“Not he who is unlearned in script and writing, but he who is unlearned in photography,” they say, “will be the illiterate of the future.” But is someone who cannot read his own pictures worth less than an illiterate? Will not captions become the fundamental part of the photograph?

Walter Benjamin. Little History of Photography. 1931.^[1]

From 1930 to 1941, a group of avant-garde artists working in the Soviet Union combined their talents to produce one of the most visually pyrotechnic publications of the 20th century, USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike).^[2] Printed in color on sheets of oversize high-quality paper and appearing in four major international languages (English, French, German, Russian, and, sometimes, Spanish), the magazine served to promote a favorable image of the Soviet Union abroad as the country underwent rapid modernization and massive social reorganization in the 1930s.^[3] Founded on the initiative of Maxim Gorky and guided by an editorial board that included several important political figures, the magazine “was intended to gain friends for the Soviet Union abroad.”^[4] In the words of its creators, it would “reflect in photography the whole scope and variety of the construction work now going on in the USSR.”^[5] As one contemporary had it:

“[the magazine] was founded to popularize industrialization by means of photography. But along with the growth and development of the magazine, the task of popularization has grown into that of an ecstatic artistic reflection of socialist reality. Friends of the magazine who have watched over it since 1930 have seen how, over time, the form and function of a photographic snapshot itself have changed. At first [the photograph], which attempted to be simply a documentary, inspired just criticism. . . . Then in an attempt to be more expressive and to reflect the grand scales and tense tempo of construction, the snapshot began to grow and acquire a compositional force.”^[6]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/nunan01.jpg>

Fig. 1. German Edition of USSR in Construction.

Today it remains a remarkable exponent of an artistic and photographic avant-garde – photographers such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova, Max Alpert, and Georgy Petrusov, and writers like Isaac Babel, Nikolai Fadeyev, Sergei Tretiakov, among others – with a voracious appetite for experimentation and new media.^[7] This team of artists, representing a wide range of stances toward formalism as well as the relationship of documentary photography with narrative, would devote themselves to capturing on film the impressive achievements of the First Five-Year Plan (Magnitogorsk, Dnieprostroi, the Moscow Metro) and convey them to the outside world.^[8] Even the magazine itself, which employed sophisticated printing techniques such as rotogravure, four-page gatefolds, and die cuts, embodied the frenetic pace of technical change in the USSR as it sought to make a coherent story out of the “factory of facts” of the USSR in this period.^[9]

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Fig. 2. Alexander Rodchenko, Special Parachute Centerfold, USSR in Construction, 12 (1935), n.p.

