to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

Rockets and People
The Main Directorate of the North Sea Route, Glavsevmorput,was established in
1932. It was directly subordinate to the Council of Peoples’ Commissars. Otto
Yulyevich Shmidt, a well-known scientist and leader of polar expeditions, was
appointed director of Glavsevmorput. His deputy and chief of polar aviation was
Mark Ivanovich Shevelev. In 1933, Shmidt attempted a nonstop voyage on the
North Sea Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok in the steamship Chelyuskin.In
February 1934, the ship was trapped and crushed by ice in the Chukchi Sea, and its
many passengers, including women and children, were taking refuge on an ice floe.
People of all social strata feared the fate of the expedition, and were thrilled by the
heroism of the pilots who saved every last inhabitant of the Shmidt ice camp.
The Soviet pilots who participated in the rescue of the Chelyuskin disaster
victims were the first in the USSR to receive the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
Arctic pilot Sigizmund Aleksandrovich Levanevskiy was also among the first
heroes. He came to fame in 1933 by rescuing American pilot Jimmy Mattern, who
was trying to complete a solo round-the-world flight and crashed his plane near
the Anadyr Range. 2 Levanevskiy transported Mattern back to the United States.
In the spring of 1935, Levanevskiy approached the government with a proposal
to organize a transpolar flight from Moscow over the North Pole to the United
States. He proposed using the Tupolev ANT-25 aircraft in which pilot Mikhail
Gromov had set a world record for the longest nonstop flight. The Council of
Labor and Defense adopted a resolution to arrange for a flight from Moscow to
San Francisco. On 3 August, Levanevskiy, copilot Baydukov, and navigator
Levchenko took off in the ANT-25 aircraft from the Air Force NII’s airfield in
Shchelkovo, intending to land 63 hours later in San Francisco. The entire world
followed the flight preparation and the flight itself with enormous interest. A
successful flight would help establish closer political and economic relations with
America. According to foreign press assessments, this flight promised to be the
most dangerous and the most remarkable in the history of aviation.
Ten hours after takeoff, having flown only as far as the Barents Sea, the crew
requested permission to terminate the flight on the designated route and return to
the nearest airfield due to a defect in an oil line. Oil had spilled over the wing,
flowed down onto the cockpit canopy, and leaked into the cockpit.
The failure of the flight was a heavy blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union.
Stalin decided to personally hear a report from the crew about the causes of the
failure and their suggestions for the rehabilitation of our aviation. During the
meeting with Stalin, Levanevskiy suddenly announced, “I don’t trust Tupolev! In
my opinion,Tupolev is a saboteur. I will never fly one of his airplanes again!”The
details of the discussion concerning the causes of the emergency, of course, never
made it into print, but aviation circles learned about Levanevskiy’s declaration
2. The Anadyr Range is located in the extreme northeast of Siberian Russia. Its easternmost part ends in
the Chukchi Peninsula near the Bering Sea.
118