In a recent film Outskirts (Lutsik, 1998) the three heroes, deprived of their land, are traveling from a remote part of the country to the center in search for justice. The elimination of the ‘bad guy’ in his office on the top floor of a skyscraper restores long-lost harmony, brings lands, peace, happiness, and even a pretty woman, the ex-secretary of the ex-boss. Despite all the irony and a pastiche of the Russian and Soviet mythologies elaborately intertwined in the film, Lutsik creates a world organized into a number of bipolar oppositions along a strong vertical axis, connecting the center and the outskirts: power / dependency, bad / good, corrupted / simple, passing / timeless, urban / rural. If the only way to define ‘outskirts’ (in Russian: okraina) becomes its distance from the center, then the additional connotation of being at the edge of something (krai) is inevitably lost. The idea of a borderland as a ‘zone of cultural bilinguism’^[1] disappears with all the implications of being ambiguous, indefinite, equivocal, even controversial, and instead is replaced by the image of a uniform territory, defined solely by its remoteness from the center. In other words, ‘outskirts’ came to stand for the word ‘province’ rather than ‘edge.’^[2] Such an interpretation seems to be persistent even if the evaluation of the suggested ‘top-bottom’ structure is negative. In The Rifleman of the Voroshilov Regiment (Govorukhin, 1999) those living far from the center (both literally and metaphorically) are left to fend for themselves, and in the inevitability of their ‘grass-roots’ actions, demonstrate a surprising efficiency.
The questions I want to raise in relation to this model are those of origins, lineage, and possible alternatives. Starting from a presumption that the homogenized space in Russian cinematography was not a given state of affairs, but rather the result of a long and controversial development with an indeterminate outcome, I seek to trace its origins and development back to the early Soviet years. Facing the need to construct a legitimizing common identity for the newly created state, early Soviet cinematography was in search of a model for center-periphery relations which, while preserving its ability to represent a variety of different territories, would also allow the envisioning of a kind of ‘organic solidarity’ of the parts. While branding the czarist Russia to be ‘the prison of nations’ and declaring the right of nations for self-determination, the Bolsheviks nevertheless viewed themselves as territorial inheritors of the Russian empire – and quickly faced the same problems of reconciling the parts after the war was won. The short-lived laissez-passer attitude to the national entities of the ex-empire was soon replaced by the politics of ‘land-gathering’ in which new and old methods were combined. On the one hand, the nationalities incorporated into the Soviet state were institutionalized, national élites created, national cultures officially promoted, quotas for national representation in various state organs introduced.^[3] On the other hand, the (pre)existing political and cultural élites, aspiring for national renaissances, were declared anti-Soviet agents of the world bourgeoisie and eventually eliminated.^[4]
The establishment of political domination did not automatically win over either Russian or other ethnicities that were partly hostile, partly indifferent, and partly simply unaware of the changes. In this context cinematography was viewed as one of the most powerful tools of enlightenment and propaganda.^[5] A number of problems that the central authorities faced were especially sharp in the borderland areas: first, bringing together a number of nations into one state, arguing for the legitimacy of federation and defining the status of its members; second, justifying the need for modernization of the country by its backwardness and its (perceived as unfortunate) dependency on the outside world; third, confronting the danger that the first socialist state would weaken and collapse under the dual and related pressures of centrifugal nationalist movements and competition between the central authorities and the local élites. Neither these problems, nor the methods applied were entirely new. Thus, in analyzing the images of different territories in the cinema of the late 1920s – namely Ukraine, Caucasus, Central Asia, and Far East – I try to emphasize the continuities with previously existing discourses, as well as point out the attempts to reverse the existing conventions.
The bringing together of European and Asian borderlands in one analysis is an attempt to blur the boundary between the colonial studies currently embracing the paradigm of ‘Orientalism,’^[6] and the spate of revisionist writings fashioning “kidnapped Europe,” which are often coupled with the Central/Eastern European Sonderweg concept.^[7] Trying to avoid the established separation – both geographical and paradigmatic – of the two fields, I argue for the importance of a comparative analysis of the territories once included in the same political framework and sharing a (growing) number of cultural experiences. By declaring enlightenment and propaganda to be the most important functions of arts and culture, the Soviet system laid their methods bare, making the work of the ideological apparatus a rewarding subject to study. On the other hand, if one agrees with Benedict Andersen on the role of the multinational states, the cinematographic identity construction becomes all the more important:

…the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming suggests that it is as much the legatee of the pre-national dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order.^[8]

The Soviet order was in fact a carefully constructed one. In 1927, for the tenth anniversary of the revolution, a number of films were commissioned to celebrate the achievements of the new state. Among them was Esther Shub’s The Great Road (Sovkino, 1927), where the montage of the numerous chronicles served to glorify the early years of the regime, no matter how short this great road seems to be. The film successfully visualized the stages of the Soviet history, greatly contributing to the canon of narrating the Revolution. Having a clear-cut beginning in the fall of czarism, the story proceeded to evaluate the process of the gathering of lands around Russia: the Far East liberated from Japanese occupants, Ukraine saved from German aggressors, Caucasus freed from the Entente intervention. Importantly, in every part of this quite typical story, the local nationalists, from Georgian Mensheviks to Ukrainian separatists, supported foreign troops. The newly formed Soviet republics, however, were defined in class terms: workers and peasants, united against nationalists, were presented as the only legitimate representatives of the nations, welcoming the Red Army on their territories. Clearly, they are shown as supporters of the revolution, which originally was conceived as not confined to political boundaries. Thus, the toiling masses of Germany and China are shown encouraging the revolution, the example of which they are expected to follow soon. The role of Comintern (Communist International) is particularly emphasized: reporting on the second Comintern Congress, the inter-title states: “There is only one flag under which it is worth dying – the flag of Comintern.”*^[9] Similarly, the enemy is also perceived in class terms as international capitalists with their headquarters in America. A blurred spatial differentiation is counterbalanced with the clear-cut temporal one. In the world unavoidably progressing towards communism, the communist/socialist/Bolshevik way was necessarily new, progressive, and future-oriented, while capitalism appeared as a dangerous residue, belonging to the past and only temporarily surviving in the present.
Summarizing the relations of the new state with its national borderlands, one has to emphasize a persistence of an ‘enlightening’ paradigm^[10] as a civilizing mission for backward peoples. The donors in this case were the Russians (“we are raising the culture of the backward peoples,”* “liberating the female-slaves of yesterday”)*, and the receivers were the population of Central Asia or of other borderland territories (the images of the newspapers being printed in the local languages, classes at school shown, adults collectively reading books at the library, all but one of the women without veils.) While The Great Road visualized a historical narrative which was later canonized, the film did not specifically address the representations of borderlands since the revolution, viewed as an expanding triumph of justice, would eventually embrace the whole world, eliminating all differences. Nevertheless, Shub’ succeeded to formulate in a nutshell the main statements which were developed by other directors who focused on a particular territory or ethnic group.
A number of alternative perspectives exist for the representations of borderlands. The variety of histories of acquiring or losing a borderland standing warn against ascribing a generic status to any territory. The same stories are being told in very different ways, depending on a multitude of factors, including the insider/outsider position of the narrator. The films I am turning to now represent a variety of positions: from Vertov’s avant-garde universalism to Dovzhenko’s locally inspired lyricism. From Turin’s pragmatic progressivism to Kalatozov’s ethnographic fascinations, and Pudovkin’s emphasis on learning and maturation. In other words, every narrative “bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand,”^[11] and every storyteller, in turn, bears certain marks of his or her times. Thus, I refrain from using a misleading notion ‘documentary’ when talking about the films that were previously classified as such, since they are often based on a fictitious scenario, create a virtual film space, and carry certain messages.^[12]