But USSR in Construction did not focus solely on Soviet industrial accomplishments. For nearly every issue on Magnitogorsk, the Berezniki Chemical Works, or the Moscow and Leningrad Meat Packing Plants, readers could find reportage on the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. Issues of the magazine appeared featuring photography and reportage from Tajikistan, the Altai, Yakutia, Khibiny, Kazakhstan, Chuvashia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Gorno-Badakhshan – regions of this ethnofederal state on the road to modernity, but also regions that still needed technical and cultural assistance to avoid atavism or decadence into Asiatic barbarism.
This mattered for a state that prided itself on its anticolonialist credentials. For the revolution had made prophecies. As one issue of USSR in Construction pronounced: “and in the places where lay the lifeless sands of Kara-Kum, cotton fields will bloom. And in the places where dead clay cities have been drifted over with sand for thousands of years, new cities, socialist cities, will arise.”^[10] The revolution had promised to replace the “dingy and hastily built” bathing huts of the Kola Peninsula with a bathhouse that had floors of “marble slab and walls covered in colored tile.” It had promised not muddy kishlaks but street corners outfitted with loudspeakers playing Mozart; not miserable trading settlements on the Kara Sea, but cosmopolitan northern Siberian port cities that would host “Negroes and English, Indians and Swedes.”^[11] If Soviet rule in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Arctic failed to effect this change, the Bolshevik claim to be building an anticolonialist Asia would ring hollow.
Since the late 1990s, scholars of European, Eurasian, and American empire have studied what one might call the social aspects of imperialism: the role that travel, trade, and exchange with far-off colonies, protectorates, or zones of imperial rule has played in “the construction of identities, the dissemination of official ideologies, and the processes of empire building and nation formation.”^[12] A similar focus on these processes and the material and intellectual paraphernalia they left in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s allows one to investigate “the production, dissemination, and reception of official narratives” about this new kind of state, a multinational state that shared some traits with European and American empires but that also defined itself as an anticolonial power.^[13] Several scholars have produced imaginative work along this line. Francine Hirsch has written eloquently on “virtual tourism” in the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum in Leningrad, Anne Gorsuch on the idea of turizm presented in the postwar travel magazine Vokrug Sveta.^[14] Both Paula Michaels and Jeff Sahadeo have written on the identities ascribed to and taken on by Soviet Asians by examining, respectively, Soviet medicine in Kazakhstan and Asian migrants to Moscow and Leningrad after the war.^[15] Willard Sunderland, Nicholas Breyfogle, Elena Shulman, Michaela Pohl, and Rebecca Manley have written on how movements of people from the core to the imperial periphery – be it the Eurasian steppe, the South Caucasus, the Far East, the “Virgin Lands,” or wartime Tashkent – affected subjects’ and citizens’ imagination of the Russian and, later, Soviet empire.^[16]
But while we now have some idea of what we might call the social history of Russian/Soviet empire from the perspective of domestic imaginations up through the 1950s, less has been written on the role that international imaginations of the USSR, both real and “virtual,” played in the Stalinist period. USSR in Construction – the Soviet Union’s most important and most sophisticated magazine geared for international consumption in the 1930s – provides a window into this world in three important respects. For one, USSR in Construction had unique access and resources to send photographers to regions of the USSR distant from Moscow – regions that were almost inaccessible to Soviet citizens living in European Russia (apart from exiles and political prisoners) and visited by only the most adventurous, or foolish, of Western souls (John Scott, Langston Hughes, and Fitzroy MacLean).^[17] Based on my preliminary research, I have not been able to find an archive of, for example, reader response letters back to the paper or detailed mentions of it in the memoirs of contemporary intellectuals that might allow for an approach similar to that of Hirsch regarding the Ethnographic Museum or that of scholars studying Soviet citizens’ writings in comment books of American exhibitions in the Communist world throughout the Cold War.^[18] A more systematic investigation of image selection by, and reader response to, issues of USSR in Construction, however fascinating, is outside the bounds of this current article and awaits my further research. But if statements about the reception of USSR in Construction have to remain speculative for now, the magazine would appear to be a likely, and at least ready-at-hand, source for perusal by sympathetic readers in the 1930s. As of 1937 it maintained distribution offices in Moscow, New York, Paris, Istanbul, Warsaw, Vilnius, Oslo, Shanghai, Sofia, Geneva, Prague, Tallinn, Bucharest, and Haifa. As Erika Wolf has shown, the editors who oversaw the magazine and the administrative complexes that funded it had significant ambitions for a readership that consisted not only of an international intellectual and business readership but also – if Wolf’s argument is to be fully believed – the emergent, increasingly sophisticated, Stalinist urban elite of the 1930s.^[19]
USSR in Construction served as a creative arena for figures who have not typically figured in the narrative about Soviet nationalities policy in the 1930s, avant-garde artists, Soviet census-makers and -takers, museum curators and visitors, and physical anthropologists: these figures as well as the Russian avant-garde and editorial staff of USSR in Construction were part of a complex mosaic of actors defining, redefining, and redacting the story the Soviet empire would tell about itself and its nationalities throughout the 1930s. Therefore, a study of USSR in Construction during its years of peak creativity, from 1930 to 1937, before many of its members died or were purged, allows one to examine how this diverse avant-garde played a significant role in creating a narrative about this new anticolonial empire and the peoples inhabiting it.
The fact that the Russian avant-garde was not the only documentary enterprise drawn to sites of rapid modernization and social reorganization in the 1920s and 1930s (consider, for example, German New Objectivity photographers, the photographers for the Turkish journal La turquie kemaliste, or the Photography Group of the American Farm Security Administration) makes this fact more significant.^[20] By comparing the depiction of non-Russian nationalities in USSR in Construction with the work of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange in the American context, the student of the Soviet state and Russian avant-garde can learn more about how the story of the peoples of the USSR emerged during this period as well as about the relationship of avant-garde and state in the Soviet Union.^[21]
In raising this comparison, I hope to contribute to a lively scholarly approach that seeks to place the Russian Empire and Soviet Union in a global comparative context. In the previous ten years, scholars have fruitfully abandoned both the totalitarian paradigm and any approach that sees Russian history as uniquely mysterious or impenetrable for a range of approaches to place Soviet history in a pan-European, pan-colonial, pan-Islamic, or pan-modern context. Peter Blitstein, Robert Crews, Adrienne Edgar, Francine Hirsch, Elif Kale-Lostuvalı, Deniz Kandiyoti, Marianne Kamp, Adeeb Khalid, Douglas Northrop, Alexander Morrison, Beatrice Penati, Niccolò Pianciola, Jeff Sahadeo, Paolo Sartori, Yuri Slezkine, and Christian Teichman (among others) have participated in a matrix of debates – nationalities policy, the Uzbek hujum, the transformation of Central Asian jurisprudence or music, to name a few – that has revolved on how to define the Eurasian empire that emerged and was transformed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[22] Debates over the proper comparative case for the Russian or Soviet empire – Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Japan, Britain, France? – offer a rich opportunity for scholars to imbibe in similar debates about empire and colonies in other national historiographies.^[23] In a related move, anticipating and then echoing Stephen Kotkin’s call in a 2001 article to view the Russian/Soviet experience as “a pivotal case for understanding the matrices of social welfare and thus of the early twentieth-century modernity and subjectivity,” scholars such as Hirsch, Peter Holquist, David Hoffman, Yanni Katsonis, Paula Michaels, and Claudia Verhoeven, among others, have placed Soviet ethnography, intelligence gathering, modernity, and pronatalism in a wider context.^[24] More recently, graduate students such as Elidor Mëhilli, Jeremy Friedman, and Sam Hirst have been researching the links between the Soviet Union and Communist Albania, Sino-Soviet Competition for the nonaligned world, and intellectual exchange in the realm of political thought between Kemalist Turkey and the USSR, respectively.^[25] In this article, I seek to make a modest contribution to this wave of scholarship in two ways: (1) by suggesting the possibility for documentary photography as a medium through which to examine the social history of empire; and (2) to suggest part of the interwar U.S. documentary photography scene as an arena of comparison with the well-known world of Soviet avant-garde photography.^[26]
More specifically, this article investigates the depiction of southern Central Asia in issues of USSR in Construction from 1931 to 1937 in an effort to explore two themes: the role of documentary photography in shaping “the narrative” in the process of Soviet state formation and how this story, intended for international consumption became garbled, self-contradictory, and unclear. This mixed message, I argue, derived from the serendipitous coincidence of unclarity and tension in two seemingly unrelated Soviet intellectual scenes of the period – nationalities policy and ethnography on the one hand, and avant-garde photodocumentarism on the other.
I focus on southern Central Asia (Tajikistan, Khujand, and Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast) for two reasons. One is documentation. USSR in Construction produced three issues on either Tajikistan or Gorno-Badakhshan during its years of peak creativity.^[27] Further, the temporal distance between each of these issues (October 1931, December 1936, and February 1937) provides a chance to see how “the narrative” about the region and its peoples changed over time with respect to ethnographic and nation-building initiatives in the region. Moreover, the fact that USSR in Construction devoted an entire issue to an autonomous oblast within Tajikistan (the only time this occurred in the magazine’s history) makes this a focused case to see how the magazine treated clans, tribes, ethnicities, and so on that were themselves national minorities in what a newly constituted Soviet Socialist Republic.^[28]
The second reason for this focus is that the ethnographic complexity of southern Central Asia makes it an illuminating area on which to focus a study of documentary photography. Not only ethnographers who explored the region in the 1920s and 1930s in order to establish national borders, but also the magazine editors and writers depicting the new arrangement had to find sharp answers to fuzzy questions. Who was a Tajik? Were Samarkand and Bukhara Tajik or Uzbek cities? What was the relationship between urban Tajiks and the “mountain Tajiks” of the Pamirs?^[29] As the editors, photographers, and writers for USSR in Construction produced their issues about a region of the world that few had ever visited, they had to consider more basic questions to which the answers to these first questions would implicitly respond. How was the Soviet Union transforming its population? What was the future of numerically small peoples within the ethnofederal structure of the USSR? What was the Marxist response to new national socialist ideas asserting that race, not sociohistorical factors, was the determining factor in human development?^[30] Did “backwardness” exist in any objective sense, and could it be overcome through socialist labor conditions? I focus on the artistic tactics photographers, caption writers, and layout editors chose to create a narrative about the nature of the Soviet state and its peoples and communicate that narrative to international readers, as well as how that narrative shifted depending on time, place, or auteur of a given issue of USSR in Construction; I treat “the ideological front” of the Soviet Union during the 1930s as a dynamic field.

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Fig. 3. Soviet Central Asia, c. 1931-1936.

