There was a time when to get to Moscow from Hong Kong, one had to transit through Bangkok onto an Ilyushin which came down, due to its relative short range, in both New Delhi and Tashkent before finally arriving at Sheremetyevo. The flight was thus very long, and the food, well, wasn’t great. Russian-made planes were not certified to land in Hong Kong, so those of us flying the route were overjoyed when, in the 1990s, Aeroflot acquired Airbuses and it was possible to fly Hong Kong-Moscow direct in well under half the time.

But any flights at all had major advantages over what came before. As Aeroflot: Fly Soviet recounts, when the Tashkent to Alma-Ata route opened in 1924, the trip took seven hours, “a great improvement on the gruelling eight-day horse ride”. When in 1939, the Soviet version of the DC-3 flew from Moscow to Ashgabat (along with Elsa Gorodetskaya, Aeroflot’s first air stewardess) in 13 hours: “For passengers, this was greatly preferable to a train ride of 129 hours 30 minutes.” And that wasn’t the worst of it:
An extreme example of time-saving was recorded on the route between the Kazakh SSR capital Alma-Ata and Balkhash. Aeroflot Li-2 aircraft flew the 260 miles in two hours, while the same journey by train took 157 hours – almost a whole week. In the absence of a direct rail link between the cities, the train had to travel north all the way to Novosibirsk in south-western Siberia before returning south, covering a total distance of 2,354 miles – almost ten times the length of the direct flight.
Later decades were no less eventful. I970 say the first successful hijacking of a Soviet airliner to another country when an Antonov-24 from Batumi was diverted to Turkey, but not before the two hijackers had shot and killed the stewardess. They were arrested on arrival on arrival in Trabzon:
the USSR sought to have them extradited to face criminal charges, the US sought to prevent it. After spending two years in prison, they were released and eventually gained the right to reside in the US, a move that was condemned internationally …
Aeroflot wasn’t quite a “company” in the normal sense of the word; what is surprising is the lengths they went to, in a Socialist state, to behave like one, engaging in advertising campaigns, competing with rail, promoting destinations, trotting out stewardesses (as they were still called), producing toy models. Aeroflot surpassed American Airlines in passenger traffic in 1958: it was the world’s largest airline until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. And the experience even made it into Soviet popular culture, as in the song “Moscow-Odessa” by Vladimir Vysotsky:
Yet again I’m flying Moscow – Odessa,
And again they won’t let the plane take off.
But here comes the stewardess all in blue like a princess
As reliable as the whole civil air fleet.
…
There’s another delay until eight
And the citizens obediently doze…
I’ve had enough, to hell with it all,
I’ll fly to wherever they’ll take me!

Aeroflot: Fly Soviet is as least much the story of the planes as Aeroflot as an airline. Readers that spent any time flying in the USSR and post-Soviet “Commonwealth of Independent States” will many recognizable names—the IL-86, TU-124, the AN-24, the YAK-40—as well as planes that probably no one had the chance to fly, such the the supersonic TU-144, “derisively nicknamed ‘Concordski’ in the West.”
But what lights up this book is the artwork. Aeroflot: Fly Soviet joyfully reproduces page-upon-page of posters, advertisements, magazine covers, matchboxes, luggage tags, tickets postcards, knick-knacks, all in inimitable—and often quite artistic—vintage Soviet style.
Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.
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