Part I. UKRAINE: Competing Loyalties

Arsenal, 1929, VUFKU, Dovzhenko
Earth, 1930, VUFKU, Dovzhenko
Enthusiasm: Symphony of Donbass, 1931, Ukrainfilm, Vertov

The establishment of the Soviet regime in Ukraine did not eliminate the conflict between imperial Russian and national Ukrainian models, but projected it onto the Bolshevik framework. It resulted not only in the brief parallel existence of the two communist parties,^[13] but also in the theory of the struggle of two cultures. According to it, the Russian culture represented the advanced proletarian element, whereas the Ukrainian culture was a backward peasant one, which justified the withdrawal of state support from Ukrainian schools, newspapers, and other cultural institutions in order to side with the more ‘progressive’ culture.^[14] In the situation where the majority of the working class was Russian-speaking, while the peasantry was largely Ukrainian-speaking, an attempt to reformulate the national conflict in class terminology enthused a counter effect from a number of Ukrainian revolutionaries who sought to de-Russify the proletariat and to modernize the nation in order to “create a new culture that would be both Ukrainian and proletarian.”^[15]
In 1923, however, a radical turn in Bolshevik nationality policy^[16] resulted in the attempts of Ukrainization, which started with the declaration on the equality of languages and the announcement of official support for the development of the Ukrainian language. This brief period in the mid 1920s generated rich literary and cultural debates, which shaped the whole generation of Ukrainian intelligentsia^[17] and directly influenced cinematography in Ukraine. The 1920s witnessed the formation of national film studios in all Soviet republics, but the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration (VUFKU), organized in 1922, was one of the biggest early Soviet film studios^[18], successful not only in establishing an autonomous distributional framework in the Ukrainian territory, but also in both raising, and in attracting directors who were concerned with the visual representation of Ukraine and creating such different images as, for example, found in the works of Dovzhenko and Vertov. Both directors were born, and grew up in Ukraine, but the divergence of their stories and experiences from their early times influenced their later views. Oleksander Dovzhenko,^[19] a universally acclaimed classic of early Soviet cinema, was only recently viewed in the context of the Ukrainian culture of his time, even though his films could not be fully understood without addressing the tension of conflicting loyalties:

If his class origins left him with a respect for Ukrainian peasant tradition and lore, his eventual commitments to political activity during the revolution compelled him to advocate the Soviet policies of modernization which originated in Moscow.^[20]