I have divided this article into two sections to explore these issues. The first section investigates how issues of USSR in Construction depicted the youngest republic in the Soviet Union and its ethnic and linguistic makeup. What exactly was this small, unindustrialized republic? USSR in Construction provided only a muddled answer to this question. Earlier issues of the magazine glorified the construction of Stalinabad, the republic’s capital, created in the 1920s practically ex nihilio – primarily because it represented a model Soviet city for Asia.^[31] But still, this glorification of a “Tajik capital” that had to be built from scratch raised questions about the competence of the Tajiks themselves. And while USSR in Construction glorified the friendship of peoples between the nationalities living in Tajikistan (many of which were not official nationalities per Soviet censuses), its issues obviated basic questions raised by this miscegenetic process of nation-building.
In a second section, I consider the relationship between the photographic avant-garde and state policy in the USSR with that of another major photographic group, the Photography Group of the American Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration of 1935–1944. Administrators tasked Soviet photographers dispatched to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with political goals that differed from those of the American photographers sent to the Dust Bowl and the American South: USSR in Construction sought to improve the image of Soviet Communism as a vibrant alternative path to modernity among a global readership, while the images taken by the Photography Group were intended to furnish American publications with images of the grim reality of rural poverty and to maintain support for the rural New Deal.^[32] Still, photographers and editors in both the Soviet and American contexts faced similar choices about what and what not to depict. How could one exploit depictions of backwardness to justify social transformation? How to depict ethnic minorities (African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, or Central Asian Arabs and Jews)? Not only their budgets and salaries but also the public image and reception of these great social engineering projects of the 1930s would depend on their efforts.
Before we proceed to my main analysis on the photodocumentary style of USSR in Construction, one final remark on optical regimes is worth mentioning. Any attempt to critically evaluate whether a photographic project succeeds, is “confusing,”, “not clear,”, or “bizarre” – as I have found USSR in Construction’s portrayal of the nationalities question in Soviet Central Asia – necessarily proceeds from certain assumptions about what photography is supposed to do.^[33] These assumptions about photography and aesthetics are, as a rich tradition of criticism has pointed out, shaped by what Christian Metz has called “scopic regimes” – different epistemological frameworks for approaching the world and art.^[34] As concerns the Soviet Union and modern Russia more specifically, contemporary writers as well as current scholarship provide several rich possible approaches. Dziga Vertov, for example, introduced to contemporary discourse the concept of the “kino-eye” (kino-glaz) – the idea that film ought be stripped of all of its theatrical elements (script, actors, decor) arguing that “raw” film of everyday life, when properly structured through complex shooting techniques, could serve as a tool to restructure man’s gaze and aid his progress.^[35] The lesser-known filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, introduced the “film train” to Russia in 1932 – Medvedkin and crew boarded a specialized train that would travel the country, film either heroic or lazy workers, produce the raw footage into newsreels en route to other destinations, and rapidly disseminate footage of near-current events throughout the country to major studios.^[36] As Emma Widdis, a scholar of Medvedkin, has shown, new technologies were exploited to create new senses of space, time, and speed. As for the team that produced USSR in Construction itself, Rodchenko wrote with great thoughtfulness on the differences between the approaches of the photographers on the USSR in Construction team.^[37] More recently, Victor Tupitsyn has argued that the 1930s in Russia saw a huge optical restructuring of the population toward what he has called a “communal optic.”^[38] He argues that housing shortages and the massive influx of peasants to Moscow and other urban centers in the 1930s, combined with other regime policies, created a hysterogenic atmosphere in which the anxiety of the kommunalka restructured people’s speech, behavior, and ways of seeing.
The precise relevance of these reflections to this article is that one’s conclusions on the efficacy or legibility of the photographs depends dramatically on the optical regime from which one regards them, or under which one imagines them to have been produced. The critic’s position is further complicated if one remembers that the photographs were produced by Soviet photographers for a wide variety of Western and Asian audiences. Adding a cross-national comparative aspect further complicates matters. Still, here I will attempt to evaluate the Tajikistan photographs not using Vertov, Medvedkin, Rodchenko (whose specific comments on photographs for USSR in Construction are scant) or Tupitsyn as my guide, but rather by attempting to link what I, a Western observer reared in a concrete optical regime markedly different than that of the 1930s, see in the photographs with what historians of the Soviet Union have recently established about nationalities policy in the country at the time. I write less as a historian of art than as an amateur attempting to link the visual culture of the 1930s with recent developments and research agendas apace in the historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union.^[39] My intention is not to “Orientalize” these photographs by dismissing them as not up to the standards of a Western optical regime, but rather to draw more attention to them as a valuable piece of evidence to inform debates in the historiography of the Soviet Union today. The emphasis is on finding disagreement, surprise, and paths not taken as we seek to find touchpoints between the rich worlds of Soviet photodocumentary and the tackling of nationalities in a Eurasian empire.

NATIONALITIES AND LANGUAGE IN TAJIKISTAN AND USSR IN CONSTRUCTION
In the early 1930s, Tajikistan became a locus of interest second only to perhaps Magnitogorsk for Western writers and intellectuals infatuated with the Soviet experiment.^[40] When Joshua Kunitz, the author of a travel account about the region, asked Sluchak, a Jewish Belarussian administrator in Stalinabad, why he chose to remain in this dusty frontier town – why Tajikistan interested him – he could hardly contain himself:^[41]

“If one wants to work, to build, Tadjikistan is the place. If one wants to fight – Tadjikistan affords ample opportunity for that, too. Even now, in 1931, we have our hands full with Ibrahim Bek and his Basmach bands. What makes this place so alluring is that the struggle here is extraordinarily intense – extraordinary even in the Soviet Union. You have done well to come here. Geography, history, religion, customs – everything seems to have conspired to make this obscure place the ideal spot for anyone who wishes to study Bolshevism both as an international force and a domestic generator of highly charged economic, political, and social drama. First, we are at the gates of Hindustan, Afghanistan, China, countries with considerable Tadjik populations. Second, we have to deal with the most fanatical Moslems in the world. Third, it is an inaccessible mountainous country – tucked away in the Hissar and Kuliab valleys and hidden among the Zeravshan, Altai, and Pamir mountain ranges – and native counter-revolutionary bands supported and armed from the outside have an excellent opportunity to harass us constantly. Fourth, we have here an involved national question, and particularly and quite naturally a tendency toward Tadjik chauvinism. Fifth, Tadjikistan was an incredibly ignorant and impoverished country.”^[42]

