie G. H. Pedaliu
LSE Ideas
London, UK
John W. Young
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK
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Peter Svik
Civil Aviation
and the Globalization
of the Cold War
Peter Svik
University of Vienna
Institute of East European History
Vienna, Austria
Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World
ISBN 978-3-030-51602-4 ISBN 978-3-030-51603-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51603-1
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Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the kind help which I have,
overyears,receivedfromKiranKlausPatel,WolframKaiser,OlafMertels-
mann,RobertvanderLinden,HelmuthTrischlerandWolfgangMueller.
I am also indebted to the Estonian Science Foundation, Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum, Gerda Henkel Foundation, Deutsches
Museum and FWF-Austrian Science Fund for providing me with long-
term financing necessary for carrying out this book project.1 I am also
grateful to my mother-in-law who had aided me with some translations
fromtheRussian.MyspecialthanksgotoAlanDobsonforhisfirst-hand
comments and suggestions as well as language editing. The book also
greatly profited from critical feedback I received from series editors, Effie
Pedaliu and John Young, and anonymous peer-reviewers. At Palgrave,
I would like to thank Molly Beck, Maeve Sinnott, Joseph Johnson and
Azarudeen Ahamed Sheriff for taking care of this book and kind assis-
tance with all technicalities. At the same time, I feel necessary to absolve
all persons mentioned above from any responsibility for the content and
eventualmistakeswhich,despitealleffortsonmypart,criticalreadermay
eventually find in this work.
1This research was carried out with the financial support of the ERMOS programme
(co-fundedbyMarieCurieActions)withintheprojectERMOS98andwasalsosupported
by the Lise Meitner programme of the Austrian Science Fund FWF under the number
M 2189.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Chicago Regime and Early (Dis)Connectedness 13
3 Building an Empire of the Red Air 43
4 Raising the Stakes 71
5 Trading Bananas for Permafrost 95
6 In the Shadows of Backwardness 119
7 Relations Cool Down and KAL 007 Incident 147
8 Bloc Aviation Under Late Socialism 181
9 Conclusion 205
Bibliography 221
Index 233
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
‘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.’
…Someminuteslateritsnarleditsponderouswayuptothecontroltower
andstopped,loomingoverthebuildingsanddwarfingeverythingaboutit.
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.
Writingfromthe1959Parisairshow,thejournalistregardedthedemon-
stration 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.
1‘Tu-114 Rossiya’, Flight, 21 August 1959, 43.
© The Author(s) 2020 1
P. Svik, Civil Aviation and the Globalization of the Cold War,
Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51603-1_1
2 P. SVIK
runway at Andrews A[ir]F[orce]B[ase], grossing 367,000 lb. including
Mr.Khrushchev,andsawitcomeunstuckat8,700ft.willeverforgetthe
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 supe-
riority, 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
‘powerallure’whichplanesusedtohaveinthepasthasnowvanished.In
2‘Aeroflot Visits U.S.’, Aviation Week, 5 October 1959, 21.
3Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston
and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 376 and Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita
Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2000), 83 and 328–31.
4Cf.‘TheRussiansHittheMoon’,Flight,18September1959,240;‘LessonsofLunik’
and ‘Soviets Hit Moon, Data Flow Improves’, Aviation Week, 21 September 1959, 21
and 28–30 respectively. See also ‘U.S. Gears Space Plan to Cut Soviet Gap’, Aviation
Week, 28 September 1959, 29.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
the end, in an environment of ever-increasing oil prices and ever stricter
environmentalregulationsbecauseoftheglobalwarming,moremundane
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
policiestowardstheSovietbloc.6 Fromtheopposite,Easternperspective,
Stefan Albrecht described the development of Czechoslovak civil aviation
policieswithintheSovietbloccontextfromthemid-1940stolate1960s;
PhilipMuehlenbeckfurnisheddetailsonCzechoslovakcivilaviationassis-
tance 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
5Andreas F. Lowenfeld, ‘A New Takeoff for International Air Transport’, Foreign
Affairs 54, no. 10 (1975): 36.
6James L. Gormly, ‘Opening and Closing Doors: US Postwar Aviation Policy: 1943–
1963’,JournalofTransatlanticStudies 13,no.3(2015):251–62;Id.,‘TheCounterIron
Curtain: Crafting an American-Soviet Bloc Civil Aviation Policy: 1942–1960’, Diplomatic
History 31, no. 2 (2013): 248–79; Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and
theAmericanAscendancy (CambridgeandLondon:HarvardUniversityPress,2013);Id.,
‘An Airline at the Crossroads of the World: Ariana Afghan Airlines, Modernization, and
the Global Cold War’, History and Technology 25, no. 1 (2009): 3–24 and Jeff A. Engel,
Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).
