Speaking for Those “Backward”: Gender and Ethnic Minorities in Soviet Silent Films

Speaking for Those “Backward”: Gender and Ethnic Minoritiesin Soviet Silent Films

Yulia Gradskova

Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia,Volume 2, Number 2, 2013, pp. 201-220 (Article)

Published by Slavica PublishersDOI: 10.1353/reg.2013.0015

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REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 2(2): 201–20, 2013.

Speaking for Those “Backward”: Gender and Ethnic Minorities in Soviet Silent Films

Yulia Gradskova

The article is dedicated to the study of the cinematographic representations of two early Soviet emancipation projects: the emancipation of women and the emancipation of national minorities. In what ways did these two emancipa-‐‑tion projects intersect? How were women of the “dominated” nations ad-‐‑dressed and treated in the post-‐‑revolutionary years? In order to answer these questions I analyze three newsreels and six thematic films connected to the mentioned topics and produced between the mid-‐‑1920s and 1931. Films dealing with the “emancipation” of women not infrequently showed women from different regions, but, in addition to this intra-‐‑Soviet perspective on an all-‐‑Soviet dimension, I focus on several films dealing with the Volga-‐‑Ural re-‐‑gion in particular. Soviet films from 1920 to the early 1930s give us more complex and multilateral information about both “emancipations” than do other Soviet documents. At the same time, they show that racialized images of “other” women were frequently used by Soviet filmmakers in order to em-‐‑phasize the progress of the Soviet modernizing project.

When taking power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolsheviks expected revolutions in other countries to follow soon after. But at the same time, they were eager to preserve the territory of the former Russian Empire under their “revolution-‐‑ary” control. The Bolshevik leaders wanted to gain support for their policies from those local intellectuals who had pronounced against Russification and Christianization during the postrevolutionary years. Indeed, the Bolsheviks hoped to attract at least some ethnic minorities through their anti-‐‑colonial slogans.1 The new revolutionary leaders presented themselves as obvious ideologues of social transformation, while the “dominated [ugnetennye] peo-‐‑ple” of the former empire were expected to learn the way to “emancipation” from the programs elaborated at the center of the new proletarian state.

The new rhetoric of culture and learning, in spite of all its anti-‐‑colonial elements (for example, ideas of destroying the “prison for people” created by

1 See, for example, Imanutdin Sulaev, ”Musul´manskie sʺ″ezdy Povolzhía i Kav-‐‑

kaza v 1920-‐‑kh gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 9 ( 2007): 141.

202 Yulia Gradskova

the “old regime”) to a large extent followed the logic described by Walter Mignolo as colonial. According to Mignolo, some people found themselves declared “barbarian” so that other people could define civilization.2 In the case of Soviet Russia, the non-‐‑Russian people from the former imperial periphery were called “backward” by the new Soviet political and cultural elite, which constantly advocated their “emancipation” and development as an important condition for the progress of revolutionary change in the coun-‐‑try as a whole.

Equality between men and women, like the equality of peoples of differ-‐‑ent nations, including the equality of former inorodtsy (non-‐‑Russians)3 with the dominant Slavic majority, was also seen as an important possibility for increasing the number of supporters of the new revolutionary ideals. At the same time, the Bolsheviks viewed women as unready to enjoy equal rights or to share in all the tasks of revolutionary work; while the Russian population as a whole was seen to be in need of more “culture” and education, it was women who were usually portrayed as “dominated” [ugnetennye] and de-‐‑prived of the possibilities for development.4 Thus, women were addressed as “backward” in the propaganda materials of the 1920s;5 like the people of the “dominated nations,” they needed help with their emancipation.

What was happening at the cross-‐‑section of these two emancipation pro-‐‑jects? How were women of the “dominated” nations addressed and treated in the postrevolutionary years? While the full answer to this question re-‐‑quires the use of different source materials, this article explores just one as-‐‑pect of this problem—the representation of women and non-‐‑Russian people in early Soviet films. As is well known, the power of cinematographic images was highly regarded by the Bolshevik leaders; film was the most important way of explaining political ideas to masses of people who did not know how 2 Walter Mignolo, “Coloniality at Large: Time and the Colonial Difference,” in

Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. Saurabh Dube (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2009).

