Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939

Although Russia's relationship with the North Pole dates from the 1500s, it wasn't until "after World War II [that] the USSR emerged as one of the top nations in polar research and development, both in the Arctic and the Antarctic." Expeditions peaked in the Stalinist years of the 1930s, and in less than a decade, there occurred many notable achievements: 1932 saw the icebreaker Sibiriakov cross through the fabled Northeast Passage; in 1934 Soviet aviators staged an unprecedented and daring rescue mission; and 1937 saw "Soviet pilots capture the world record for long-distance aviation two times in succession...." McCannon's focus is on the larger subject of the USSR's economic and cultural development in this period seen through the prism of Arctic exploration.

The heroic exploits of polar explorers and aviators seized the public imagination, and helped unify this huge, sprawling, diverse "totalitarian" culture. McCannon regards these heroes as an answer to the question of how totalitarian regimes command loyalty from their populations. Brainwashing and terrorism can not alone explain it. But the galvanizing force of popular myth might, and in the service of this idea, McCannon analyzes "socialist realism" of the time as a Zeitgeist. Its key elements are "the cults of Lenin and Stalin, a keen sense of patriotism, a great emphasis on technological and industrial power, and, above all, heroism." The Arctic itself grounded these ideals, enriching them with the North's mythic pull and the high-tech grandeur of aviation. Until the appearance of this history, the impact of the Arctic on Soviet popular culture has been a neglected study.

Though flush with scholarly detail, McCannon's history will engage the layperson who has some knowledge of the subject. Within each chapter, the material is organized into manageable narrative blocks. The subject might have remained as cold as the title, but McCannon's narrative voice conveys clarity as well as a love of subject. --Hollis Giammatteo

Product Description
A work of refreshing originality and vivid appeal, Red Arctic tells the story of Stalinist Russia's massive campaign to explore and develop its Northern territories during the 1930s. Author John McCannon recounts the dramatic stories of the polar expeditions--conducted by foot, ship, and plane--that were the pride of Stalinist Russia, in order to expose the reality behind them: chaotic blunders, bureaucratic competition, and the eventual rise of the Gulag as the dominant force in the North. Red Arctic also traces the development of the polar-based popular culture of the decade, making use of memoirs, films, radio broadcasts, children's books, and cultural ephemera ranging from placards to postage stamps to show how Russia's "Arctic Myth" became an integral part of the overall socialist-realist aesthetic that animated Stalinist culture throughout the 1930s.

Mr. Heckathorn criticizes my book mainly on the grounds that I fail to take into account Robert Harrison's "proof" that the USSR's three transpolar flights of 1937 (along with other Soviet air expeditions) were faked. I would argue in return that to ignore Harrison's "findings" is not a fault, but rather responsible scholarship.

Readers should be aware that Harrison's book (a vanity publication that was, for some time, unable to find a press at all, then was taken up by a publisher that specializes mostly in thriller fiction) is a classic example of conspiracy-theory fringe literature. At least on the Internet, its principal endorsement comes from a British neo-fascist group (www.heretical.co.uk), most of whose web space is taken up with paranoid ravings about "Hebrew millionaires" and "Jewish communists." This is not to say that Harrison (or Heckathorn) shares any of these views; it is simply to show that Harrison's writings hardly occupy a place in the scholarly mainstream.

Harrison's arguments are based on speculative readings of grainy, poor-quality Soviet photos, equally grainy, poor-quality photos taken by the U.S. Army, and theories and assessments contained in U.S. intelligence reports. Harrison fails to take into account that the Soviet media (much like Western news services, then and today) routinely printed stock photos of pilots and aircraft, so images in newspapers and books did not always match the times and places mentioned in captions or headlines. This creates inconsistences, out of which Harrison spins theories more elaborate than they need to be. Moreover, the U.S. Army was hardly the most objective observer of Soviet aviation, and, for that matter, it was not always the most accurate. Also, writing in the 1980s, Harrison had no access to government and Communist Party documents in Russian archives, a plethora of which shows that these flights did in fact take place (and since these documents were never intended for public consumption, Soviet or foreign, it is safe to assume that they were not faked).

Finally, Harrison's conclusions, especially when applied to the third polar flight of 1937--Levanevsky's fatal disappearance--flies in the face of all logic. If the Stalinist regime went to such great lengths to deceive the world about its polar triumphs, in order to impress the international community with its technological prowess and human bravery, why on earth would it follow two stunning successes with a hideously embarrassing failure? If Stalin had wanted to purge Levanevsky (as Harrison and Heckathorn assert), he could have done so easily without a needlessly intricate plan that necessitated tarnishing the USSR's earlier exploits in the Arctic (faked _or_ genuine).

Admittedly, no archival record ever reflects the past with absolute precision or completeness. And Stalin was certainly ethically and practically capable of any deception imaginable. But Stalin did not deceive without rational purpose. And the archival record is more trustworthy than dubious guesswork based on possible inconsistencies spotted in photographs of less than stellar quality. At most, Harrison has raised the rather truistic point that not everything about Soviet propaganda exploits was as it seemed. But, with respect to matters of substance, he has neither proven nor disproven anything, circumstantially or conclusively.


Stalin's Fake Polar Flights of the 1930's   December 28, 2001
Ted Heckathorn (Idaho)
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Few polar historians or academics are aware of the late Robert J. Morrison's 1987 exposure of Stalin's North Pole scam of the 1930's, in "Russia's Shortcut to Fame: 50-Year Hoax Exposed." Morrison researched from previously classified US Army documents and photographic evidence that the so-called record setting flights originated from remote islands of the Alaskan panhandle to Vancouver, WA and San Jacinto, CA, not from Moscow as Stalin wanted the world to believe. Also Levanevsky was not lost in the Arctic, but was a victim of Stalin's great paranoid 1937 purge