In the spring of 1922, Muscovites got the shock of their lives. Down the street came something that looked like a car had been possessed by an airplane: an open-frame vehicle on four wheels, roaring with a full aircraft engine mounted at the rear, its big wooden propeller blasting air backward and pushing the whole contraption forward. Pedestrians froze, then scattered. Horses panicked. This wasn’t a stunt or a movie prop.
It was the aeromobile of Leonid Kurchevsky — and the man himself was often behind the wheel.
Kurchevsky was born in 1890 in the quiet historic town of Pereslavl-Zalessky, northeast of Moscow. He studied physics and mathematics for a couple of years at Moscow State University but dropped out – a pattern that would define his entire career of working around the rules rather than inside them.
By 1922 he headed the vehicle laboratory at the Inventions Committee of VSNKh (the Supreme Council of National Economy). In the chaotic early Soviet years, this was basically a playground for anyone with bold ideas and enough nerve to try them with whatever scrap was lying around.
The Propeller Solution to Everything
His idea was brutally simple: why bother with drive shafts, gearboxes, and differentials when you already have the most powerful portable engines of the era – surplus aircraft motors from World War I? Just bolt the engine to a light chassis, stick a propeller on the back, and let Newton do the rest.
The first aeromobile was an open, lightweight machine that looked half car, half experimental sled. Kurchevsky didn’t just test it locally – he drove it himself from Moscow all the way to his hometown of Pereslavl-Zalessky, about 140 kilometers, escorted by a convoy of normal cars that probably served as both witnesses and emergency backup.
He also built a cargo version with a twist that still looks insane today: the cargo bed sat in front of the driver and engine. With the propeller pushing from behind, why not? Visibility with a full load must have been… creative.
Around the same time he was experimenting with a tubular “reaction car” – a cylinder with contra-rotating propellers inside that would push air backward. Aerodynamicist Professor V. P. Vetchinkin even ran the calculations. It was never built.
The Wild Workshop in Pereslavl
Kurchevsky wasn’t a one-trick pony. In his Pereslavl lab (which included its own mill to help fund operations) he:
- Rebuilt wrecked foreign cars using mismatched parts (German bodies + American engines + French motors).
- Developed a miracle tire emulsion that could “heal” bullet holes on the fly. In one legendary 1922 demo at Khodynka Field, soldiers shot revolvers into the tires of a truck while it drove laps. The truck kept going for another ten circuits.
- Worked on alcohol-ether fuel mixes when gasoline was scarce.
- Built hydroplanes and aerosleds that could operate on water, snow, or mud.
It was classic 1920s Soviet “mad science” – resourcefulness taken to the extreme.
Context: When Aircraft Engines Were the Future
Kurchevsky wasn’t alone in his propeller obsession. Just a year earlier, Latvian engineer Valerian Abakovsky had built the “Aerowagon” – a high-speed railcar with a giant aircraft propeller. In July 1921 it carried high-ranking Bolsheviks (including Fyodor Sergeyev, known as “Artem”) on a propaganda trip. On the return journey it derailed at high speed near Serpukhov. Seven people died, including Abakovsky himself at age 25. Their bodies were buried in the Kremlin Wall.
Kurchevsky’s machines were slower and stayed on the ground, but they came from the exact same belief: the airplane engine was the most powerful thing available, so why not put it on everything?
From Propellers to Recoilless Guns – and Tragedy
By 1923 Kurchevsky had already started working on something new: dynamo-reactive (recoilless) guns. After a brief arrest in 1924 for alleged embezzlement (he was building a helicopter on the side), he was released and eventually became the chief designer of an entire experimental artillery bureau.
He created a whole family of recoilless weapons – from 37 mm anti-tank rifles to monstrous 305 mm and 420 mm naval guns. Some were mounted on trucks, planes, and even destroyers. For a while he had powerful patrons, including Marshal Tukhachevsky and Sergo Ordzhonikidze.
The problem? Most of them didn’t work reliably. They suffered from mechanical failures, dangerous backblast, and performance that didn’t match the promises. By the late 1930s nearly all were withdrawn and scrapped. The entire idea of recoilless artillery was discredited in the USSR for years.
In 1937, as part of the Tukhachevsky purge, Kurchevsky was arrested again. He was sentenced to death on November 25, 1937, and executed the next day (though some sources controversially list 1939). He was rehabilitated in 1956.
Why the Propeller Car Still Matters
The weapons failures and the purge have overshadowed the lighter, weirder part of Kurchevsky’s story. But in 1922, that noisy propeller car rattling through Moscow wasn’t a footnote – it was one of the most interesting things on four wheels anywhere in the world.
It captured the raw, desperate creativity of the early Soviet 1920s: warehouses full of aircraft engines with no planes to put them in, engineers who believed almost anything was possible if you just bolted the right parts together, and a state that was willing to let eccentrics experiment.
Today the aeromobiles look like steampunk prototypes or early concepts for hovercraft and air-cushion vehicles. They remind us that the line between genius and madness is often just a matter of timing and politics.
And somewhere in the archives, those old black-and-white photos still show a bald man with a determined grin, sitting behind the wheel of a machine that shouldn’t have worked… but somehow did, at least for a little while.
Soviet propeller car, 1922. Yes, it was real… and loud.