3 For more about the different interpretations of the term inorodtsy, see Juliette Cadio (Zhulét Kadio) Laboratoria imperii: Rossiia/SSSR, 1890–1940 (Moscow: NLO, 2010), 89–91.

4 The literature written on this issue is large; I will refer here only to a few publications: Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Lynne Atwood and Catriona Kelly, “Programmes for Identity: The ‘New Man’ and the ‘New Woman’,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly & David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 256–90.

5 Atwood and Kelly, “Programmes for Identity,” 274–75; Yulia Gradskova, “Raskreposhchenie natsionalki: Sotsialńo-‐‑kul´turnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v otnoshenii etnicheskikh men´shinstv (na primere Volgo-‐‑Ural´skogo regiona v 1920-‐‑e gg.),” Voprosy issledovaniia sotsialńoi politiki, no. 1 (2011): 45–58.

Gender and Ethnic Minorities in Soviet Silent Films 203

to read and write.6 Film helped to fulfill the Party’s need to show and explain the desirable direction of change, the need to document changes in everyday life, and the need to present the challenges of the emancipation of women and minorities through the visual images of newsreels and thematic silent films. It is important to note here that the cultural politics of the “center” in this case, as Irina Sandomirskaja has shown, were not defined solely by the communist leadership but also by intellectuals, including avant-‐‑garde film-‐‑makers.7

The previous research on Soviet nationality policies and the solution to the “women’s question” in the imperial periphery found many contradictions between Soviet programs of “affirmative action” (including attempts at the “emancipation” of women), on the one hand, and methods of their realiza-‐‑tion and presentation to the population in the context of the politics of cul-‐‑turalization and the fight against backwardness, on the other.8 According to Douglas Northrop, these contradictions were so problematic that they even led to a situation where the Bolshevik party “helped to create a discourse of national-‐‑cultural resistance to its own women’s liberation policies.”9 My previous study of Soviet publications for and about “women of the Orient” shows that women of the former inorodtsy from the Volga-‐‑Ural region (in-‐‑cluding Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkir, Mari, and Udmurt women) were usually presented as rather exotic and, at the same time, in need of support from people from the center in order to become Soviet citizens.10

Thus, in this article, I explore Soviet representations of non-‐‑Russian women in order to determine how the “woman’s question” in national re-‐‑

6 Stefan Plaggenborg, Revoliutsiia i kul´tura: Kul´turnye orientiry v period mezhdu

Oktiabrskoi revoliutsiei i epokhoi stalinizma (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2001), 210–12; Evgenii Dobrenko, Muzei revoliutsii: sovetskoe kino i stalinskii istoricheskii narrativ (Moscow: NLO, 2008).

7 Irina Sandomirskaja, “One Sixth of the World: Avant-‐‑Garde Film, the Revolution of Vision, and the Colonization of the USSR Periphery during the 1920s (Towards a Postcolonial Deconstruction of the Soviet Hegemony),” in From Orientalism to Post-‐‑Сoloniality, ed. Kerstin Olofsson (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2008), 10–11.

8 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Madina Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Moder-‐‑nity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006); Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire, Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

9 Northrop, Veiled Empire, 34. 10 See Gradskova, “Raskreposhchenie natsionalki”; Gradskova, “Kuli semí kuli:

“Zhenshchiny otstalykh narodov” i sovetskie politiki kul´turnosti” in Tam, vnutri: Praktiki vnutrennei kolonizatsii v kul´turnoi istorii Rossii, ed. Aleksandr Etkind, Dirk Uffelmann, and Ilía Kukulin (Moscow: NLO, 2012), 664–83.

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gions was presented in cinematographic production. How are the people living in the region shown? What place do women have in different films? Are there differences between cinematographic stories about the region and its people and cinematographic stories on women’s emancipation per se, with respect to interpretations of the “woman’s question”? I analyze how non-‐‑Russian women were presented in the cross-‐‑section of Soviet political images of the non-‐‑Slavic and non-‐‑Christian population of Russia (former ino-‐‑rodtsy) and the representation of the solution to the “woman’s question.” This analysis will contribute to a better understanding of the complex role that images of non-‐‑Russian women played in Soviet propaganda.

