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Riding the Soviet Iron Horse: A Reading of Viktor Turin's Turksib through the Lens of John Ford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2018

Abstract

This article considers Viktor Turin's 1929 film Turksib to be a “Red Western,” or film that is indebted to an American cinematic, visual, and literary tradition in its production of a vision of a Soviet frontier. Turksib engages with a discourse of frontierority that proved central to the articulation of Soviet identity in the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing from prerevolutionary cultural paradigms for Russian national and imperial growth, as well as from the key American myth of the train's role in vanquishing the frontier, Turksib is a film meant to realize notions of territorial largesse in an ideologically-acceptable manner—that is, to reconfigure the dominant imperialist-capitalist model of the frontier in socialist terms. A close study of Turin's film in comparison to its western counterpart, John Ford's early classic, The Iron Horse (1924), reveals the challenge of distinguishing industrialization and modernization in socialist and avowedly anti-imperial rather than capitalist and colonial terms.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

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43. Widdis, Visions, 128.

44. One exception is the 1929 Tajik film Pribytie pervogo poezda v Dushanbe, directed by V. Kuzin, N. Gezulin, and A. Shevich, see Abikeeva, Gulnara, “Central Asian Documentary Films of the Soviet Era as a Factor in the Formation of National Identity,” Kinokultura, 24 (2009)Google Scholar, at www.kinokultura.com/2009/24-abikeeva.shtml (last accessed March 30, 2018). The railway, with “its links to the themes of construction and displacement,” is “an archetype of Soviet identity” (Abikeeva). The opening of the Turksib in 1930 “provoked a storm of documentary films, press eulogies, and literature in celebration.” These included the films Pervomaiskii podarok trudiashchimsia strany (1930), Ermolaev's Turksib (1930), Room's Turksib otkryt: Kino-ocherk (1930), and a portion of the 1930 film Giganty raportuiut (The Giants Report), see Emma Widdis, Visions, 104–5.

45. European films tended to demonstrate more ambivalence toward the train than did American, see Kirby, 194–95.

46. Film found for itself “an apt metaphor in the train” (Kirby, 2). The “essentially ‘modernist’ medium” of cinema was deeply linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century “economic, social, and technological developments” (Stollery, Alternative Empires, 16–17).

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48. Overview from Payne, Matthew J., “Viktor Turin's Turksib (1929) and Soviet Orientalism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 21, no. 1 (2001): 3762Google Scholar; 37–48.

49. Leyda notes that Turksib was “a popular and immediate success abroad” and was well-received at home (260). Soviet critics responded favorably, for example, see I. Sokolov's review “Turksib i ego avtor Turin” (Kino i zhizn΄, 9, 1930, 7–8) praising Turin for creating the first “kinopoema” about socialist construction (7).

50. Payne, “Turksib,” 45.

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53. The press referred to the project as “the forge of the Kazakh proletariat” (Payne, “Turksib,” 41), but, as Emma Widdis notes, the Turksib was also called “the first Soviet railway,” see her Visions, 105, emphasis mine.

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64. Fox Studios commissioned The Iron Horse as “a sort-of sequel” to Paramount's The Covered Wagon; the two films are credited with establishing the genre of the “epic Western.” The Iron Horse was greatly hyped by the standards of the day, see Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John ford (New York, 1999), 7879Google Scholar, 87.

65. Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CN, 1998), 94Google Scholar.

66. Roberts notes the allusion to Stalin, Forward Soviet!, 110.

67. Levy, John Ford, 94, emphasis mine.

68. See, for example, Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, on how the attainment of international socialism was understood as the end point of history.

69. As on the Turksib, interracial tensions were present during construction of the Transcontinental Railroad; European workers directed persistent violence against Chinese laborers at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tcrr-reports/ (last accessed April 3, 2018).

70. The European/Russian workers on the Turksib “violently objected to nativization” and the inclusion of Kazakhs among the proletarian ranks (Payne, Stalin's Railroad, 10). There was also “class warfare” between the engineers and the workers on the Turksib, despite the supposed disappearance of worksite hierarchies (Payne, Stalin's Railroad, 7).

