RUSSIA: Hooligan Flyers

Standing before the graduating class of the Soviet Military Academy in the Kremlin fortnight ago, Dictator Stalin cried:

“The art of valuing machinery and reporting about our technique has been learned, but I fail to hear a single case of reports being made with similar eagerness as to how many people we have trained in a given period, and how they have been helped to grow and become experienced in their work. It is time to understand that the most valuable of all capital is the people. If we have enough trained men in our factories, farms and army, our country cannot be conquered; if not we are lame in both legs.”

The speech marked an important switch in Soviet policy from building machines, and yet more machines at all cost, to training men fitted to operate them. Not until last week did the world realize in most dramatic fashion in what dire need Soviet Russia is for capable, trained personnel. The Maxim Gorki, largest land-plane in the world, crashed in the worst airplane disaster in history (see p. 56). Russian designed, Russian built, the plane was technically perfect, might never have fallen but for the childish desire of a stunt pilot named Blagin to do tricks in dangerous proximity to the great plane.

Equally hysterical, a Russian news photographer in a third plane that was flying nearby nearly throttled the pilot of his plane before being knocked, half conscious, back into his seat.

The Soviet press was quick to echo the gist of Stalin’s speech last week. Announcing immediate plans for the construction of three planes just as big to be called Maxim Gorki II, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, the official Pravda cried:

“The stunting of Pilot Blagin was the result of a criminal lack of discipline which the Government and the Communist Party are removing from the air fleet with hot irons. . . . Regulations that hooligans of the air must not fly within a mile of military airplanes in flight should be applied to civilian aviation as well.

“We Bolsheviks never retreat. Now before the bodies of our dead warriors, before the wreck of the Gorki, we pledge ourselves to build a still more powerful and more beautiful airplane.”