In Dovzhenko’s mature works produced in VUFKU, Arsenal and Earth in particular, his native land is portrayed as traditional yet not nationalistic, rural yet undergoing modernization, part of a larger union yet autonomous. His self-stigmatizing perception of backwardness is partly similar to the images in the Russian westernizing discourses^[21], yet the affective attachment to the peasant life prevented Dovzhenko from sacrificing it fully to the urban world. The discourse on cultural autonomy and the politics of Ukrainization of 1923-25 seemed to him to be a solution to the otherwise irreconcilable loyalties.^[22]
The questions of center-periphery relations are present indirectly in both Arsenal and Earth. While in Arsenal Russia is eventually associated with revolution, communism and internationalism (the path which Ukrainian workers are to follow), in the first part of the film, featuring the World War I, it also stands for militarism and imperialism shared by all the belligerent countries. The main question of the film is the contradiction between the national and class allegiances in which the main hero, Timosh – a Ukrainian worker returning to Kiev from the Western front – is entangled. The decision of going pro- or anti- independence is thus made unaided; there is no presence of outside influence in the film. Returning from the front, Timosh faces the need to answer the question he is asked upon returning: “Who are you? Ukrainian?” “Yes, I am a worker.”*
A grotesque representation of the Ukrainian Rada comes from Dovzhenko’s pro-Bolshevik position and gives us clues as to why he abandoned his earlier pro-independence views. The years of independence are presented as the time of nationalist-romantic-orthodox frenzy, condensed into a scene of an outdoors Easter procession. Starting with the Orthodox priests, carrying a portrait of Bohdan Khmelnytsky along with the icons and other church regalia and singing hymns to the independent Ukraine, the camera moves on to the ardent orators replacing one another on the podium, whose speeches soon become indistinguishable from one another and serve to excite even more the applauding audience shouting “Long live! Long live,” and finally records a conversation of two laid-back youngsters: “Do you know who was this Khmelnytsky?” “Some khokhol (pejorative: Ukrainian) general.”* Mocking the ignorance of the many, Dovzhenko at the same time despised the nationalist fervor which he saw possessed many circles: students, teachers, entrepreneurs, intellectuals and artists, personified as social types in caricature-type images. The symbolic significance of the national resurrection is thus ridiculed as an outdated, meaningless and empty ritual, which does not rest on the support of the main ‘pillars of society’: either the workers or the peasants.
While the workers in Arsenal were represented as a community with a universal and progressive clear class-consciousness, who under guidance of Bolsheviks fought the nationalist government, the peasants on whom Earth is centered, had less articulated ideas on progress, development, center and periphery, living in the pantheistic world of bountiful nature. Modernity and change come to the village from outside as technological advancement (in this case, a new tractor), but the process of modernization is naturalized to a degree when it seems inevitable and necessary to all but the inherently evil kulaks (rich peasants). The Ukrainian village, idyllic and poetic, is not directly connected to any external center, and its relations with the outside world, especially with the city, are minimized, even presuming that the tractor actually arrived from an urban area. Disrupting the traditional agricultural circle, the tractor brings it to a new level, but does not ruin the inherent cyclical rhythm of life. Thus, both ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ images in Dovzhenko’s films are represented as self-sufficient, nourished on Ukrainian folklore and national heritage, yet renouncing all nationalist and separatist tendencies in favor of universal progress in which Moscow was perceived as the leader.
This image is brought into a sharper contrast through a comparison with the works of another film director, interested in defining ‘Ukrainianness.’ Denis Kaufman was also born and grew up in Ukraine, in an urban Jewish family but made his career in Moscow where he became known under the pseudonym Dziga Vertov and from where his extended cinematographic odyssey through the Soviet republics started. Founding the pioneering Soviet chronicle Kino-eye, he developed a theory of the bettered vision of a camera’s ‘mechanical eye,’ introducing the ontological controversy of the cinematic material into the discussions on the idea of truth and reality in cinema.^[23] Having made a number of films, including the well-known Man with the Movie Camera (VUFKU, 1929) he became interested in sound effects in cinema, considering it a vital component of the viewing experience. While Symphony of Donbass was often presented in film literature as simply one of the first sound experiments in the Soviet cinema,^[24] it is worth comparing Vertov’s narrative of developments in Ukraine to the images created by Dovzhenko.
The film starts with a young girl in the headphones tuning the radio. The images of church bells, praying congregation, and crosses of various sizes, accompanied with the respective sounds of church service, are replaced after the “right” wave is found: Leningrad station transmits the march from the film Symphony of Donbass. Apart from being a straightforward introduction of sound into the film, the scene sets up the spatial coordinates, demonstrates the creation of an “imagined community” through the simultaneity of shared experiences based on the presupposed interest in and importance of the received information for the listeners. In addition, the past and the present as well as reality and fiction are merged into a Mobius-strip-like inextricability. Having thus announced the trip to the region of the coalmines and factories, at that moment the most industrial area of Ukraine with a high concentration of workers, the film in fact takes us to the land of orthodox Christianity, extensively showing the believers, mostly aged, praying, crossing, and bowing, accompanied by a variety of tunes (from melancholic to ironically cheerful), cries and moaning, church choir and ringing bells. Traveling with equal ease through time and space, the camera then takes us from the world of the old and vicious addictions (the praying scenes are mixed with images of drunkards with vodka bottles, tottering along the streets) to the new (featuring young pioneers), organized (marching columns of demonstrators), and industrial (steaming factory chimneys) world.
Adherence to atheism is not only an important feature of the progressivist thinking in line with European enlightenment, but also a way to remove one of the strongest barriers between nations in the Russian empire, coming from the “crystallized Moscow’s self-image as an Orthodox Christian state.”^[25] The riddance of religious identification (Christianity vs. Islam, Buddhism, paganism, etc) eliminates a pejorative concept of ‘inovertsy’ (people of other faith), seeking to replace it with class solidarity cutting across national borders.^[26] The methods of identity redefinition, however, are often similar to the enforced conversion of Russian subjects into Christianity, since now it is everything Christian that is declared outdated, primitive, misleading, and alien. Vertov de-essentializes the Orthodoxy, attributing it entirely to the realm of the past and refusing to connect it to the issues of national identity. When compared to Dovzhenko’s Easter procession, clearly located in the present and forming an alternative (even if dispreferred) path of development, the scenes of desacralization of the churches and their transformation into the workers’ clubs in Vertov’s film do not evoke existential questions of self-identification, but demonstrate a triumph of reason and common sense over prejudice and backwardness.^[27]
Thus, the image of contemporary Ukraine, opposed to the odds and ends of the past, is an industrial, young, and dynamic one, based on the principles of atheism and collective socialist competition. The latter theme is related to the first 5-year plan, which treated the norms as the goals to be surpassed. In this respect Ukraine is presented as part of a larger entity, invested with certain responsibilities and expected to work hard to fulfill them. Against the current of agricultural images of Ukraine, Vertov focuses on the republic’s urban face, only accidentally including the peasants, presented as modeling their behavior on the proletariat’s pattern (holding similarly organized meetings, making similarly structured speeches, and repeating similar obligations, but shown only after the workers and in a much shorter sequence). The connection between the center and periphery is reinforced as the voice emanating from the back screen designates the Ukrainian share in the overall development of the country: “In the days of the struggle for fulfilling a 5-year plan in 4 or even 3 years, the miners of Donbass shall remember that the future of the main industrial centers of the country of socialism depends on them.”* The authority remained undefined, yet clearly located outside the immediate mining area, supervising the overall development and controlling each part of the process. Thus, Vertov includes Ukraine in a larger entity, where the performance of one part necessarily affects the other. The coordinating center exists, but remains ill-defined, avoiding the imposition of a fixed power hierarchy. The issue of national or cultural identity is not perceived as a problem of conflicting loyalties overrun by the large-scale economic problems. Opposite of an insider’s ambivalence in relating class and national issues in Arsenal and Earth, Vertov, with an identity of a cosmopolitan urban artist, has the perspective of an outsider looking at the territory once close and familiar.