71. MacCabe, “Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire,” 13.

72. Matthew Payne likewise asserts that the workers’ battle against nature is central to the film, see “Turksib,” 55.

73. Lavrent΄ev, Krasnyi vestern, 16.

74. This is how many have read the scene. For example, Anne Dwyer argues that Shklovsky views the image less as an expression of the threat of extinction than as a suggestion that the train and the camel will operate together in this new Soviet space, though in different ways, see her “Standstill as Extinction: Viktor Shklovsky's Poetics and Politics of Mobility in the 1920s and 30s,” PMLA, 131.2 (2016): 269–88. Emma Widdis reads this scene as emblematic of the film's attempt to create “a harmonious relationship between the natural world and those that inhabit it,” Visions, 105. In Sarah Dickinson's work on Turksib, however, she observes that the film demonstrates “regret for the fate of Central Asia's indigenous culture before the onslaught of Sovietization” and that this constitutes the “primary interest” of the film; see “Iron Steed as Little Golden Calf: Turksib and the Modernization of Central Asia,” unpublished paper, 4.

75. Dwyer, 280.

76. The “Cowboy Artist” Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926) portrayed the closing of the frontier in nostalgic-elegiac terms. His experience as a cowboy and time spent among members of the Blackfeet Nation lent an air of authenticity to his work. See Taliaferro, John, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist (Boston, 1996)Google Scholar. Image courtesy of the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction.

77. Prusin and Zeman note that Ford “often visually recreated . . . images from classic American frontier art, such as the paintings of Frederick Remington.” They further suggest that Soviet directors also engaged in this practice, noting that “an interesting comparison may be drawn” between Mikhail Romm's The Thirteen (1937) and Frederick Remington's 1903 painting “The Fight for the Water Hole,” see “Taming Russia's Wild East,” 262.

78. There was Native American resistance to the Transcontinental Railroad, but not to the extent dramatized in Ford's film; see “Native Americans and the Transcontinental Railroad,” at http://www.pbs.org./wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-tribes/ (last accessed May 21, 2015, no longer available), and Hine, Robert V., Faragher, John Mack, and Coleman, Jon T., The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, 2000), 291–93Google Scholar.

79. Cawelti identifies the elegiac as a key mode of the Western: it mourns the end of a state of wilderness and the destruction of a pre-modern Native American way of life (The Six-Gun Mystique, 80).

80. Forced settlement in the mid-1930s destroyed the Kazakhs’ traditionally nomadic way of life, sparked famine, and caused large loss of life, see Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives,” 30–32.

81. Matthew Payne similarly suggests that the American version of such a scene typically emphasizes the “tragic nobility” of the Native American defeat by the train. He reads the chase in Turksib purely as farce, however, “Turksib,” 53–54.

82. Film and literature in this period rejected the individual hero as a means of decentering narrative attention, see Clark, Petersburg, 266.

83. Marx, Leo, “The Railroad in the American Landscape,” The Railroad in the American Landscape: 1850–1950, Curator, Guest, Walther, Susan Danly (Wellesley, MA, 1981)Google Scholar. Russian colonization was widely construed as an act of giving life to a “lifeless,” “empty” region, see Sunderland, “Colonization Question,” 217. David Rainbow examines the metaphor of “giving life” in Siberian colonial discourse in “The Life of Siberia: Biology as Metaphor in Late Imperial Russia” (unpublished paper presented at Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Conference, San Antonio, TX, November 2014).

84. Lenin expressed concern with the “plague” of Oblomovism in a 1922 speech and elsewhere. See “The International and Domestic Situation of the Soviet Republic: Speech Delivered to a Meeting of the Communist Group at the All-Russian Congress of Metalworkers,” March 6, 1922, Collected Works, trans. Skvirsky, David and Hanna, George, 2nd English ed. (Moscow, 1965)Google Scholar, v:33, 212–26; 223 at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/06.htm (last accessed 5/21/2015).

85. Martin Stollery notes the projection of the “peasant problem” onto Central Asia. See his Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter, Eng., 2000), 84Google Scholar.

86. Roberts, Forward Soviet!, 111.

87. The cinematic portrayal of industrialization under Stalin was meant to show how Russia's vast space could be “tamed and domesticated,” see Widdis, , “‘One Foot in the Air?’ Landscape in the Soviet and Russian Road Movie,” in Harper, Graeme and Rayner, Jonathan, eds., Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation, and Cultural Geography (Bristol, 2009), 78Google Scholar.

88. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 67–70.

89. MacCabe, “Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire,” 6.

90. Marx, “The Railroad in the American Landscape,” 14.

91. Nye, David E., American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 46Google Scholar.

92. Ibid., xiii-xv.

93. Matthew Payne notes that machinery is “the real hero” in Turksib, “Turksib,” 41.

94. This worker is Russian; I am grateful to Katherine Holt and Anne Dwyer for noting that this privileging of the Russian physique reveals perhaps unconscious tension around official ideology.