In 1944, a Russian IL-2 warplane was shot down by the Germans near the town of Pustoshka in the western Soviet Union. It crash-landed on a frozen lake. And when the ice melted, the plane sank to the bottom, where it sat for more than 40 years.
Last month, the body of that rugged airplane, rebuilt and freshly painted with camouflage and red stars, gleamed under the lights of a cleaning room in a Smithsonian restoration hangar outside Washington.
The identity of the Shturmovik in the Smithsonian is still surrounded by mystery and ambiguity. It is a composite aircraft made from the remains of three or four Shturmoviks recovered from the bottom of lakes near Leningrad and Murmansk in the early 1990s. With the fall of the Iron Curtain t, it suddenly became easier for Western warbird collectors and restorers to recover wrecks of German and Soviet aircraft from the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War.
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