Part II. CAUCASUS: Noble Savagery

Salt of Svanetia^[28], 1930, Goskinprom Gruzii, Kalatozov

Caucasian imagery has a long tradition in the romantic literature of the 19th century as well as similarly extensive amount of literary scholarship, devoted to the problems of representation.^[29] A combination of ‘freedom’ and ‘wilderness’ as different evaluations of the perceived essence of the local population resulted in “the steady coexistence of Russia’s mythologies of noble and ignoble Caucasian savagery.”^[30] All the accompanying romantic ideas of escape from the constraints of civilization, monumental heroism, and the shocking brutality of the mountaineers were dutifully present in both the fictional literature as well as in memoirs and travel diaries from the times of the imperial conquest.^[31] It is important to emphasize, however, that the conquest of the Caucasus – both military and mental – happened at the time when the paradigm of ‘continuity’ won over the ‘contiguous’ one^[32], largely leaving aside the doubts about the ‘humanness’ of the Caucasians, but still keeping to the aggressive discourse of the necessary subjugation of the ‘wild’ to the ‘civilized.’
Lumping together the three very different ethnic entities into one geographical unit does not do justice to it, downplaying not only religious differences and distinctive cultural identities, but also different patterns of political and social development. Proceeding to the analysis of a Georgian movie, I would like to point out that it was Georgia, that during the early revolutionary years under the leadership of the Social Democrats produced a national mass movement, adopted a nonnationalist socialist ideology, and counted on “a democratic revolution in Russia that would solve in one sweep the people’s ethnic and social oppression.”^[33] While the short-lived political autonomy was brutally crushed from the center,^[34] in the cultural memory as well as popular mythology the long-existed theme of freedom persisted, merging the outsiders’ (in this case largely Russian) romanticization of the mountaineers with the local traditions and folklore.
Salt of Svanetia is an interesting example of such an amalgamation: based on a story written by a Russian avant-garde writer and dramatist Sergey Tretyakov,^[35] it was an ethnographic study filmed by a Georgian camera-man-turned director M. Kalatozishvili who Russified his name and entered the history of Soviet cinema as Mikhail Kalatozov. Born in Tiflis and educated as an economist, Kalatozov’s interest in cinema was sustained and encouraged by his friends in Moscow (Pera Attasheva, Harry Potamkin, and Jay Leyda to name a few^[36]), but it was probably his local sensitivities that made the film a truly remarkable example of a silent kulturfilm.
The film starts with a quotation by Lenin prophesying the diversity of the Soviet Union, embracing within itself “every kind of social and economic way of life.”* The envisioned micro-universe, however, has a hierarchy: “Even now in the outskirts of the Union there are some little corners where the patriarchal way of life persists and the remnants of the clan system live their last days.”* The declaration of existing backwardness at the same time presumes not only a clear distinction between the modern developed center and a remote periphery, but also the last days of the “lagging behind” for the latter. The text is then replaced by a map of Caucasus, which introduced the new territories and new communities to the public mind and helped viewers to get a sense of the location of a distant mountainous village of Ushkul, upon which the story is focused. The quote and the map help defining the intended audience for this film: it was made for the broad public which presumably had little knowledge of that particular part of the country, rather than for the Svan community itself. The educational purpose of the film is thus no less important than its propagandistic message and ethnographic qualities of the material.
Svans are presented as a community of the past, leading a self-sufficient medieval life, and producing all the basics on their own. The mountainous life is opposed to the valley, from where the lords attempted to conquer the free villagers (“until the Revolution came.”) The price of this freedom is seclusion and minimal connections to the outside world and the scarcity of the most common resources: water, salt, and pastures. The harsh climate and scarce natural resources ensure a severe life: stones surround the Svans throughout their lives, serving as a bed, a grave and a burial cross. The mountains lessen the pastures, and the crops are restricted to frost-resistant barley. In the absence of technology the labor is hard and monotonous – and the products are usually simple (“down in the valley the factories roar and rumble, here the ancient looms are still in use… [The Svans are] making their own clothes, cutting the hair in their own fashion, making felt hats from the wet wool, winding the ropes, and building the bridges themselves.”*) Two factors, thus, conditioned the Svans lives: on the one hand, unfriendly climatic conditions, and on the other, lack of communication with the rest of the world which could provide necessary materials and technologies. Independence takes its toll, imposing poverty, backwardness, and much suffering (even causing the death of those who risk traveling down to the valley.)
Lagging behind the times leads to the heavy burden of traditions that Svans have to live with. In an immobile world where nature is hostile, and where the mountains themselves, turn from an element of the identity to an obstacle on the way towards progress, happiness, and harmonious life, the main actors are the poor (and thus most mobile) peasants. They are forced to go to the city for work, and thus are the only hope of obtaining the much-needed salt. The translation preserves the double meaning of the film: Salt of Svanetia, referring to the biblical essence of the place (“Ye are the salt of the earth…” St. Matthew, 5:13), it at the same time describes an isolated territory that does not have exactly that which could make it special and independent: it lacks salt. Here seclusion undermines self-sufficiency and the only way of flourishing for Svanetia lies through its opening up to the world.
However, despite the initial claim that a secluded life helped to prevent the domination of the lords from the valley below, the Ushkul society is later portrayed as differentiated into rich and poor as well. The funeral of a rich member of the community, with all its aesthetic beauty and anthropological interest, serves as an attempt of social criticism as well: the death of the rich implies not only expenses for the other members (who have to donate to the church, interpreted as a profiteer), but also causes the death of a baby whose mother was outcast from the community due to old prejudices. Other traditions are interpreted as equally backward: sacrificing a bull, racing the horse of the deceased to its death, and the gluttony at the funeral (with parallel cuts to the mother dying from thirst). At the same time the burial is portrayed as an important, and even awaited event in the community (preceded by overall agitation in anticipation of a festive ceremony), whereas pregnancy is perceived as a curse (which is explained by the absence of roads.) Seeing the community dying out the women, who previously waited passively, revolt (“we don’t want to feed the earth with milk!”*), joining the protest of those who left searching for roads, salt, and communication with the outside world. Clearly, for all of them connecting Ushkul to the world is saving it from full disappearance.
As if responding to the “community cry” the Svans-bolsheviks return, fighting the nature, exploding the mountains, cutting the trees, and building a road to connect the village with the rest of the world. The final message is optimistic and reassuring: “They bring not a handful of salt, make not a thin path in the mountains: by the 3rd year of the 5-year plan half of the road is built.”* The overall message regarding this mountainous borderland differs from the images of Ukraine discussed above: Caucasus is a mountainous region which has no organic connection to Russia and due to its natural conditions has no specific function for the rest of the country. It is viewed as more backward and more different than Ukraine. While it has a number of similar problems (for example, dominance of religion, class differentiation), it lags behind other territories due to its isolation for centuries, even if the life style there is not qualitatively different. It shall be civilized to ease people’s lives, not for any practical purposes, but rather in general adherence to the values of progress. Civilization comes to Ushkul with the ‘enlightened’ Svans-bolsheviks, indirectly acclaiming Russian influence. The romantic image of noble savagery is given an ethnographic outlook, but is nevertheless rooted in the 19th century representations of the Caucasians, finding dignity and solemn magnificence in the practices described previously. The discourse of self-sufficiency, which is remarkably absent from the portrayal of Central Asians, accounts for the difference in the images of the two neighboring regions, as well as their role and function in a larger framework called the Soviet Union.