Sluchak may have been right, but inhabitants of Tajikistan as well as Western observers would want to know: what was Soviet development doing to the region? It may have been well and good if Tajikistan, prior to the establishment of Soviet power, stood out as “incredibly ignorant and impoverished,” full of “the most fanatical Moslems in the world,” or hindered by “Tadjik chauvinism” toward the other nationalities in the region. One might dismiss this as the legacy of the Emirate of Bukhara. There was little one could do about the fact that this frontier would become populated by a “larger than usual share of crooks,” “has-beens,” “failures,” and “followers of long rubles” in addition to earnest builders of socialism.^[43] Nevertheless, if the Soviet project was going to become “a model republic of the Eastern countries,” let alone to German, British, American socialists, it had to show that it could indeed master backwardness and the national question.^[44] In this context, USSR in Construction took on special significance as the Soviet regime’s primary international photographic journal. As the main printed source that was produced and sponsored by the Soviet government, it had a special sanction for readers that works like Kunitz’s Dawn over Samarkand could never possess.
Still, the magazine, particularly in its first issue on Tajikistan (November 1931) but also in its issues on Gorno-Badakhshan and Tajikistan in 1937, presented a confused picture of Soviet development efforts in the region. The nationalities question represented a major problem in this regard. For an issue of a magazine devoted to glorifying Soviet nationalities policy, USSR in Construction’s 1931 issue tended to depict the Tajik SSR less as any sort of ethnofederal unit for Tajiks and more as a novel cosmopolitan Soviet Orient. This became clear on one level through the issue’s depiction of Tajik cities: on the title page to the issue, a photomontage combines a vertical cutaway of a map of Tajikistan with a photograph of a party of men on horseback looking across a riverbank into Afghanistan.^[45] The magazine depicts only a center swath of the territory of the Tajik SSR, and “Stalin-abad” stands at the center. The map deliberately excludes any of the western territories of the SSR as well as Samarkand and Bukhara. As one turns the page, it becomes clearer and clearer that Stalinabad – not the Persianate cities located in the Uzbek SSR – has become the focus of Tajik national culture. A photograph depicts a monument of Lenin with his cap in his left hand and pointing with his right hand. The caption beside it reads: “Tadjik poets have written hundreds of poems dedicated to this monument”: there is no mention of Tajik culture or cities outside the Tajik SSR. “The capital – Stalinabad – is the militant headquarters from which culture, industrialization and socialism spread over the entire Republic,” says a caption on the next page. All of these penetrate “the far off villages, the inaccessible mountains, and the impassable marshes.”
Well and good, but a closer look at Stalinabad itself begged the question of the Tajikness of the new republican capital. USSR in Construction dismissed much of what remained of the settlement prior to Soviet development as backward or on the road to being eliminated, be it Dushanbe’s “narrow obscure streets” of which few remained, or the “clay huts with mud and reeds” photographically juxtaposed against brand-new dormitories. And the modern city of Stalinabad that was rising up was hardly representative of Tajik urbanism. One photograph caption spoke of the “newly paved streets” that “cut through the city” as well as “a new worker’s settlement with standard type houses built on a strip of formerly waste land.” If the new infrastructure of Stalinabad was imposing gridded order over the former fetid alleyways of Dushanbe, or if the new dormitories represented non–site-specific housing on what had been “wasteland” before, was this not less a Tajik city and more a construction site? Another page of coverage on Stalinabad showed the buildings that housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik SSR, the House of the Red Army (with signage in three languages – Arabic-script Tajik, Latinized Tajik, and Russian), and a “Dekhanin House,” a social club for peasants. Yet all of these buildings used European or Russian-style architecture: where were the lavish chaikhanas of Khojent (pictured later)? Here was one picture of the new republic – in some way a Tajik republic, but divorced in geography, architecture, and urbanity from the great Persianate cities now lodged in the Uzbek SSR.^[46]
Further confusion prevailed when it came to the nationalities question in Tajikistan. The magazine never clarified whether this was a distinctly Tajik republic in which other narodnosti would be expected to do what Tajiks accused Uzbeks of doing to them in Uzbekistan – namely “to assimilate into Uzbeks” – or whether it was to be a more diverse place in which the friendship of nations would allow all the narodnosti of Tajikistan to flourish.^[47] USSR in Construction certainly depicted Tajikistan as a place where people identified by nationality rather than religion, language, or cultural heritage: one photograph showed a poster on a classroom wall diligently listing several of the peoples of the USSR while schoolchildren – “natives of Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan, Bukhara hebrews and Arabians” – sat in their seats.^[48] While these schoolchildren and, in another photograph, young men, learned Latin-script Tajik, another page of the 1931 issue emphasized the ethnic devolution at work in Tajikistan. One caption played up the republic’s diversity:

“Numerous national minority races live and develop freely in the Tadjikistan Republic. Who, for example, knew before the Revolution that there were arabs in Tajikistan? In the Kurgan-Tyubinsk region alone there are Uzbeks, Khazars, Luls, Beludji, Lokanzi, Yognobzi, Turks, Afghans, etc., etc., living as friendly neighbors. Under the Emir each of these tribes was bitterly hostile to one another.”

Such was the self-representation of Soviet nationalities policy vis-à-vis that of Bukhara and the Russian Empire as presented in USSR in Construction: good neighborship and the rediscovery of forgotten narodnosti. Still, what exactly were these peoples? “National minority races?” “Tribes,” to use the phrase of the above caption? Or, as the Tajik captions described them, qabilehha (types)? It was not clear how to fit them in on the road of Marxist national development, or what position (if any) the Tajiks held over them. One photograph depicted a young Arab boy learning math “in an Arabian school” near “an Arabian collective farm, named after Sho-Taimura.”^[49] Another photograph showed a troupe of Jews playing their instruments in front of a house: “There is a collective farm of Bukharan Jews, situated next to a Tadjik village. The youth of both farm and village get together in the evenings for a bit of fun.” USSR in Construction left unclear the future direction of these minority nationalities: non-Tajik nationalities, it appeared, could remain on their own national collective farms, and, yes, intermingle with the other peoples of the Tajik SSR. But what of a genuinely Tajik SSR? What of proletarian internationalism? Readers could not help but be confused about the nationalities policy of the world’s first socialist state.
USSR in Construction also presented a Babelish picture of language policy in the region. Here the editors of the magazine faced a hugely complicated and subtle world. As historians of Central Asian languages have noted, prior to the October Revolution, most literate Central Asians spoke two or three vernacular spoken idioms, but generally wrote in Persian, Arabic, or Chagatai, an Eastern Turkic literary language.^[50] Numerous Turkic language dialects and varieties of Iranian languages dotted the region in the south, while the idea that each territory or population group should have its own proprietary language remained foreign.^[51] Many of the spoken Turkic vernaculars had no written form and “virtually no literature, beyond an oral folk tradition.”^[52] While Bolshevik ethnographers and linguists operating in the Turkic regions of Central Asia thus had to try to invent newly standardized and written languages out of thin air, they faced a different problem in Tajikistan.^[53] On the one hand, classically derived Persian (as opposed to dialects more distinct from the classical present within Central Asia) boasted a treasure house of a literary tradition dating back more than 1,000 years in Iran, Central Asia, and India and might position the republic well as an outpost to South Asia; on the other hand, literary Persian could be associated with feudalism, and many mountain Tajiks simply could not understand it. Following extensive debates about language reform throughout the 1920s, the delegates to a linguistic conference in Stalinabad on August 22, 1930, decided to base the new Tajik language on its contemporary spoken and written form, while also abandoning features of the language that unified it with the Tajik/Persian spoken outside of the Soviet Union. Phonetics would be based on the Bukhara dialect (even though the border delineations had allocated Bukhara to the Uzbek SSR), and Tajik was to be written in Latin script. The decision, lauded by one Tajik journal Rahhari Donish (Guide to Knowledge) as a “progressive stance” that would bring Tajikistan closer to advanced European nations and languages, separated future generations of Tajik-learners from both Persian literature and the non-Soviet Muslim world.^[54] While many Party leaders in Tajikistan struggled to make the switch from Arabic to Latin script, by the late 1930s, reported literacy rates had gone from less than 4 percent to 70 percent.^[55] While many of the non-Slavic languages of the USSR were Cyrillicized in the late 1930s to limit the spread of pan-Turkic ideas from Turkey and to make it easier for all army recruits to read and communicate in Russian in the army, for a period in the 1930s, Tajikistan, along with other Central Asian republics, used Latin script: Western, modern, and un-Islamic.^[56]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/nunan04.jpg>

Fig. 4. An example of Arabic-script Tajik language insert, USSR in Construction, 10 (1936), n.p. The photomontage describes a mountain Tajik from Darvaz who has successfully settled on a collective farm near the Vakhsh River.