My study of Soviet films is inspired by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova’s decolonial theory, in particular their emphasis on the im-‐‑portance of exploring interpretations of “modernity” in the context of West-‐‑ern civilization and colonial expansion.11 Even if Russia cannot be seen as the proper “West” and Russian Orientalism, as Tlostanova suggests, is only “sec-‐‑ondary Orientalism,”12 the presence of Orientalism and coloniality in Russian history and in Soviet discourses of the 1920s–1930s nonetheless makes the decolonial perspective productive for the analysis of the representation of “other” women in Soviet silent films.

Films as a Historical Source for Studying Soviet Emancipation Campaigns

In order to produce this analysis, I examined films preserved in the State Ar-‐‑chive of Cinematographic and Photo Documents in Krasnogorsk13 as well as scripts for the chosen films. My interest was centered on the emancipation of women in the Volga-‐‑Ural region and the gendered aspects of the Soviet “culturalization” campaign in this multicultural area.14 For this reason I have chosen those films that focus on minority groups living there or films dedi-‐‑cated to the region as such. Thus, my study examines the films On the Border of Asia (1930, N. Anoshchenko), Country of Four Rivers (1930, V. Dubrovskii), Mari People (1929, N. Prim), and Four in One Boat (1930, N. Prozorovskii).

11 Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,”

The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, 1 (2002): 60. 12 Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies, 64. 13 I am very grateful to the Archive’s staff and, in particular, to Elena Kolikova for

all the help with archival work. 14 For more about Soviet politics of women’s emancipation in cross-‐‑section with

nationality politics in the Volga-‐‑Ural region, see, for example, Alta Makhmutova “Lish´ tebe, narod, sluzhenie!” Istoriia tatarskogo prosveshcheniia v sud´bakh dinastii Nigmatullinykh-‐‑Bubi (Kazan: Magarif, 2003); ed., Hilary Pilkington and Galina Emelianova, Islam in Post-‐‑Soviet Russia: Public and Private Faces (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Gradskova, “Kuli semí kuli.”


However, in order to explore a more general perspective on how issues of the emancipation of minorities and women were addressed by the Bolshe-‐‑viks, I also analyze parts of newsreels and one thematic film dedicated pri-‐‑marily to the “woman’s question”: State Cine-‐‑Calendar (1925, D. Vertov; I ana-‐‑lyze only the part on the meeting for those working among “women of the Orient”), Meeting of the Oriental Department for Work Among Women in Komin-‐‑tern (1920–24, unknown producer), Soviet Cinema Magazine (1928, unknown producer; a special issue dedicated to work among women), and In Single File (1930, I. Setkina). Finally, I analyze a film dedicated to culturalization of minorities in the USSR: The Inspection is On (1931, unknown producer).

Thus, for my analysis I have chosen three newsreels and six thematic (documentary15) films that to a greater or lesser extent are connected to the topics under discussion and were produced between the mid-‐‑1920s and 1931. Most of the films belong to the last period of mass production of silent films.16 In contrast to the newsreels produced mainly by the central film stu-‐‑dios, the films dedicated to the ethnic minorities of the Volga-‐‑Ural region were produced by the film studio Vostokkino (1928–34), a shareholding com-‐‑pany created with the aim of cultural development among the peoples living in the East.17

Research into early Soviet avant-‐‑garde films has shown that the film pro-‐‑ducers, inspired by the idea of radical social and political change, brought many innovations to the techniques of filmmaking18 and embraced a new

15 All the films I have chosen for analysis are documentaries according to the Soviet

definition. However, following Liudmila Dzhulai, I have decided to avoid sim-‐‑ply calling them documentaries due to the visible presence of staged episodes and the clearly ideological selection of the reality chosen for “documenting.” According to Liudmila Dzhulai, “In practice the ‘organization of material’ not rarely revealed itself as camouflaged dramatization.” Liudmila Dzhulai, Doku-‐‑mentalńyi Illuzion: Otechestvennyi kinodokumentalizm—opyty sotsialńogo tvor-‐‑chestva (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 75–76.