Part III. ASIA: Waiting for a Miracle to Come

One-Sixth of the World, 1926, Goskino (Kultkino), Vertov
Turksib, 1929, Vostok-Kino, Turin
Storm Over Asia, 1928, Mezhrabpomfilm, Pudovkin

Extensive interactions between Russian and Asian territories throughout the centuries resulted in the intricate and yet quite fixed images of the neighbors in the Russian mind. Starting from a feeling of total apartness and great hostility resulting from overwhelming religious, cultural, political, and social differences, it was in the post-Peter I times that the Russian attitude towards Asia became that of supremacy and dominance, resulting from the incorporation of the western-centered point of view into the Russian intellectual legacy.^[37] The dissemination of the Enlightenment mode of thinking formatted the interpretation of territorial expansion of the 18th century as a mission civilisatrice and attempted to establish the parameters (however confusing) for coming to terms with diversity: ascribing different developmental stages to different societies meant they were viewed as “a stage of history, not a mark of the devil.”^[38]
The political framework imposed by Russia on the peoples of the Central Asia treated its new subjects as inferior to others, largely due to inherent religious differences, impeding their assimilation. Along with being categorized as inovertsy (people of different faith), Tatar and Turkic populations were also branded as inozemtsy (people from different land) and inorodtsy (people of different kin), and viewed as a pinnacle of difference. All these problems of definition as well as attempts to overcome them with sticks and carrots were later inherited by the Soviet regime which largely continued viewing the Central Asian republics in colonial terms. The vague and misleading heading ‘Central Asia’ as well as an overall paucity of knowledge about the region produced elusive definitions based on religion (Islam, paganism), customs (exoticism, barbarism), land (underdeveloped infrastructure, low fertility, desert, steppes), culture (nomad life style, cattle breeding, cotton growing), and level of development (primitivism, infancy, savagery); all of which will be recurrent themes in the films discussed below.
Adopting a familiar developmental attitude towards the peoples and territories of Central Asia, the Soviet discourse declared a break with the czarist policies, while continuing them in practice. The distance between the Central Asian and the Central Russian territories was perceived as a vector (from periphery to the center) pointing in the direction of progress. The opposite direction was supposed to stand for the flow of material and ideological values, absent from Asia until the Revolution. The modernization of the area starts after the revolution, and railways, plants, and electricity are represented as the achievements of socialism. By opposing ‘history’ to ‘pre-history’ the latter is presented as blank, at best containing poverty and repetition. The ‘history’ begins with the act of liberation of the have-nots from the haves, presented as an act from above, confirming the stereotypes of passivity and submissiveness of the Central Asian population.
One of the earliest films featuring the population of Central Asia was Vertov’s One Sixth of the World. Aimed at bringing together diverse places and varying ethnicities, the author set up a spatial framework in which a demarcated part of the world stood for the future of the planet and yet contained the underdeveloped and backward territories and peoples. Interestingly, Vertov focused solely on the non-European parts of the Soviet Union, completely excluding central territories from his narrative:

you, bathing the sheep in the sea, …
you, in the auls of Dagestan, …
you in Siberian taiga, …
you Tatars, Buriats, Uzbeks,
Kalmyks, Komi from Komi republic, …
you with the grapes and you with rice, …
you eating the raw reindeer meat, …
you spinning the wool in the mountains, …
YOU
ALL
ARE
THE MASTERS
OF THE SOVIET LAND.*

