Russians to the Pole

In Moscow one night last week crowds bustled to a theatre to see a new play by one Michail V. Vodopyanov. It was called The Dream and it dealt with a flight to the North Pole. About the same moment Playwright Vodopyanov was actually at the controls of a big monoplane which was actually over the North Pole.

This coincidence was just one detail of a minutely calculated plan on which Russian scientists and aviators have been working for years and which last week came off with perfect precision under the direction of Russia's No. 1 non-political hero, jolly, bushy-bearded Dr. Otto Tulyevitch Schmidt. A 46-year-old chemist and meteorologist, who looks like the late U. S. coughdrop-making brothers of the same name, Dr. Schmidt was the first man to navigate the "northwest passage" from Archangel to Vladivostok in one year. He has been responsible more than anybody else for the Soviet's great development of this icebound route, over which some 160 freighters now ply each summer. Dr. Schmidt's greatest fame came three years ago when the icebreaker Chelyuskin sank beneath him and 101 men, women, and children, 150 miles north of Bering Straits. He set up housekeeping on an ice-floe, kept everyone alive & healthy for two months until a fleet of airplanes rescued them all (TIME, Feb. 26 & April 23, 1934). Since then, Dr. Schmidt has been planning a feat dwarfing anything he has ever done before--to establish a permanent base at the North Pole, run an airline over it from Moscow to San Francisco.

Last March, with all plans in order and complete equipment on hand, Dr. Schmidt led a flight of four four-motored ANT6 monoplanes from Archangel across the Arctic Ocean to bleak Rudolf Island in frigid Franz Josef Land. On May 5 one plane piloted by Pavel Golovin flew to the Pole and back without landing. Last week Dr. Schmidt himself took off, headed straight up over the bald, glittering dome of the globe toward the Pole. With him went Pilots Vodopyanov, I. T. Spirin, M. S. Babushkin and Mechanic F. I. Bassein. Vodopyanov, who took part in the Chelyuskin rescue, did the flying, covered the 560 miles to the Pole in six hours. Circling a few times, he picked a smooth floe 15 miles beyond, put his big plane down in a perfect landing. Climbing out and setting up a radio station, Dr. Schmidt wirelessed Moscow, 2,390 mi. away: "We feel that by interruption of communication we have inadvertently caused you alarm. We are very sorry. Hearty greetings. Please report to the Party and the Government the fulfillment of the first part of our task."

While Russia went crazy with joy and officially laid claim to the Pole.* Dr. Schmidt and friends set to like polar beavers. Next morning he reported: "Everything is in good order. . . . The first weather report was sent to Moscow according to schedule. The weather is comparatively warm--10.4DEG Fahrenheit. The sun is shining and a light wind is drifting the surface-snow. Everyone enjoyed a good sleep in the warm sleeping bags."

At Rudolf Island meanwhile waited 37 men, including four scientists, who will live at the Pole for the coming year. This week the three other planes are scheduled to take the four scientists and a load of supplies to the base, bring Dr. Schmidt and his companions back. The four who will remain are Ivan Papanin, the leader, a former military commissar and leader of the fleet mutiny at Leningrad during the War, lately manager of the polar station at Franz Josef Land; Ernest Krenkel, who was radio officer with the Byrd Expedition to the Antarctic in 1930; Pyotor Shirshoff, hydro-biologist who was aboard the Chelyuskin; and Eugene Feoderoff, who has been studying magnetic waves in the Arctic for three years. They will have an immense assortment of equipment: four tons or so of powdered chicken and similar foodstuffs, brandy, tea, caviar, a windmill to generate electricity for power, light, and cooking, skis, wolf-pelt sleeping bags, guns, sledges, a phonograph with 15 records, radio, chess set, cigarets (cigars for holidays), cameras, books, and a dog to warn of bears. Everything will be divided into five caches so that a sudden crumpling of the ice-floe cannot cause disaster.

The skill and success with which the ticklish job was launched lent a blush of color to the proposed Moscow-San Francisco airline. The route is by far the most direct (6,050 mi. against the present 11,000), involves stops at Archangel. Franz Josef Land, the Pole and the mouth of the Athabaska River in Alaska. Of greater value, however, are likely to be the expedition's magnetic observations, investigations of the direction and speed of ice-drifts, depths of the polar ocean, chemical and physical properties of different strata of water.

Said Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, who flew over the Pole in 1926: "This is a superb undertaking. ... It is my guess that the group . . . will drift over toward Spitzbergen or Greenland and in order to stay at the Pole they will have to move their base periodically in the direction of Alaska."

Said Matt Henson, 72-year-old Negro who is the sole surviving member of Admiral Robert Edwin Peary's party that trekked to the Pole in 1909: "It was a sight harder the way we did it."

*As the U. S. State Department explained, no question of sovereignty is involved for there is nothing there but water almost two miles deep.

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