On May 18, 1935, the Maxim Gorky — the largest aircraft in the world, a Soviet eight-engine behemoth with a 63-meter wingspan roughly equal to a modern Boeing 747 — took off over Moscow alongside three smaller aircraft. The smaller planes were there to make the size difference obvious from the ground. The accompanying I-5 biplane, piloted by Nikolai Blagin, performed two loops around the giant plane. On the third, he collided with it. The Maxim Gorky crashed into a low-rise residential neighborhood west of present-day Sokol metro station, killing 45 people: both crew members and all 33 passengers aboard the Maxim Gorky, the biplane pilot, and nine people on the ground.
The ANT-20 had been designed as the flagship of the Maxim Gorky Agiteskadril, an aerial propaganda squadron that toured the Soviet Union promoting communist achievements. For this purpose it carried a printing press, a library, film projection equipment, and a radio broadcasting system called "the Voice from the sky" — a loudspeaker setup that broadcast propaganda directly from the air. It was named after the writer Maxim Gorky to mark the 40th anniversary of his career.
A replacement aircraft, the ANT-20bis, first flew in 1938 and served Aeroflot routes in Russia and Uzbekistan. It crashed in December 1942, killing all 36 aboard, after a passenger temporarily took the pilot's seat and accidentally activated the stabilizer control.
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