In this narrative Central Asia along with other territories is used for pointing out surviving prejudices (a woman wearing a veil) as well as for demonstrating the advantages of the new over the old (a few minutes later – a woman taking a veil off). The motif of ‘suppressed/liberated women’ is one of the most recurrent one in cinematographic descriptions of Central Asia. Portrayed as a part of Muslim tradition, it serves not only as a critique of a religious practice, but is also used for re-narrating religious differences as a matter of mores and customs, along with national cuisines (rice or raw meat), dressing habits (turban or fur coat), and leisure activities (slashing a live goat or deer-racing). Facing religion as one of the strongest identification criteria, such a reformulation sought to eliminate the question of qualitative differences, presenting them instead as cultural peculiarities, simultaneously making religious identity inferior and temporary.^[39] Relegating religious matters to the realm of customs explains the milder anti-religious stance towards Islam than Christianity characteristic of One-Sixth of the World, especially as compared with the aggressive anti-clerical stance of Enthusiasm.
Similarly to the message in Salt of Svanetia, an obvious fascination with the picturesque local customs in One-Sixth… existed along with the progressivist discourse. The newly created entity stretching “from the Kremlin to the Chinese border, … from the lighthouse beyond the Arctic Circle to the Caucasian mountains”* was conceived as proudly marching towards socialism, each part fulfilling a necessary mission. While Vertov focused on the collective unity of this effort, the main message of another kulturfilm, representative of the aesthetics and mythologies of the 1920s – Turin’s Turksib – was an idea of cooperation through differentiation. Coming from a well-to-do family, Turin received his education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but later moved to Vitagraph Studios to study the film business.^[40] Working at Vostok-kino in the 1920s he combined his knowledge of the new film world with a propagandistic pro-industrialization message, creating an image of Asia as a functional part of a larger whole. The film focuses on Turkestan, which is declared to be “the land of burning heat”* whose wealth is cotton – “Cotton for Russian industry.”* With conspicuous logic the description proceeds: “But the people must eat and good cotton land is used for grain. The grain of Siberia could free the land for cotton. The desert lies – a barrier – between. A problem for Turkestan – for Siberia – for the Soviet Union.”*
The pragmatic rhetoric of a prudent manager justified the reorganization of the world to make best use of all the resources. Just as Ukraine has its own mission in Enthusiasm, Asia in Turksib is presented as best fitting for one particular activity, relegating all problems of her own subsistence to the areas richer in natural resources. While the potential self-sufficiency could be reached, it is nevertheless considered an irrational misuse of given conditions. A trade-off reminds of Durkheimian model of organic division of labor, a higher form of social solidarity in human communities where mutual dependency is justified by mutual benefits.^[41] The increased specialization is based on the idea that Turkestan is responsible for making the best use of its resources and thus providing the whole Soviet Union with the necessary amounts of cotton. Presented as a perfectly logical reasoning for the humans, the only problem on the way to such peaceful coexistence is again nature. The hostile desert prevents smooth communication, posing life threats for single enterprising individuals attempting to find their ways across the dunes. A closer look at the roles and images of ‘insiders’ versus ‘outsiders’ in overcoming the natural barrier provides an insight into the perceived relations between the center and periphery as well as brings to light the image of the ‘natives.’
The center as such is absent from the narrative. Instead of being dependant on remote central powers, the region establishes communication with what is presented as its immediate neighbor – equally vast and resourceful Siberia. Central Asia thus stands for the land of heat, desert, and cotton along with the vast steppes of the Kazakh nomads. Similarly, Siberia is presented as one unit – a land of snow, forest, and grain. Just as the two regions are described in natural terms, their communication also follows a natural logic of development, starting, however, only after the Revolution. The familiar motif of liberation is at work again, presenting the local population as passively waiting for the changes to happen. Just as they are portrayed inertly expecting the rains to come, the modernization is also viewed as coming only with the Soviet power^[42] and happening without much of the participation of the local population. Presented largely as inhabiting a rural space, the opposition of city vs. desert implies the distinction of modern vs. backward, assimilated vs. secluded. The moments of interaction clearly establish the power hierarchy between the two: the engineers going out into the Kazakh steppe for taking the necessary measurements are met by the indigenous nomad population with mixed feelings of fascination and fear, referred to as “strangers,” and their automobile is baptized as ‘Shaitan-arba’ (devil’s vehicle). However, an overall attitude is rather friendly. The whole village gathers around the visitors with naïve and curious looks, and the figure of a child playing with the car’s klaxon summarizes the author’s attitude towards the local population. The episode of the Kazakhs racing after the train and a camel grazing next to the railway contribute to this image, serving at the same time as visual metaphors of the power and advantage of the technical progress.
Perceiving nature as the only obstacle on the path to development and prosperity, Turin presented all human energy and knowledge as directed at overcoming this hostility. The scenes of construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railroad extensively used military jargon and imagery and combined manual and machine labor into one coalescent effort. Nature, which could be both an ally (when bringing water) and a foe (placing deserts and rocky mountains in humanity’s way), becomes at the end a personified opponent of progress and thus, of humankind: “Stubborn is nature. But still more stubborn is man and the machine.”* Focusing on nature as an obstacle, Turin eliminates all other problems, emphasizes the similarities within the created entities to underline the compatibility there was existent between neighboring territories despite their differences. Central Asia received railways and technical equipment from the outside in exchange for her national riches and thus entered the path of progress leading towards a modern future together with other Soviet lands.
The inherent friendliness was not, however, the only image of Asia. Despite a persistent anticipation that the world would follow the Soviet example, the territories not included in the new state were portrayed as alien and hostile to the new regime. Thus, Asia was divided into two parts: “our” friendly Asia (reserved largely for the Soviet Central Asian republics and thus confined to the present) and “their” hostile one (at different times associated either with China, hosting a large group of the White movement or with Japan, long perceived as a military aggressor). Evoking a memory of the Mongol yoke, the image of the ‘other Asia’ serves as a basis for Pudovkin’s film Storm over Asia (the original Russian title: The Heir of Genghis Khan), which makes an attempt to redefine the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The movie is set during the Civil war, the time of contested loyalties and shifting borders. The opposition of the Reds (pro-revolutionaries) and the Whites (counter-revolutionaries) set in the Mongolian steppes affected the local population, which is introduced as the descendants of the legendary Golden Horde whose Khans had conquered the territories from the Sea of China to the Dnepr.
The present-day Mongols were portrayed as nomads, earning their living by hunting, and exploited by a westernized Russian merchant – clearly a friend of the Whites – procuring the fruits of their labor dirt cheap. When coming across a battle between the Reds and Whites, the main character (who remained without a name throughout the film) instinctively sided with the Reds, fighting whom he perceived as “an enemy.” Caught captive by the Whites, he is first sentenced to death but later is officially announced as the heir of the famous Mongol Khan in the hope that that would help the Whites establish friendly relations with the local population. The hero, however, having realized the wicked nature of the Whites, turns from a silent dummy into a dangerous fighter and calls for a national uprising that would liberate his countryman and bring back the ancient powers. Pudovkin once again makes use of an ‘apprenticeship’ model” which proved successful in his earlier film Mother (1926). According to it a benevolent but unenlightened hero undergoes the necessary socialization process which teaches him to recognize ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The borderland territory, on which the ‘struggle for souls’ takes place, is presented as an area of uncertainty, lacking a clear demarcation line, capable of both expanding and shrinking, and thus in need of close attention.
The borderland identity poses the familiar questions of barbarity and religion, situating the local population between the two poles: one is represented as just, crude and simple, another – as refined and malevolent. An attempt to use Buddhism for befriending the local population castigates both the institute of religion and the manipulating nature of the Whites. The ‘right’ choice is made after the hero regained his identity or memory or consciousness, all of which are considered largely synonymous. Avoiding further developments, the film ends with the awakening of the “heirs of Genghis khan.” Against the painful collective memories of the Mongol yoke, the new generations with an ‘enlightened consciousness’ are not viewed as a threat but as a future ally, serving as a visual illustration of Lenin’s idea that national movements precede and prepare the socialist ones.^[43] The idea of a further expansion of the Soviet State is still not excluded and the eastern borderlands are considered in flux. The perceived flexibility existed for a limited time and gradually came to be replaced by an image of an isolated country, surrounded by vicious neighbors. This change is especially visible in the evolution of the images of the Far East. Of particular importance is the shift in the representational canon which is not limited to these specific territories but is used as an illustration of a larger political, economic, and cultural processes.