16 After 1931, sound films significantly increased in number. See Denise Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 242.

17 For more information about Vostokkino, see, for example, Nikolai A. Lebedev, Ocherki kino SSSR: Nemoe kino 1918–1934 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965), <http:// bibliotekar.ru/kino/36.htm>; Oksana Sarkisova, “Folk Songs in Soviet Orchestration: Vostokfil´m’s Song of Happiness and the Forging of the New Soviet Musician,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 14, 3 (2010): 261–81.

18 Yuri Tsivian, Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona: Le Giornate de Cinema Muto, 2004); Sandomirskaja, “One Sixth of the World”; Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! History and Non-‐‑Fiction Film in the USSR (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).

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cinematographic language.19 Furthermore, Oksana Sarkisova and Irina San-‐‑domirskaja have demonstrated that Soviet film was a complex mechanism producing national and cultural policy simultaneously,20 while research on non-‐‑acted films has been described by Graham Roberts as important for un-‐‑derstanding Soviet society through film audiences.21 The shots created in dif-‐‑ferent geographic locations and brought together by montage became the most important components of the production of Soviet newsreels and silent films in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, many films were made by amateur filmmakers and were of rather low quality.22 Thus, early Soviet silent films were very diverse with respect to form, place of production, and artistic value. However, beginning in 1930 the film industry, like all spheres of life in the Soviet Union, experienced greater centralization while the “ide-‐‑ological correctness” of cinematographic images was made the center of at-‐‑tention of the Communist Party.23

For the most part, the films under analysis have no place among the masterpieces of Soviet cinema; most of the thematic films were made nearly in the post-‐‑avant-‐‑garde period, when the Stalinist canon of “socialist realist” representations of Soviet nations and Soviet women began to be established in 1930. Still, the last silent films to some extent continued to follow the prin-‐‑ciples of representing reality that were characteristic of the 1920s, in particu-‐‑lar due to the predominance of visual images over the textual; only with sound could the authoritarian propaganda become central in the films.24 As for films made by Vostokkino, they played a special role in the campaign for the education of minority people and had to combine several goals. Accord-‐‑ing to Sarkisova, Vostokkino’s films were produced with the double aim of denouncing the orientalizing tradition and achieving commercial success.25

19 “It is not through Soviet mass against bourgeois magic but through the united

vision of millions of eyes that we shall struggle against capitalist sorcery and deceit.” Vertov, 1925; quoted in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 125.

20 See Oksana Sarkisova, “Edges of Empire: Representations of Borderland Identities in Early Soviet Cinema,” Ab Imperio, 1 (2000): 225–51; Sandomirskaja, “One Sixth of the World.”

21 Roberts, Forward Soviet, 2. 22 Lebedev, Ocherki kino. 23 Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in

Documents, 1896–1999 (London: Routledge, 1988), 283–84. 24 According to Youngblood, the silent films generally had difficulties with their

educational and propaganda functions “because information—and propagan-‐‑da—are better transmitted through speech” (Youngblood, Soviet Cinema, 214).

25 Sarkisova, “Edges of Empire,” 263.


“Women of the Orient” as an Object of Emancipation

The earlier collections of short newsreels presented to the public as cine-‐‑magazines, cine-‐‑reports, or cine-‐‑calendars from time to time took up the issue of the emancipation of women. Newsreels from the early 1920s were usually based on footage produced in Moscow, centered on big meetings, confer-‐‑ences, and party leaders responsible for women’s emancipation. Due to the format of short news reports, film producers usually had to limit themselves to showing what was happening without explaining the importance of the events and people on the screen.