In the 1931 issue of USSR in Construction, however, the editors made the decision to include brief Arabic-script Tajik translations of the majority of narrative text (in English, French, German, and Russian) in the issue, sometimes presented side by side with the text, other times in separate text boxes running parallel or perpendicular to the European language text. The ultimate reason for the script appears to be that some copies of the magazine were purchased and distributed by the Society for Cultural Ties with the USSR, a Soviet organization, for shipment to cultural elites in Afghanistan.^[57] It made for a unique choice: in no other issue of USSR in Construction did the editors include native-language translations of the actual content of the issue: not with Georgian, not with Yakut, not with Kazakh. The move produced a bizarre impression. On one level, even as the magazine showed Western readers photographs of petroleum refineries and industrial silk plants elsewhere in the republic, what could one conclude about Oriental backwardness or modernity upon seeing photographs of Tajiks riding down rivers on inflated goat skins, with captions in a script removed from European or American modernity? Tajikistan might be improving economically, but one could easily conclude that the republic – after fourteen years of Soviet power – remained closer to Mecca than Moscow.^[58] On another level, USSR in Construction contradicted reality and appeared to be furthering – at least to Western readers – a more exoticized view of Tajikistan than was actually the case. In one photograph under the heading “Training New Men,” the reader finds photographs of Tajik classrooms (segregated by gender) reading in Latin-script Tajik from a chalkboard.

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Fig. 5. Max Alpert, Classroom in Tajikistan. On the chalkboard is written “Zinda bod rohi Lenin, pojanda bod jurqaji bolsivikon”; the posters on the wall depict Europe (left), several peoples of the USSR (middle), and a map of the Western and Eastern Hemisphere (right). USSR in Construction. 10. 1931. n.p.

On a third and final level, the choice of Tajik-language captions – regardless of their script – raised further questions about the national character of the republic. USSR in Construction had made much of the highly multiethnic character of Tajikistan, but what would become of Arabic, Khazar, or Yaghnobi if pedagogues and authorities emphasized Tajik as the national language? One photograph, subtitled “abolishing illiteracy,” provides some suggestions. In it, we find a Tajik teacher instructing two illiterate Arab pupils how to read – not in Arabic-script but in Latin-script Tajik. In another context (the 1936 issue of USSR in Construction, written by El Registan on Gorno-Badakhshan), the magazine bragged of how speakers of Shugnan, an Iranian language spoken in the Pamirs “by only a few thousand people,” could enjoy “textbooks in their native tongue [that] have been printed for this handful of people.”^[59] The explanation went on:

“Today there is not a single village in the Pamirs without its school for youngsters and its literacy courses for adults. The thirst for knowledge has seized on tribes who but yesterday worshipped fire and a human god. In Porshnev – the citadel of the biggest ishan (priest) in the Pamirs, Yusuf-Ali-Sho – the young Pioneers make charming songs of the verses composed by the poet Lakhuti to the Kremlin.”

The narrative presented in USSR in Construction might be called one of “chauvinistic ethnophilia.” Students of all nationalities in Tajikistani schools had to learn Tajik – in Latin script, most of the time, in theory. Only thus could Shugnan children sing songs composed by a Persian poet dedicated to the guidance of Russians.^[60] But within certain limits, children of other nationalities and linguistic backgrounds would have materials made available for them. While Shugnan could read from Shugnan textbooks, other officially recognized narodnosti – Arabs, for example – had no national rights to Arabic language materials as Arabs per se (even if most of the Central Asia Arabs spoke Uzbek and Persian). If it had been Lenin’s argument that native language instruction was essential “even for a single Georgian child,” then the situation in Tajikistan was more complex.^[61] Whether they spoke Central Asian Arabic or another language as their mother tongue, young Arab girls in the Tajik SSR would learn Tajik – in Latin script. How much practicality and how much ideology determined this – and whether USSR in Construction was even giving an accurate description of conditions on the ground – is hard to determine precisely, and probably depended on context. It was, of course, striking that USSR in Construction was placing so much attention on minority ethnic groups in Tajikistan at all. According to the 1926 Soviet census, there were only 77 Central Asian Jews, 198 Jews total in the entire republic, and yet they merited coverage. But it still presented a picture of a nationalities policy in which some narodnosti, like Shugnan, enjoyed exceptional national rights while others, like Arabs, were forced to adapt to learning the national language of their republic.

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Fig. 6. Max Alpert. Photograph of Tajik man inflating goat skin raft. USSR in Construction. 10. 1931. n.p.

All of this might seem precious today, but in the interwar context, national rights – a central part of the European Versailles system – were a heated issue, between German-speakers in new Central European states having to learn Polish or Czech, or Ukrainians in interwar Poland not being allowed to take their classroom instruction in Polish. And in this context, the team at USSR in Construction presented a very confused picture. Was it supposed to be an ethnic polity for Tajiks? Or was it a cosmopolitan Soviet Orient? Was the language of Tajikistan supposed to be closer to Europe or to the Islamic world? And just who would be forced to learn it? For much of the 1930s, the answer that audiences outside of the Soviet Union were receiving from USSR in Construction was simply that the magazine did not know.
Why did USSR in Construction look this way – muddled and confused – even as one aim of the publication was to offer a clear and compelling picture of an alternative path to modernity during this “interwar conjecture?”^[62] Clearly, how compelling or coherent a picture readers would deem the magazine to have would depend issue to issue and region to region. Until art historians and area studies experts begin to mine the photographic archives and antiquarian booksellers of Russia more deeply all answers must remain provisional.^[63] Still, I suspect that those issues of the magazine that focused on southern Central Asia – and the picture of the Soviet Union that some international readers would have received – looked muddled as they did because USSR in Construction had by the mid-1930s become a kind of interference pattern of two major intellectual debates going on in the USSR at that period. On the one hand, magazine editors who produced issues on specific regions – Tajikistan or Georgia – had to show that Soviet plans for national development were indeed working: in other words, that old patterns of “backwardness” were disappearing. Indeed, other sections of the issues under discussion devoted great attention to the forced resettlement of mountain Tajiks to the Vakhshstroi project as well as the great leaps in productivity and monumental chaikhana (tea house) construction at the Comintern Collective Farm near Khojent. But in doing so, they broadcast to the world messages about the existence, or nonexistence, of objectively backward races, or the possibility of racial improvement through labor, at a time, as Francine Hirsch has eloquently shown, that Soviet ethnography was learning to speak a language of anthropology that spoke of “race,” of national development, in uniquely Bolshevik tones.^[64] Never making entirely clear whether Tajikistan was to serve as a revolutionary springboard to South Asia, it reflected, too, the uncertain status of the Soviet borderlands that Terry Martin has described in detail in his work.^[65] Capturing awkward photographic evidence of the backwardness that still plagued the Soviet provinces of the mid-1930s, or the guarded nature of the Soviet-Afghan border, USSR in Construction became an awkward prism, one in which the changing slogans and meanings of the Stalin Revolution became refracted through one version of photographic reality.
The other key reason this message became or seemed so garbled was that the photography that accompanied the captioning intended to describe the changes afoot in the Soviet Union of the 1930s was itself subject to renewed debates about photodocumentary aesthetics in the Soviet Union of the period. As Margarita Tupitsyn has shown, USSR in Construction constituted a kind of ensemble project for the leading talents of Soviet photography, one in which individual photographers’ tendencies toward formalism or multiplicity would be subordinated to produce works of art with representational content emphasizing totality.^[66] In the words of Lazar Mezhericher, USSR in Construction would offer up new “monumental artistic photography.”^[67] As such, it constituted a transitional periodical, one that demonstrated a shift from the formalist, factographic trends of the early 1930s toward the more monumental art of the later years of that decade. Many of its issues captured this shift from the quotidian world of factography and ocherki that Devin Fore has described to the monumental photography foreseen by Mezhericher.^[68] Sometimes, as when Rodchenko remained close to formalism for the White Sea Canal issue of USSR in Construction that he designed, the resulting narrative remained compelling. But when photographers such as Shaikhet and Alpert took everyday-looking photographs of, for example, Vakhshstroi collective farmers, only to find these modest photographs trumpeted as signs of socialist progress, the negotiation between formalism, factography, and triumphalism could become confused.^[69] When combined with shifts in “the narrative” about Soviet nationalities policy or Soviet borderlands that steered the captioning of the magazine, no wonder the picture that emerged became so muddled. The result was, in contrast to what Walter Benjamin had foreseen in his prophecy about the photographic illiterate, not editors who were unable to read the photographs before them, but rather a cast of independently minded photographers and designers struggling or refusing to adapt or subordinate themselves fully to the changing story of the Revolution.