Part IV. THE NORTH AND FAR EAST: At the Edge of the World

One-Sixth of the World, 1926, Goskino (Kultkino), Vertov
Aerograd, 1935, Mosfilm, Dovzhenko

The Northern and Far East territories rarely receive much attention from the ‘empire studies,’ possibly due to the absence of a developed indigenous discourse, alternative to the central interpretation. Viewed as vaguely defined, remote, and underdeveloped territories with scattered populations, they were the places of exile, a reservoir of natural resources, and in the case of the Far East – a buffer separating Russia from the ‘other Asia.’ Another important ‘function’ of the local ethnicities beginning from the 19th century was to serve as an object of study for the rapidly developing ethnography which used these ‘natural’ examples to showcase the stages in the process of civilizational development.^[44] While the fascination with ‘natural communism’ at the end of the 19th century was shaped by the works of Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877) and Engels (Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1884), the later Soviet civilizing attitude to the local population anticipated the catching up of the northern peoples in the future and yet continued viewing them as completely backward and primitive.
In the previously mentioned One-Sixth of the World, the description of the northern and far eastern peoples takes up almost as much of the director’s attention as the Central Asian territories. The “masters of the Soviet land” are occasionally presented throughout the film hunting, breeding or racing deer, performing shamanistic rituals, and yet some others are shown reading Soviet newspapers. It is in the episode focused on a Samoyed community, however, that the image of the northeastern borderland was most fully presented. Located in a semi-mythic place “where the sun stays in the sky for half a year and the night lasts for another half,”* the Samoyeds are portrayed sitting motionlessly at the seashore, waiting for the ship that visits them once a year. Coming from the ‘mainland’ with manufactured goods and food supplies (flour, wood, textile), it stays for one day, exchanging these commodities for furs and hides, which it takes further to the international Leipzig fair to trade for machines and equipment needed for the country’s development. Not only the remoteness and the separation, but also the power hierarchy is taken to its extreme in this description. The life of the local population is devoid of any autonomy and self-support but is at the same time declared necessary for the common good. The dutifully fulfilled mission is rewarded by knowledge that comes to the locals as Lenin’s voice recorded on a phonograph: “This way in the Soviet land even the peoples leading patriarchal life, … however far they lived, are building socialism.”*
Lacking the industrial force and agricultural development of Ukraine, the independence and self-sufficiency of the Caucuses, or the climatic advantages of Central Asia, the Northern territories are viewed as a repository of natural treasures, minimally affected by the civilizing changes. While included in a larger communication network, this part of the country is directly dependant on the faraway center, and at the same time is represented as isolated from all the adjoining territories. Initially deprived of a borderland status, the North is perceived as an outskirt lacking any ambiguity. It is, thus, the presence of a neighboring entity that accounts for the controversial image which the Far East received both in literature and in cinematography. Nevertheless, not only has the perception of the neighbors changed throughout time, depending on various political, economic, military, and cultural encounters, but the image of the borderland itself was adjusted each time in keeping with the changing conditions.
The frontier image of the Far East in the early Soviet culture reflects a number of concerns: “the settlements of the Far East, native resistance to Soviet authority in remote areas, and the growing fear of foreign (especially Japanese) and domestic enemies of the USSR.”^[45] The atmosphere of growing terror, expanding purges, and overall phobia of subversion caused the reevaluation of the borderlands as the most vulnerable areas, open to both internal and external treason. Building on the existing stereotypes of the Japanese in Russian culture (and literature in particular^[46]),^[47]Dovzhenko in his film Aerograd brought to the fore the main anxieties of the 1930s as well as attempted to account for them.^[48] Being Dovzhenko’s first film made at Mosfilm studio in Moscow, it indicated his success and acceptance as a Soviet filmmaker,^[49] and at the same time implied stricter surveillance of his commissioned works. The Party as well as Stalin’s personal involvement with Aerograd is well documented.^[50] Thus the film contains much of the current political discourse serving as a distilled example of the socialist realist aesthetics, as well as of a militarized everyday life, together with a growing, self-promoted seclusion of the Soviet Union. A marker of its time, the film also illuminates the reformulation of the center-periphery relations in the Stalinist culture.
The opening scenes present the Far East as a bountiful and generous land, quite in line with Chekhov’s description of his trip to Sakhalin where he saw “prose before Lake Baikal and poetry afterwards.”^[51] The image of the taiga as a resourceful terrain and an aesthetic experience is confirmed by the oath of the two locals, two best friends recite in unison: “Fifty years of my life have gone by in the taiga and it seems like only a day. Every day I look and I look again and I ask myself if anywhere else in the world there is such a beautiful and rich place. No place in the world is so beautiful and rich.”* The discourse of scarcity, backwardness, and dependency is replaced here by that of natural harmony and self-sufficiency, declaring that fifty years spent at the same place suffices for making a judgment about the world.
The population of this earthly paradise, however, is portrayed as mixed. Territorial distinction into “locals” and “foreigners,” is not confined to the “good” versus “bad” qualifiers, but is aimed at demonstrating that the evil congregates across the boundaries. The director depicted the Japanese infiltrators, jealous and aggressive, befriending the Old Believers, who are lost far in the taiga and mired in the old times, visualizing the message of the internal danger bluntly and schematically. The alarming presence of enemies both inside and outside the country calls for heightened vigilance, utilizing military rhetoric. This time, however, it is applied not towards the nature, but to the hostile humans. Total elimination is presented as the only possible solution in the situation of the silent conspiracy of the aggressors and the atavists. The omnipresence of the enemies puts traditional loyalties in question. In Aerograd the “bad guy,” marked by his “telling” name (Khudiakov from the word khudo – bad, evil), is hidden under the appearance of an old friend. Following the fairy-tale tradition, the bad never go unpunished, and old affections are sacrificed for the collective security of the many.
Guarding the collective safety implies protection of the borders and control over the inner territory. The borders of the Far Eastern frontier, presented as particularly vulnerable to the attacks, are to be protected from all sides: the land, the sea, and the air can be used for intrusion. Portraying the enemy as aggressive and militant, Dovzhenko justifies the agglomeration of military resources in the area, as well as a merciless attitude towards the traitors. The Japanese in the film are presented as backward, unsuccessful conquerors, jealous not only of the vast Soviet spaces and economic achievements, but also of their cheerful and calm mood. Summarizing these feelings in a death monologue, a Japanese calls himself a samurai and commits suicide, voluntarily giving up his life in the face of a stronger (presumably both moral and martial) power.
The strength and security of the Far East, however, could not have been reached in isolation from the rest of the country. The main hero – a tiger hunter (again, in the literal and metaphorical sense) – is featured as a benevolent but outdated protective force. His young son – a pilot – is in full control of modern technologies and ideologies. He flies to the Far East from the center to help the older generation in protecting the Soviet Union and its peoples. Given an ancient Slavonic name Vladimir (the ruler of the world) he stands for the youthful masculine powers of the state, able to fight and crush the enemy – both outside and within. The homogenization of the territory is originally implied in the formulation of the “power layout.” The main film characters belong to two groups: Japanese and Russians the latter being divided into the “good, modern” and “hostile, backward.” The local population is left with the roles of apprenticeship and martyr: the latter dying by the evil hand of the Old Believers, the former goes to the as yet unbuilt city of Aerograd to study.
The city which gives its name to the film is thus never built. The main message of Aerograd asserts the necessity of the military defense of the borderlands and calls for vigilance in everyday life, avoiding the mundane issues of construction work. A key moment in the film, in relation to the role of the Far East in a larger whole, probably is the scene of a mass migration eastwards, showing progressively dozens, hundreds, and thousands of pilots, soldiers, and marines traveling from different Soviet cities. Coming to the Far East to institute a firm border in the place of an ambivalent frontier, these men in uniforms bring with them a uniform identity of the new Soviet man, devoid of any idiosyncrasy. Homogenization of the territories and the elimination of qualitative differences are probably the most important features of Stalinist cinema. When compared to earlier images of various borderlands, the Stalinist model (tentatively given this name for lack of a better term) is missing a number of facets: the territories either lose their autonomy (up to the point of full dependence) or are portrayed as self-sustainable due to the strong connection with the center instead of to the neighboring lands. The population is invested with a standardized identity, excluding any ambiguities, even if keeping a picturesque appearance. The borders fully replace the borderlands, and the socialist subsumes the ethnic and national in the notorious formula of the Soviet art: “national in form, socialist in content.” Thus, the Far East, along with other territories, is gradually to become a familiar, predictable place, characterized solely by its remoteness from the center, and occasionally by climatic peculiarities.

