Aeroflot

Aeroflot Soviet Airlines, the airline of the former Soviet Union, is the world's largest airline. For more than 50 years Aeroflot has been the focal point of Soviet and Russian civil aviation. Before 1920 Russian air enthusiasts had experimented with aircraft development, and in 1920 and 1921, as the Russian Civil War drew to a close, small-scale experiments with air transport were made under both private and state initiative. Flights to the Nizhni Novgorod fair, a traditional trade fair, engendered a more systematic approach toward aviation. The Chief Administration of the Civil Air Fleet was soon established, and one of its first acts was to develop in 1921 a joint venture with German interests to create the Deutsch-Russiche Luftverkehrs A.G. (Deruluft). Specializing in flights to the West, Deruluft's regular services began from Königsberg in eastern Germany to Moscow on May Day, 1927. In its tenth year of operation it had two main routes--from Berlin to Moscow and from Königsberg to Leningrad--and it carried 3,600 passengers and 145 tons of post and goods. Systemic domestic aviation developed at approximately the same time, with the state playing a more significant role. In March 1923 the first Soviet airline, Dobrolet, was created as a joint state and commercially based organization and the first regular service was introduced in July 1923 from Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod. The Russian people shared the West's interest in aviation, and an attempt was made to formalize this in March 1923 with the creation of a large public organization--the ODVF, or Friends of the Air Fleet, under the slogan "working people build the air fleet." Aviation could be portrayed as an exciting diversion from the real difficulties of the New Economic Policy as well as a potential source of future international conflict. At the 13th Party Congress in May 1924 it was noted that "the rapid growth of military and civil aviation in capitalist countries makes it necessary to strengthen and develop our own." The actual scale of activities, however, was still very small. In 1923 Georgian and Ukrainian based airlines were also created, backed by banks and commercial enterprises. During the 1920s, Dobrolet began to expand its activities across Russia, forming subdivisions as it did so, and in September 1926, it was made into an all-union organization. International flights to Mongolia and Afghanistan were initiated, but the main airlink to the West was still by Deruluft. In 1928 a general consolidation began. The Ukrainian airline was merged with Dobrolet, and between 1930-32 a succession of organizational changes culminated in all Soviet civil aviation being subsumed under the title Aeroflot in March 1932. Henceforth all internal civil flying activity was under the control of Aeroflot. The new airline did not become fully responsible for international flights to the West until the agreement with Deruluft expired in 1937, when the latter's routes were either suspended because of the growing hostility between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia or taken over by Aeroflot. In this way, Aeroflot emerged as the monopoly carrier in the USSR, with a structure essentially unchanged until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. During this long period Aeroflot experienced sustained expansion, interrupted only by the Second World War, when it played an important military role. By the end of the 1930s Aeroflot had become the world's largest airline. After 1945 the Soviet state made a deliberate attempt to direct medium- and long-distance travellers within the USSR onto Aeroflot. By 1990 Aeroflot connected 3,600 cities and towns in the USSR and flew to 102 countries, carrying 138 million passengers and 3 million tons of cargo and mail (5 million passengers and 100,000 tons of freight on its international routes). No American airline could compete at this level. However, as the Deputy Director of Aeroflot said in 1963, "a true comparison between ourselves and the Uni