SOVIET DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

“Simple layout. Some text. Emphasize what has been accomplished.”^[70]

Roy Stryker, On how to present travelling FSA exhibits

These photographs of, and reportage about, Soviet Central Asia in the USSR in Construction may be very striking. But what was distinctly Soviet about this kind of documentary photography? In order to bring this aspect of the photographs out, it may be instructive to turn to the work of a project that was similar in form if not in content to that of the photographers for USSR in Construction: the work of the Photography Group of the American Farm Security Administration (FSA). Founded in 1935 as the Resettlement Agency and renamed in 1937, the FSA was a major New Deal organization that organized public employment through the construction of experimental satellite suburbs as well as provided loans and agricultural education to poverty-stricken farmers. In the summer of 1935, the head of the then-Resettlement Agency, Rexford Tugwell, an agricultural economist, contacted his former economics graduate student Roy Stryker and asked him “to prepare a pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems, something that had always been dear to [Stryker’s] heart.”^[71] Stryker soon assembled a team of five American photographers – Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange – gave them reading materials on regions of the country, and a “shooting script” with directions for what to photograph.^[72] For example:

“Bill posters; sign painters-crowd watching a window sign being painted; sky writing; paper in park after concert; parade watching, ticker tape, sitting on curb; roller skating; spooners-neckers; mowing the front lawn.”

A creative tension soon emerged between Stryker and government officials in control of the program’s finances during the Depression. On the one hand, the FSA photographs that trickled in from the field (where photographers often spent up to six months at a time) were pushed to American publications at no cost in order to bring to national attention the third of the country that was “ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed.”^[73] FSA photographs were to remind the public forcefully of the challenges of rural poverty and maintain support for the New Deal; government administrators constantly insisted to Stryker that they “simply could not afford to hammer home anything except their message that federal money was desperately needed for major relief programs.” Stryker’s photographers thus had to walk a fine line between capturing photographs that were artistically moving and those that could be politically effective documents depicting American poverty. There was the issue of finding photos that could work in different presentation contexts: newspapers with larger-than-average black readerships in the South; the International Photography Exhibition in New York; and the Student Union at the University of Oklahoma.^[74] But at the same time, they also had to be careful to avoid obviously staged situations. In 1936 (an election year), for example, Republican newspapers in South Dakota embarrassed Rothstein by accusing him of staging photographs of a cattle skull in parched plains terrain. Scholars of the FSA have uncovered relatively few documents describing the reception of FSA photographs, although some of the comment cards from the International Photography Exhibition provide some idea of the range of responses.^[75] “Subjects very sordid and dull for an exhibition,” wrote one attendee, “[need] more nudes.”^[76] Still, another person was moved, if xenophobically so:

“The U.S. as a whole ought to be ashamed to have such conditions existing. Instead of sending money to help Jews and other foreigners, they should stop [groups] from sending money out of the country. I say help America first.”

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Fig. 7. Farm Security Administration Exhibit: «In the Image of America,» at Museum of Science and Industry, New York City, 1941.

FSA photography serves as a valuable transnational comparative case for Soviet documentary photography because of the explicitly public and instrumental role photography was supposed to play and because photographers from both groups focused on similar themes: backwardness, government’s role in ameliorating poverty, and (in certain cases) the moral, intellectual, and material improvement of subalterns or minorities – Central Asians, especially Central Asian women, in the case of USSR in Construction, and African-Americans in the case of the FSA photographers. There are, of course, difficulties with this comparison. FSA photographs were used in a wide variety of contexts, from exhibits at Grand Central Station to mainstream American magazines, while USSR in Construction represents examining only one (albeit important) context in which Soviet documentary photography appeared. Neither Stryker nor the FSA photographers were preoccupied with the link between documentary photography, narrative, and plot to the same extent as were their Soviet counterparts. Unlike Soviet documentary photography, where (as far as current scholarship has ascertained) our corpus remains limited to the publications themselves, the online archives of the FSA provide access to those images that were actually used as well as to those that photographers took, but that were left on the cutting board. In other words, the images selected to appear in the 1941 FSA “In The Image of America” exhibit do not correlate directly to those in issues of USSR in Construction that focused on southern Central Asia. Indeed, comparisons of Soviet photodocumentary practices with that of other countries besides America (Turkey, Italy, Germany) throughout the interwar conjecture may well prove more fruitful than the analysis presented here. Still, I want to propose that if we compare how both groups – for all of their differences – used, or did not use, documentary photography as a language to discuss the relationship between the law, gender, and power, the exercise may better inform our understanding of each of the projects.

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Fig. 8. Joseph Rothstein, «The bleached skull of a steer on the dry sun-baked earth of the South Dakota Badlands» (1936). FSA. Library of Congress.

Take, for example, the depiction of courtroom scenes involving subaltern or minority groups.^[77] In the 1931 issue of USSR in Construction, Max Alpert photographed the interior of a courtroom in Tajikistan, depicting what appears to be a panel of three judges (two men and one unveiled woman) presiding over several others: three men, two women wearing horsehair veils, two younger girls without veils, and a young boy.

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Fig. 9. «A courtroom. One of the judges is a Tajik woman. She was the first woman in the city to discard her veil after the revolution. Standing opposite the desk is the figure of a female veiled in a blue, heavy, bag-like ‘parandja.’ She is only 16 years of age. She has come to complain that her husband beats her.» From USSR in Construction. 1936. 10. n.p.