The images of non-‐‑Russians, former inorodtsy, women, and topics of the emancipation of “women of the Orient” were present in the newsreels where the images of “other” women, looking different from the mass of Russian factory and peasant women, served to illustrate the gigantic dimension of the work to be done. In a short film about the conference organized by the Kom-‐‑intern’s department for work among women of the Orient, we see women-‐‑delegates from different parts of Asia. The camera moves from one group to another, focusing on a group of women totally covered with dark cloth so that no part of their faces or bodies is visible. After assuring the spectator that the women gathered for the conference represent the diversity of “other” women, the camera, however, moves to more familiar speakers (part of the film takes place at a kind of mourning ceremony at a cemetery). The script identifies Aleksandra Kollontai, Klara Zetkin, and Nadezhda Krupskaia among the women at the ceremony; male speakers at the conference include Lev Trotskii, Aleksandr Zinoviev, Red Army general Budenyi, and the head of the Soviet government, Kalinin. These key figures of the Bolshevik Revo-‐‑lution and Soviet power signify the importance of the emancipation of the women of the Orient for the Soviet leadership. Still, the camera does not lose sight of the female figures representing the Orient: we see the listening pub-‐‑lic, a group of women dressed in clothes covering their whole bodies posing near the entrance to the Ministry of the Justice, and, finally, women-‐‑delegates on the railway station platform obviously on the way back home, newly inspired.

In a newsreel made by Dziga Vertov from approximately the same pe-‐‑riod, the narrative of work among women of the Orient is rather short as well. In this case, the participants of the conference on work among women of the Orient are listening to the head of Zhenotdel, Nikolaeva, and two rep-‐‑resentatives of the Komintern, V. Kasparova and T. Roi, a man from India (all the participants are shown in close-‐‑ups and, in contrast to the previous film, are named in captions). The auditorium, however, is shown as rather differ-‐‑ent from the one in the first film: many women have short hair, some women are wearing caps, and no veiled women are shown. Nevertheless, after showing the main speakers the camera focuses on two particular women whose appearance is noticeably different from that of the traditional Russian/

208 Yulia Gradskova

European woman: Comrade Kulieva from Turkmenistan and Comrade Khogoeva from Buriat-‐‑Mongolia. Both have remarkable hair coverings—a white kerchief in two knots over the ears in the first case and a high round hat in the second—but their faces clearly reveal their concentration on the speaker. Thus, it is possible to say that the “woman of the Orient” appears in this short episode as a diligent pupil taking seriously the words of her teach-‐‑ers but not showing her own initiative.

In many films of the late 1920s–early 1930s about work among women, “other” women appear briefly in the stories about “emancipation” in order to represent the extent of the cultural change that has occurred during the post-‐‑revolutionary period. For example, a special issue of the Soviet Cinema Mag-‐‑azine from 1928 dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik party’s work among women, focuses on the transformation of the everyday life of “ordinary” (usually white, Slavic, or Russian-‐‑looking) women. We see the “new woman” speaking at the delegates’ meeting, tasting food in a kindergarten, as a pilot of a military plane, and as a party member. Only a few short episodes of this film stress the spread of “emancipation” to “other” women as well; for example, the caption “woman of the Orient” follows shots of a woman in a kind of Chinese dress sitting in the presidium of the meeting and a “working woman of the Orient” collecting cotton.

In the late 1920s, growing emphasis on the emancipation of women as an result hat has already been achieved (as well as increasing attention to visual propaganda on the scale of the Soviet Union as a whole) contributed to the expansion of geographical diversity in the representation of the Soviet “new woman.” At the same time, however, the women shown in films increasingly sacrifice individuality for representativeness of the number of “emancipated women” among different ethnic groups in Soviet territory. The seriousness of the women speakers and listeners in early Soviet films is in contrast to the smiling faces of the “emancipated” and “happy” women of the early 1930s. The thematic films The Inspection is On and In Single File are good examples of this transformation.

Irina Setkina’s26 film In Single File is a poetic story about women’s equal-‐‑ity in the workplace in conjunction with the fulfillment of the third year of the five-‐‑year plan. According to the film, women, like soldiers, are ready to join ranks with men in order to fulfill the party’s plans for the construction of socialism. The USSR is presented as a giant factory and construction site. Thus, women are shown working with new machines: as tractor drivers, mowing machine operators, tram drivers, and electricians. Women are also depicted in new positions in the power structure: we see “Director Sazonova” and “Head of the Village Soviet” printed on doors. In the last scene we are

26 Irina Setkina-‐‑Nesterova (1900–90), a Soviet film producer, best known for her

postar documentaries, <http://istoriya-kino.ru/kinematograf/item/f00/s02/e0002695/ index.shtml> (accessed 1 April 2013).


shown a woman with rather as “city look”—a dark coat, white blouse, and short hair cut.