CONCLUSION: The Recipe for a Potpourri

Starting from the assumption that “the future of the borderland people was inscribed in their representations,”^[52] I attempted to demonstrate the flexible and evolving nature of the borderland imagery, changing both geographically – from region to region, as well as temporally – from the model of horizontal dependency in the 1920s to the vertical one prevailing in the 1930s. Different Soviet republics gave rise to very divergent imagery, and the position of the narrator “inside” or “outside” the course of the narrated events determined the outcome greatly. On the whole, however, Stakhanovist and collectivist Ukraine, isolated Caucuses, passively waiting Central Asia, and endangered Far East – all the images carried an imprint of the civilizing mission of the Soviet power, which originally experimented with different ways of narrating difference and unity. In many respects continuing the policies of the Russian empire, the Soviet regime reformulated its position towards the subjects to confine it to the Marxist ideology. In other words, if in imperial Russia “illiterate Christians were not true Christians, learned non-Christians were not truly learned,”^[53] the Soviet version had it reversed: illiterate communists are not good communists, literate anti-Communists are not truly literate. While having diverging images of the ideal world, the idea of going in one (and the only correct) direction and thus educating in the right (and only possible) spirit was shared alike by the avant-garde and the more traditional Soviet artists. Accommodating national differences into such a model was not an easy task. Introducing an evolutionary scale of development could be viewed as the easiest way out from too many questions. Opting for the national model within a larger union was denounced from two sides: by the local national élites as well as by the homogenized Soviet one. Sacrificing national identity for a larger collective one was yet another option – finally adopted and developed to its logical extremes under Stalin, creating ‘cinematographic nations’ by ascribing each a set of superficial characteristics. The films, functioning as educational material, thus transmitted more and more shallow knowledge, contributing to the growing homogenization of the Soviet population along with its increasing cultural ignorance.
The specters of the past do not disappear easily. The two films mentioned in the beginning of the paper are seemingly remote from the issues discussed above. Both of them, however, directly or indirectly refer to the Soviet past. By evoking the name of the revolutionary commander Voroshilov and his renowned riflemen, Govorukhin in one word ironically describes the identity of the main character, rooting it in the Soviet past, clearly familiar to the viewers. Lutsik not only deliberately replants the image of another revolutionary legend – Chapaev – into a contemporary environment, but also intentionally replicates the title of the well-known Outskirts by Boris Barnet (Mezhrabpomfilm, 1933). The concepts of the two outskirts are strikingly different, however. Barnet’s image of a provincial Russian town during World War I keeps to the decentralized horizontal model of the 1920s, including the interplay of different identities and making the center manifestly absent from the narrative. By referring to the place as a provincial town which could exist anywhere, he expands the notion of outskirts to incorporate the connotation of an ‘internal borderland.’ Conversely, both Lutsik’s Outskirts and Govorukhin’s Rifleman, while also lacking a precise geographical definition, are much more rooted in the Stalinist centralism by recreating a generic remote space, totally dependant on the central powers. A lot of alternative ways of seeing thus seem to be lost on the notorious Great Road. Irretrievably?