Scott W. Palmer

More interested in the continuities between the aviation experience in Imperial and Soviet Russia, Palmer finds a comparable use of aviation between both regimes as being not just a marker of achievement in competition with other nations, but as a harbinger of change that would transmute the backward & inadequate Russian present into the shining future. The reality was that the genuine achievements could only be a veneer over the continued weaknesses of Russian society ("compensatory symbolism" being the author's term), in spite of the "forced volunteerism" of the Soviet state versus the enforced quietism of the Imperial state. Looking at the continuity of the failures in Russian society unto the current day one can only wonder what it will really take to create true social creativity in that country.… (más)