USSR in Construction placed the courtroom scene within a greater narrative of woman’s liberation (most visible through unveiling of the horsehair veil) enabled by Soviet power.^[78] A photograph below showed a group of eighteen unveiled woman following an instructor in physical exercises on a public square, with the caption: “Going in for some physical culture on the square facing the Women’s pedagogycal [sic] institute on Bainliunilyali street. These will never be forced to wear a ‘parandja.’”^[79] Photographs on the opposite page showed “students of the Institute for Music” – unveiled adult women – as well as a local unveiled woman at work at a textile mill. The caption above her read: “My husband was addicted to opium. I heard that a new silk factory was opening, so I divorced him and went to work.” The courtroom scene works, in other words, as part of a larger story of the benefits Soviet rule has brought to Tajik women: the ability to control their lives through the judiciary (whether as judges themselves or plaintiffs who will be taken seriously), the ability to escape the dark confines of the veil for open spaces and exercise (in many ways a metaphor for the “opening” of Central Asia by Soviet rule), and the right to define their own lives independent of men in their lives.^[80]

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Fig. 10. «My husband was addicted to opium. I heard that a new silk factory was opening, so I divorced him and went to work.» USSR in Construction. 10. 1931. n.p.

Still, if we compare this courtroom scene to similar scenes from FSA photography that purported to show the just workings of the American legal system, a more nuanced picture may emerge. Consider the production of the summer 1941 exhibit “In the Image of America.” Here it becomes clear that while some American photographers took risks in their photography of minorities’ relationship with the law, the public presentation of their photographs remained less provocative than that of their Soviet counterparts. “In the Image of America,” which was organized by Edwin Rosskam (Stryker’s “visual information specialist”) and presented as a 200-photograph exhibit of rural life in America at Rockefeller Center in New York in conjunction with the Photographic Society of America (PSA), sought to “present, in most abbreviated form, a panoramic sketch of country – this vast, rich continent – and our country’s people, strong in their variety.”^[81] If one scans the panel of the exhibit devoted to democratic processes for images of African-Americans, one finds no images of blacks.

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Fig. 11. Farm Security Administration Exhibit: «In the Image of America,» Part of Exhibit on Science and Industry, Rockefeller Center, New York City, 1941. FSA. Library of Congress.

But the photograph of two defendants standing before a judge in a courtroom, all under a Masonic “eye of God” decoration, near the top left of the panel, hides a unique story. The shot that Rosskam selected originated from a series of photographs taken on court day in Rustburg, Virginia, by John Vachon.^[82] Yet far from the shot chosen for the exhibit, which obscured the defendant’s racial identity thanks to the shawl, hat, and collar covering the back of the woman’s head, Vachon had actually devoted much of his filming to explore the provocative racial undercurrent to the trials. The two other photographs he took of the couple before the judge used tricks of perspective to emphasize the power dynamic of the black couple standing, arms crossed, below the bulk of the white judge, the “eye of God” symbol above him, and the portraits of white Virginian notables. In the next photograph, the black man almost appears to partly support his weight on the table under the gaze of the judge. Vachon had the eye to use vertical composition to show the difference in power between white judge and black citizen in Rustburg, but when it came time for Rosskam to select among his photographs for public display to a mainstream American audience at Rockefeller Center, she chose the photograph that most blurred this white/black power relationship. As one scholar has written, “the defendants could have been any Americans on trial, and the image became as prosaic as that of the Pie Town, New Mexico, community meeting beside it.”

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Fig. 12. «Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.» Featured in 1941 FSA exhibit. FSA. Library of Congress.

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Fig. 13. John Vachon. Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.

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Fig. 14. John Vachon. Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.

If we turn back to the depiction of the Tajik courtroom scene in USSR in Construction, what new conclusions can we draw about it or its “uniquely Soviet” nature (if any)? On one level, when compared with Vachon’s courtroom photographs, Alpert’s shot stands out for its horizontality: unlike the more critical Vachon photographs with their clear emphasis on the top/bottom power dynamic between the white judge and the black defendant, or even the photograph that appeared in “In the Image of America” with the unidentified defendants below the judge and “the eye of God,” the Tajik court scene depicts almost all of the participants in the trial at the same level; the wife-beating husband, the sixteen-year-old wearing the veil, and the rest of the men, women, and children in the courthouse either sit or stand on the floor below the raiser on which the judges sit, but the angle of the photograph serves neither to diminish nor glorify any of them.
What might one say about the uniquely Soviet nature of Alpert’s photograph? Compared to Vachon, who sought to make the judge himself the subject of the composition, Alpert focuses more on the legal system and respect for the law itself. Whereas in Vachon’s photograph (in the two that were not printed) much emphasis was placed on the judge himself as an agent of a legal system dominated by whites through perspective and composition, in Alpert’s photograph no one comes across as particularly charismatic or as the dominant figure in the photograph. While the female judge may have, according to the caption, been something of a radical, Alpert presents her in front of a wall sketch of a parandja, but with her eyes down, her hands at the table, and at the edge of the photograph, she hardly dominates the composition. The focal point, if anywhere, of the photograph lies on the wife-beating husband. He stands at the center of the frame, judged simultaneously both by the judicial officials (an unveiled woman and two or three men) and by a cross-section of Tajik society: veiled and unveiled women, a man, and two children. Not individual characters acting out racial animus, but a variety of state and societal actors enforcing justice assisting innocent teenage women to punish their male oppressors: such is the drama that Alpert’s photograph acts out. Women’s liberation was, as the Tajik caption to these pages said, but a part of mankind’s greater ascent towards total control of its own social condition.^[83]
Of course, Soviet documentary photography in Central Asia also shared some traits with its American counterpart. Both groups had to find a happy medium between depicting the progress that state-sponsored social transformation had already made in the provinces and showing the backwardness that remained and still had to be overcome. Here one compared the kishlak of Dushanbe to the modern streets of Stalinabad; there one showed the transformation of the “Negro Farmer” and his family from a shanty farmhouse to a sturdy house with porch.^[84] Alpert, Shaikhet, and Piatakov as well as Vachon, Lange, and Stryker operated in strangely parallel positions of having to communicate the simultaneous backwardness and moral progress of native aliens (blacks or Soviet Muslims) to either more white-bread American audiences or international cosmopolitans. (The United States did not, to my knowledge, have an equivalent to USSR in Construction, depicting to international audiences the appeal of the New Deal project as a road to modernity.)
Still, the public memories of these two photographic projects remain quite different from one another. Taken and redacted as they were during a transitional period in Soviet photodocumentary politics and practices, few of the photographs from USSR in Construction retain the emotional power of their American counterparts. Consider the two groups’ treatment of backwardness. Many of the American photographs, such as Lange’s “Power farming displaces tenants. Texas Panhandle. 1938,” document the technological and structural economic changes that have erased the old way of life for family farms and small towns without denigrating the dignity of its subject. The abandoned family house in Lange’s 1938 composition invites compassion from its viewer: where have its inhabitants gone? Looking at the photographs of the Soviet photographs, meanwhile, not the introspection of the camera lens as it examines the antediluvian world but rather the contempt with which it photographs the Dushanbe kishlaks, the emphasis on the new world of Vakhshstroi as opposed to the journey from Darvaz, strikes the viewer. In contrast to the respect for the past seen in the FSA photographs of economically shattered Southern sharecroppers and Dust Bowl farmers in FSA photography, one finds in USSR in Construction photography a ruthless confidence in the new world brought to the periphery. We read El Registan’s Mosaic story of the Stalin Constitution flown in by plane to the Western Pamirs for discussion by Shugnan collective farmers; we see V. Kinelovsky’s photograph of a Pamiri girl awestruck upon seeing an airplane for the first time as the Russian pilot beside her grins (Fig. 16): technological fetishism married to an atemporal story of the West bringing progress to the East. We find here, in the words of the art historian Max Kozloff, “not the confidence of the present as it studies the living past, but the spectacle of the past awakened to a future that does not exist.”^[85]

