Avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko designed Aeroflot's winged hammer and sickle
The winged hammer and sickle still found on Aeroflot planes started life as branding for a 1920s start-up. Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko drew it for Dobrolyot, an early Soviet airline that sold shares for one gold ruble each and let anyone holding 25,000 of them borrow an aircraft.
Soviet civil aviation began on paper in January 1921, when a decree signed by Lenin asserted, for the first time in Russian history, the state's sovereignty over its airspace. Mail and passenger flights followed that May on a route from Moscow to Kharkov, using Sikorsky Ilya Muromets aircraft, and a joint Soviet-German company called Deruluft began carrying mail between Königsberg and Moscow in 1922.
Dobrolyot, formed in March 1923 on an idea credited to Leon Trotsky, was modelled on a volunteer merchant fleet from the 1870s. It had authorised capital of 2 million gold rubles, which grew to 5 million within a year, and relied mainly on Junkers aircraft. Beyond passengers and freight, its charter covered aerial photography and building up a domestic aircraft industry, and it put up its own airports and weather stations. Rodchenko handled its posters as well as the logo, urging citizens to buy stock.
The company absorbed its regional rivals in 1928 to become the only civil airline in the country, and on 25 March 1932 the name Aeroflot, meaning air fleet, was adopted for the entire Soviet civil air service. During the Second World War its crews were mobilised; between August 1942 and February 1943 they flew 46,000 missions into Stalingrad carrying supplies and troops. Afterwards, the rugged Antonov An-2 biplane, delivered from March 1948, carried local services across the whole union.
Aeroflot grew into one of the largest airlines in the world. When the Soviet Union dissolved, it was broken up in 1992 into roughly 400 regional carriers, nicknamed Babyflots. The surviving company remains Russia's flag carrier, based at Sheremetyevo in Moscow, with the government holding 73.77 percent of its shares.
Source: Aeroflot
