Introduction
In the fall of 1929, yet another pioneering Soviet film premiered in Berlin to critical acclaim. The Berlin _Film-Kurier_ reported that, like Sergei Eisenstein's _The Battleship Potemkin_ [_Bronenosets Potemkin_ 1926], "the film . . . has created an impression, which can only be defined by the word furor."2 In Britain, The New Leader hailed the film a "magnificent epic, that powerfully seizes one with enthusiasm." The director was accounted "of the same order as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, one of the very great masters."3 Soviet critics, too, likened the work of this new director to the best representatives of film avant-garde, with the leading critic Ippolit Sokolov judging it one of a very few films that "are creating the style of our Soviet cinema."4 But unlike the cinema avant-garde, the film also found favor with the same cultural radicals who hounded directors like Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin as bourgeois "formalists." The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), perhaps the most militant of these cultural vigilantes, warmly endorsed the film.5 Perhaps most surprisingly, mass audiences in the Soviet Union, who scrupulously avoided both the experimentalism of the avant-garde and the heavy didacticism of the cultural revolutionaries, made the film a genuine hit with a large box-office. What film could please so many constituencies in the midst of the Cultural Revolution?
Surprisingly, this sensation was not an avant-garde theatrical release such as Eisenstein's _Battleship Potemkin_ or Pudovkin's _Mother_ [_Mat'_ 1926], but an educational film (kul'turfil'm) made to propagandize one of the Five-Year Plan's many construction projects, Viktor Turin's _Turksib_. As Jay Leyda points out in his study of Soviet cinema, "_Turksib_ was a popular and immediate success abroad -- and a surprise at home, both to the makers of culture-films [kul'turfil'my] and of studio-films, especially when this modest film was received with enthusiasm wherever it was shown."6 _Turksib_'s success continues to surprise for a number of reasons. First, later scholars of Soviet cinema, when they have noticed it at all, have held _Turksib_ in low regard, both artistically and as a piece of propaganda. Denise Youngblood gripes that it has "too many shots of flowing water and cotton fields," and is mystified by Sokolov's good opinion of it. She pans it even as propaganda: "One learns very little from the film."7 Graham Roberts, in his path-breaking study of the Soviet documentary, is similarly negative. Although grudgingly admitting that _Turksib_ "received genuine popular acclaim," he considers Turin's film a faux-documentary; the film's "approach to the material is melodramatic" and its style too much in the debt of fictional film conventions.8 Few films have seen such a discrepancy between contemporaries' acclaim and the dismissal of posterity.9
Second, with the exception of Dziga Vertov's work, and perhaps Esfir Shub's, very few cognoscenti would expect a documentary to receive such critical acclaim abroad and mass appeal at home. While both the avant-garde and the commercial cinema have been long studied for their impact on Soviet culture and world art, documentaries have only recently attracted scholarly attention.10 Even studies focusing on the propaganda function of films, such as Kenez's _The Birth of the Propaganda State_, Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh's _Soviet Cinematography, and Film Propaganda_, make only passing reference to the genre of films the Bolshevik leadership most associated with political indoctrination, kul'turfil'my.11 This neglect reflects the historical defeat of the genre in the culture wars of the late 1920s -- for all their imprimatur of ideological soundness, kul'turfil'my were liked by neither directors nor studio executives. Nonetheless, disregard of this genre seriously skews our understanding both of what the Soviet state wanted to convey through film and of what Soviet audiences watched. Arguing that nonfiction and current affairs material has an important "agenda setting function in a society's zeitgeist," Roberts is certainly correct in noting, "Audiences, via club showings, were far more likely to have seen _Turksib_ or any number of documentary shorts than the masterpieces of Dovzhenko or Eisenstein, never mind Boris Barnet."12
Finally, the neglect of _Turksib_ may come from a misapprehension of its message. As a frankly celebratory treatment of Stalinist industrialization by a young director sympathetic to Cultural Revolution, _Turksib_ has been fit into a comfortable framework of socialist realist propaganda. As such, and despite its reception, it has largely been denied the aesthetic evaluation offered to such art films as _Battleship Potemkin_, while being judged primarily for ability to translate reigning party orthodoxies. Such an approach, however, both overestimates the film's conformity to regime propaganda goals, and underestimates its cultural influence. An indication that _Turksib_'s use as a propaganda medium was at best ambiguous to the regime can be seen in the fact that _Turksib_ became an "arrested film" by the mid-1930s; it was pulled from distribution and put on a list of films not to be shown at any venue.13 If its propaganda half-life was rather short, however, the movie established an enduring legacy by initiating a particular sort of Soviet Orientalism.14 Simply classifying _Turksib_ as agitprop does little to explain it, its popularity, or its cultural influence.