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Fig. 15. Dorothea Lange. Power farming displaces tenants. Texas Panhandle. 1938. FSA. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.

When it comes to portraiture of the backward or subaltern, the difference between the two modes of photography becomes even clearer. Lange’s Migrant Mother and Walker Evans’s photographs of Allie Mae and Floyd Burroughs were, like many of the photographs for USSR in Construction, staged photographic constructions of rural poverty, ignorance, and backwardness. They, like their Soviet counterparts, were originally taken to justify policies that would turn the backward countryside into a laboratory for experimentation in new ways of living. Still, the FSA photographs (and the later work of Evans for the project that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) retain an awareness of the dignity of the humble subjects that USSR in Construction rarely emanated.^[86] FSA photographs such as Gordon Parks’s “American Gothic, Washington D.C.” are taken from human perspectives (at the level of the human eye); their subjects remain aware that a human eye behind the lens is photographing them. In contrast to this, Shaikhet’s photographs of Tajik collective farmers are taken from the navel up, or from the ground. “These moments,” writes Kozloff, “instead of being momentary, were meant to endure by virtue of their contrast with any conceivable psychological viewpoint. They do not accord with the perspectives of social human beings but rather with creatures that fly or crawl.”^[87] Their subjects, removed from any context that would identify them with a concrete political cause or historical background that would render conditional their optimism and hope in the future, remain of the voyeuristic gaze of the camera that inspects them.^[88] Taken at a moment when Soviet pho-todocumentary practices found themselves between the Borgesian encyclopedic and momentary ideals of the factographic program and the total art of Stalinism and socialist realism, which itself “became, with few exceptions, a collection of material for cultural historians,” few of the photographs from its pages retain popular appeal in Russia or the post-Soviet countries today.^[89] Indeed, it perhaps remains most remembered as an archive of Soviet terror – of the construction of the White Sea Canal and (to a much lesser extent) the Fergana Canal – than as a daguerreotype of a Soviet Eurasia on the eve of its total transformation.

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Fig. 16. Kinelovsky, «At the Khorog Aerodrome.» USSR in Construction. 12. 1936. n.p.

* * *

What to make of USSR in Construction in the end? In this article, I have tried to explore how Soviet documentary photography, in particular that of USSR in Construction, promoted an image of Soviet nationalities policy and a narrative of the Soviet transformation of southern Central Asia that was – more than at odds with the idea of state-sponsored evolutionism espoused by other Soviet institutions – confusing, muddled, and without clear thrust. Soviet photographers and editors may have become extremely technically adept in their photographic and publishing techniques, but they were often, to refer to the Benjamin quotation with which I began this essay, photographically illiterate. Even as captioning and telling a story to accompany their photographs became a major part of issues of USSR in Construction, the magazine’s editors struggled with managing

“...the instructions that rest in the authenticity of photography. Not always can one circumvent them with a reportage whose clichés have only the effect of linguistically associating themselves in the viewer. The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever more ready to hold fast to fleeting and secret pictures whose shock awakens the association mechanism in the viewer.”^[90]

Having failed to find those moments of daily life that, when inscribed on film, could alone document the success of the Soviet project, USSR in Construction resorted to captioning, “which implicates photography in the literarification of all living conditions” – and yet still the attempt to find a coherent narrative failed. The picture, then, that international audiences received of the transformations within the Soviet Union regarding non-Russian nationalities was erratic. Who was a tribe? Who was a narodnost’? Could backwardness be overcome given the proper social and economic conditions? Apparently, few among the editorial staff could respond to these questions at a moment when the terms of the political debate on nationalities as well as the limits of their photographic language itself were in flux. These photographs may have sated readers’ curiosity about Soviet Central Asia, but they hardly answered the more fundamental questions about the Soviet project. Given the modern Russian and international amnesia toward any individual photograph from the USSR in Construction corpus, they failed – as I have suggested through the comparison of Soviet with FSA photography – to produce enduring artistic images.

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Fig. 17. Gordon Parks. American Gothic. Washington D.C. (Photograph of Ella Watson).

Fortunately, USSR in Construction – to say nothing of other contemporary publications such as Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photo), Daesh’ (Let’s Give), 30 Dnei (30 Days), or 24 chasa iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem’i (24 Hours from the Life of a Moscow Working Family) – provides just such a valuable source for future explorations into the intersections between avant-garde, nationalities policy, and comparative empire as concerns the USSR of the 1930s. Whether one examines USSR in Construction in its own right or uses its coverage of particular regions or trends in the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s as supporting material for other projects, its exuberant style and sweeping thematic and geographical range, and, above all, its photography make it a compelling resource for the student of Soviet history, the self-understanding of the Soviet project by the avant-garde, or the use of photography by modernizing states in the 1930s more broadly.^[91] As historians of Russia and the Soviet Union move more in coming years to examine the histories of Central Asia, the Caucasus, non-European Russia, and the postwar Soviet Union in a global comparative context, the use of visual media produced by the Soviet and other avant-gardes – and an increased visual literacy – will play an import role in this new historiography of twentieth-century Eurasia.

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Fig. 18. Max Alpert. Photograph of Tajik. USSR in Construction. 1936. 10. n.p.

USSR in Construction, for all of its gaps, was one of the major photographic exponents of the prewar part of this history – a period, that, as Adeeb Khalid, Adrienne Edgar, and Stephen Kotkin have argued, was replete with visions of technical, economic, and even gender modernity never fully pursued after the “interwar conjecture.” Having examined in real detail only three issues of USSR in Construction that have focused on the geographically small region of southern Central Asia, I cannot but feel that I have only scratched the surface. But as students of the Soviet project trained less specifically as art historians than historians per se turn their attention to this product of the Soviet avant-garde, perhaps the interval of some eighty years that separates today’s questions from the rotogravure of USSR in Construction “will discharge its historical tension,” and invite new and exciting approaches to this period.^[92] It is “in the shine of these rays,” to evoke Benjamin once more, that these photographs may fully emerge, “so beautifully and coyly from the darkness of the days of our grandfathers.”