Stalin's Aviation Gulag - A Memoir of Andrei Tupolev and the Purge Era
Available in English for the first time, Stalin's Aviation Gulag provides not only a personal biography of a key figure in Soviet aviation design but also an illuminating account of the human side of the Soviet Union's midcentury achievements in fight.
'For those familiar with the Stalinist legacy, in particular the purge era of 1937-41, the intersection of aviation and political repression is well known — in fact, this era became a dramatic example of Stalin's ambivalent posture toward his technological elite. At the very epicenter of this story is Andrei Tupolev (1889-1972), the Sovjet Union's premier aircraft designer in the twentieth century. A year before his death, an anonymous memoir began to circulate in the 'samizdat,' or underground press, in the Soviet Union. Bold in tone and filled with many anecdotes, [the memoir] soon attracted a large readership, becoming in the 1970s a classic in the literature of dissent. For members of the Soviet aviation community; the anonymous memoir represented a candid account of how Tupolev and many other specialists endured political repression under Stalin."—from the Introduction to Stalin's Aviation Gulag.