to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

Arctic Triumphs and Tragedies
kilometers south of the Pole in the American sector of the Arctic. In the spring of
1938, the sea currents and the direction of the ice drift were already well known.
One could assert with great probability that if the aircraft did not sink when it
crashed, then it was carried along with the ice toward Greenland and from there
to the Atlantic Ocean.The unexpectedly rapid drift of the ice floe on which the
polar station North Pole-1 was located confirmed this hypothesis. In February
1938, the four members of the Papanin expedition might have perished off the
shores of Greenland if rescue ships had not managed to reach them in time. A
detailed description of the searches for Levanevskiy during the period from 13
August 1937 until the end of 1938 is contained in Yu. P. Salnikov’s book A Life
Devoted to the Arctic. 17
In the Soviet press and radio broadcasts of 1937–38, the enthusiastic accounts
of heroic feats by our pilots and polar explorers shared the spotlight with reports
of uncovering hidden Trotskyites and other “enemies of the People.” During those
years the majority of my acquaintances and I had no idea of the actual scale of the
arrests. After the trial and execution of the officers headed by Tukhachevskiy, the
names of other “enemies of the People” were not officially reported. In October
1937, Tupolev, along with many of his closest collaborators, was arrested. In
November 1937, Air Force Commander Alksnis, who had just been decorated and
treated with much favor by Stalin, suddenly disappeared.
after the rush jobs to prepare the rescue aircraft were over, I resumed my studies
at the night school of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. My night
student classmates had not lost their sense of humor, and they recommended that
I immediately “go get lost in the ice” on one of the search aircraft. Only dozens
of years later did I become aware that it was only by pure chance that I did not
share the fate of many repressed individuals that I knew. The operation of the
NKVD apparatus at that time also had misfires.
August 1937 has remained in my memory as the month of the tragic loss of the
N-209.Among the crew, the man I was most fond of was Godovikov. But over the
month of the continuous joint preparation at the hot airfield, others had also
become my good friends.
The feat of Levanevskiy and his crew has remained forever in the history of
Arctic flights.
For the 1930s, the North Pole scientific-research station on the Arctic ice floe,
the first transpolar flights from Moscow to the United States by the crews of
Chkalov and Gromov, and Levanevskiy’s flight ending in tragedy were great and
heroic feats in the schema of history. Sixty-five years after these flights, a group of
experienced Russian test pilots decided to repeat the trans-Arctic routes of 1937.
Honored USSR test pilot and Hero of Russia Anatoliy Nikolayevich Kvochur,
17. Politicheskaya Literatura publishing house, 1984.
137