To do so, a multilayered analysis of the film is necessary. First, the film must be viewed not only in terms of its text, but also in relation to its subject, the great railroad construction for which it was named. _Turksib_ must be put into context, both cinematically and politically. The movie not only played a role in film industry debates over what a Soviet film ought to be (nonfiction versus fiction, didactic versus entertainment, avant-garde versus commercial), but also acted as a tool for the regime's social engineering schemes. Since it is assumed, wrongly, that Turin acted as a politically orthodox propagandist under more or less tight control by the party-state, the actual production of _Turksib_ needs to be examined. _Turksib_ was the first major feature of a new and fragile studio, Vostok-Kino, that held a brief from the government to "enlighten" the "backward" East. The studio's attempts to shape Turin's efforts to meet these goals, as well as guarantee the movie's commercial success, influenced _Turksib_'s production and reception. Moreover, the reception itself among varied audiences, all with very different expectations from the film, requires interpretation. Finally, to understand _Turksib_'s unexpectedly broad appeal, the themes and motifs of the movie, as well as its style, must be scrutinized....
2 GARF, fond A-444, opis 1, delo 170, ll. 2-4: Spravka, "O rabote prodelannoi VOKS'om po propagande fil'ma 'Turksiba.'" 3 Ibid. 4 Ippolit Sokolov, "The Legend of 'Left' Cinema," [originally I. Sokolov, "Legenda o 'levom' kino," Kino i zhizn', 1930, no. 5], in _The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents_, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 290. 5 "RAPP Resolution on Cinema," in _The Film Factory_, 277. 6 Jay Leyda, _Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film_ (London: Unwin and Allen, 1960), 260. 7 Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 215. 8 Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! History and the Non-fiction Film in the USSR (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 111. 9 The contemporary consensus is all the more jarring in that the first generation of western scholarship on Soviet cinema generally responded positively to the film. Thus Leyda says of the film, "The theme was handled with astonishingly skillful editing, the audience being worked up to an intense emotional crisis by the sheer brilliance of technique. Individual scenes of strong dramatic value abounded in every part" (Leyda, _Kino_, 260). Alexander Birkos, writing in the 1970s, could say of _Turksib_ that it was "still considered by film historians as one of the outstanding documentaries of world cinema" (Alexander S. Birkos, _Soviet Cinema: Directors and Films_ [Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1976], 116). 10 Most importantly, Roberts, _Forward, Soviet!_ but see also Valeriya Selunskaya and Maria Zezina, "Documentary Film-A Soviet Source for Soviet Historians," in _Stalinism and Soviet Cinema_, ed. Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (New York: Routledge, 1993), 172. Documentary films were also neglected by Soviet scholarship. The one exception is Sergei Drobashenko, _Istoriia sovetskogo dokumental'nogo kino_ (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1980). For the standard treatment of Soviet cinema highlighting the avant-garde's difficulties with power, see Richard Taylor, _The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For commercial fiction films in the silent era, see Youngblood, _Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era_, and idem, _Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s_ (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1992). 11 The partial exception here is Richard Taylor's work, which does feature Vertov's _Three Songs of Lenin_ [Tri pesni o Lenine 1934]. Arguably, however, this is the least "documentary-like" of Vertov's films, as it includes much staged material. Richard Taylor, _Film Propaganda; Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany_ (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998 [1978]), esp. 73-84; Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, _Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991_ (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993); Peter Kenez, _The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods for Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 12 Roberts, _Forward Soviet!_ 1-2, 5. 13 In fact, _Turksib_ was one of the few "revolutionary" films censored from the repertory in 1936 along with such decadent and "bourgeois" films as _The Bear's Wedding_ [_Medvezh'ia svad'ba_, Eggert, 1926], _Aelita_ [_Protazanov_, 1924], and _Third Meshchanskaia Street_ [_Tret'ia Meshchanskaia_, Room, 1927]. See Peter Kenez, _Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 144. Further evidence of Turin's questionable credibility is that _Turksib_ was the last film he made until his _Men of Baku_ [_Bakintsy_, 1938]. While Turin did not suffer in the purges and died peacefully in 1945, he does seem to have fallen into the same sort of artistic limbo that afflicted Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub after 1930. See Roberts, _Forward Soviet!_ 111. 14 The existence of Orientalism in a Soviet context and the importance of film in establishing it, see Michael G. Smith, "Cinema for the "Soviet East": National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film," _Slavic Review_ 56/4 (Winter 1997): 645-78.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.emory.edu/OIA/Halle/publications/payne.pdf>.] *****
Matthew J. Payne: <http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/faculty/payne.html>.
Matthew J. Payne, _Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism_: <http://www.pitt.edu/~press/Fall2001/Payne.html>.
Turksib (poster): <http://artwork.barewalls.com/product/artwork.exe?ItemID=23839&zoom=1&njs=1>. -- Yoshie
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