Visions of a New Land

Visions of a New Land Visions of a New Land Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War Emma Widdis Yale University Press New Haven & London Copyright © by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Widdis, Emma, – Visions of a new land : Soviet film from the Revolution to the Second World War / Emma Widdis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) . Motion pictures—Soviet Union—History. Soviet Union—In motion pictures. I. Title. PN..R W .؅—dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky’s pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds. —Italo Calvino Contents Preface, ix Note on Transliteration and Translation, xi Introduction: Projecting, Chapter 1. Connecting, Chapter 2. Feeling, Chapter 3. Decentring, Chapter 4. Exploring, Chapter 5. Travelling, Chapter 6. Conquest, Afterword: Mapped? Notes, Glossary, vii viii Contents Filmography, Bibliography, Index, Preface When the Soviet Union went to war in , it did so under the ban- ner of a new identity and defended a new vision of its territory. In this book, I will explore the role of film in the creation of that identity— and that territory. I will examine how the Soviet space was represented in documentary and feature films made between and , and trace the evolution of Russia’s new “imaginary geography” under Lenin and Stalin. To some extent, the dates that delimit my period of enquiry are in- evitably artificial. I chose them, however, to mark out what I believe to be the long period during which models of spatial organization were tested and debated in cultural texts in Soviet Russia. I will focus in particular on the late and early to mid s—on the period of the First Five-Year Plan and the beginnings of Stalinist consolidation. The scope of the book, however, is not and cannot be limited to this short period, and the broader time frame is vital to my argument. In the same way, this is a book about film, but in it I also draw extensively on a wide range of other materials and sources to illustrate and sub- stantiate my broader claims. I hope, above all, to begin to answer two ix x Preface interrelated questions: First, how was the Soviet space imagined in cultural production? How did these “imaginary geographies” reflect real questions about the organization of the territory? And second, what kind of experience of the space was pictured? How did cultural texts offer models of a transformed rela- tionship between Soviet man and woman and a transformed world? Film, then, can be only a part of the larger enquiry into the space and spaces of the Soviet utopia. Many individuals and institutions have provided support and encouragement over the years during which this book has been written. I am grateful to the Slavonic Department of the University of Cambridge, to Peterhouse, to Fitz- william College, and to Trinity College, for vital financial and moral sustenance; I also thank the Kennedy Memorial Trust, and the Slavic Department of Har- vard University, for the much appreciated opportunity to explore other spaces. I cannot list all those who have helped in the preparation of this book. I owe a great debt to Julian Graffy, for his apparently endless generosity, both intel- lectual and material, and to Catherine Cooke, whose help in providing the illustrations was invaluable and whose advice and encouragement throughout the project were even more so. The following people read earlier versions of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions: Svetlana Boym, Katerina Clark, Evgenii Dobrenko, Simon Franklin, Jana Howlett, and Richard Taylor. The book is greatly improved by their contributions. I have also gained much from discussions with Victor Listov, Maia Turovskaia, Naum Kleiman, Nikolai Izvolov, Neia Zorkaia, Katia Khokhlova, Romas Viesulas, and Valeri Bossenko in Moscow, and with Chris Ward, Susan Larsen, Amy Sargeant, Anne Henry, and Kate Tunstall. The staff of many libraries and archives in Moscow con- tributed to making my research easier and more productive, and Niamh O’Ma- honey, Laura Cordy, and Adrian Newman offered vital help in the preparation of the manuscript and illustrations. I would also like to thank Jonathan Brent, Jessie Dolch, Mary Pasti, and Gretchen Rings for their invaluable support in the publication process. I made a sincere attempt to identify the source of each illustration included in this book. In some cases, however, I was unable to locate an illustration’s source. I therefore wish to apologize if I have inadvertently failed to credit any person or organization. Finally, the writing of this book would not have been possible without the support of many others. In particular, I thank Anthony Cross, Robert Douglas- Fairhurst, Michael Newton, Suzanne Nicholas, Muriel Zagha, Mike Widdis, and Dianna Widdis and, of course, Jason Goddard, to whom I owe so much. I hope it’s worth it. Note on Transliteration and Translation Transliteration of Russian is according to the Library of Congress system. Titles in the text are given in Russian and English at first mention, and thereafter in English. Titles in the notes are in Russian only. Although most citations are in English, key Russian terms used throughout the text are defined in the Glossary: in the text, they are given in Russian and English at first mention, and thereafter cited in Russian. All translations from the Russian are mine unless otherwise noted. xi Introduction Projecting This is a book about Soviet spaces. And about Sovietness. Through film, it will trace the map—real and imaginary—of Sovietness. What, then, is Sovietness? Its influence, malevolent or otherwise, on twentieth- century history is indisputable; yet it remains a category about which we understand little. The existence and essence of Sovietness have been variously denied, disputed, and attacked over the past ninety years. More recently, it has been politically dismantled by the collapse of the Soviet Union in . It should have disappeared. And yet in contemporary Russia and the former Eastern bloc at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for better or worse, something that we recog- nize as Sovietness remains very much alive: it is a way of understanding the world, and a way of living in it. Such endurance seems to indicate that Sovietness was not merely a construct of propaganda, a false identity imposed from above on op- pressed peoples and easily discarded in together with almost a century of history. It was, rather, a lived identity—and such it remains, as the lived heritage of post-Soviet Russia. Sovietness is, more- over, a unique historical phenomenon: an identity constructed anew 1 2 Introduction in the media age, in the course of a single century. Born in a dialogue between ideology and pragmatism, state and citizen, Sovietness was envisaged from its very beginnings as a revolutionary way of living in the world. It enlisted mod- ern technology in its attempt to create a new space. To understand the history and heritage of Sovietness is a vital task for us to- day. Its roots lie in the first two decades after the revolution of , marked as they were by a search for the shape and contours of the new order. Spanning the transition from the revolutionary socialism of the civil war period, through the economic “retreat” of New Economic Policy, and into the Five-Year Plans that marked the beginnings of Stalinism and the command economy, these were the formative years of the new regime. They were the years during which the coordinates of Sovietness were defined. Identifying these coordinates is the project of this book. Looking at feature and documentary film in particular, but also at popular journalism, avant- garde aesthetics, and architectural projects, I will examine how Soviet propaganda offered a new model of identity. Understanding Sovietness, I suggest, means understanding the space of Sovietness. In , the revolution pro- claimed a world remade, and the shape of that new world was a vital, and com- plex, question. The success of any social or political project depends on the provision of an imaginary “map” of the social and spatial totality within which the individual is to function: in the case of the Soviet Union, the sheer scale of the territory made this a monumental, and crucial, task.1 Examining visions of the territory during this period is a means of examining competing visions of social organization. Social revolution demands spatial revolution: the new regime needed a new map. “A COUNTRY WITH NEW BLOOD CIRCULATION” Walking in Moscow in , the German philosopher Walter Benjamin made an interesting observation: “Russia is beginning to take shape for the man of the people”; he wrote in a later essay: “On the street, in the snow, lie maps of the [R]SFSR piled up by street vendors who offer them for sale.... The map is almost as close to becoming the centre of the new Russian iconic cult as Lenin’s portrait.”2 Four years later, in , a Soviet adventure journal for children enti- tled Vokrug sveta (All Around the World) boasted of how many maps of itself So- viet Russia was now producing.

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