Motor Sich ONE: Cossacks and aeronautics

Cossacks, the Chinese Elon Musk, Erik Prince, the Great Red Director Boguslaev. The Dniepr defense line. Inessa and Lenin, French bourgeois revolutionaries in Russia. Sikorsky. Gaddafi. Il-22M....

The mini-quests covered in today’s first instalment of the Motor Sich odyssey:

• An overview of the deep significance of the aeronatics factory - geopolitics between the Chinese Elon Musk Wang Jing, John Bolton, Erik Prince, and Russian military industry

• The charismatic owner Vyacheslav Boguslaev, paradigmatic ‘Red Director’. Compromising photos with young women in Moscow clubs, the ‘pro-Russian’ businessman’s tensions with Russia, his 2022 arrest and current occupation of the liminal space between life and death

• The prehistory of Zaporizhzhia - ‘beyond the rapids’. Cossacks, Tartars, and the Tsarist Dniepr defence line. How Aleksandrovsk became Zaporizhzhia.

• Imperial industrialization. French investors in the Russian empire and their Leninist wayward daughters.

• The Ilya Muromets bomber, the world’s first four-engine aircraft. The Kievan Igor Sikorsky and his national identity. Vyatrovych’s disavowal, purchase by Lockheed Martin

• Motor Sich’s many aeronautic achievements. The Soviet Union’s first helicopter. The world’s largest plane, the strongest helicopter, and the ‘tenacious bastard’ Il-22.

• Motor Sich worldwide - Iran, China, Gaddafi’s custom An-74

Motor Sich, Мотор Сiч, Motor Sich. I’ve been meaning to write about it for years, and the notes just keep piling up. What is Motor Sich?