In addition to praising the emancipation of women, this film has other important ideological goals: to refute the Western “myth” of compulsory work in the Soviet Union, to justify the cruelty of collectivization by showing the intensity of “kulak resistance,” and to create propaganda for military training. Indeed, the substance of the second part of the film is dedicated to one more type of the Soviet “new woman”—a woman-‐‑hero, a victim of the dramatic fight with the past. We see a huge procession of people behind the coffin of a woman-‐‑activist killed by a kulak. Furthermore, women are shown not only working in nurseries and new collective kitchen-‐‑factories but also taking on the role of kolkhoz propagandists (e.g., in one episode, the women invite an older man to join the kolkhoz). Thus, the film provides a multidi-‐‑mensional picture of the Soviet emancipation of women as an entrance into the “male world” simultaneously with the conversion of women into Soviet subjects—loyal Soviet citizens ready to fulfill the plans of the Communist Party.

What place do “other” women have in this film and what roles do they play? The film includes footage shot mainly in Central Asia and presents women dressed according to different ethnic traditions of the region. While the name of the ethnic group is sometimes identified in the accompanying text (“Uzbek women” or “Turkmen women”), in other episodes the ethnic identity of the women can only be guessed. What is remarkable, however, is that “other” women appear more frequently in the last part of the film, which is dedicated to the cultural revolution. In almost all the episodes they are shown as beneficiaries of culturalization. This representation differs from the representation of “ordinary” (Russian-‐‑looking) women in the first part of the film, where they are shown as active participants in the construction of socialism. Some non-‐‑Russian women gather attentively around a radio-‐‑set, a Turkmen woman sits in class with her child on her knees, a woman from Kazakhstan simultaneously writes and breastfeeds her child (the naked breast is shown in close-‐‑up). Only a few episodes are dedicated to non-‐‑Russian women, not dressed in the European style, as active builders of the new life. In one of them, a woman with long dark plaits is shown washing fruit at a factory, while some other women offer their traditional heavy jew-‐‑elry in exchange for new tractors. The last episode may also have another meaning—the woman who is shown removing her earrings not only acts to build more tractors but also contributes to culturalization by changing her “exotic” and probably “unhealthy” look into correct Soviet femininity.27

27 See Yulia Gradskova, “Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty and

Maternity in Soviet Russia in the mid 1930s–1960s” (Ph.D. diss., Stockholm University, 2007).

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Thus, women’s emancipation is shown as a part of Soviet-‐‑style moderni-‐‑zation, and “other” women, in accordance with Mignolo’s description of European modernization, are particularly useful for stressing the progress of civilization. The barbarity of their ethnically different look, long and exotic clothes, and even partial nudity—all contrasting with the look of “ordinary” Soviet women—stresses the grandeur of the Soviet civilizing project. The “other” woman is transformed through such a representation into someone less progressive, less capable of building socialism—not simply “other,” but “worse.” Indeed, following the concepts of contemporary decolonial theory, the direct connection made through cinematographic representations be-‐‑tween the look of “otherness” and lesser suitability for building the future progressive society allows us to speak here about the more visible (compared with earlier films) “racialization” of non-‐‑Russian and non-‐‑Slavic women.28

Finally, the film The Inspection Is On aims to make a kind of cinematic in-‐‑spection of the achievements of centers and organizations with the special mission of bringing culture to the people of national minorities. The film shows cultural transformation as an up–down process carefully planned from the center; footage from different regions of the country with ethnic and geographic diversity plays a prominent role here. The inspection is managed from the headquarters on Red Square—a group of people is shown sitting around a table in a nice big room in Moscow. The most prominent people among those gathered are representatives of the Soviet of Nationalities of VTsIK—Comrades Dimanstein, Nukhrat, and Volkov. Like the leaders in the newsreels from the early 1920s, these leaders are mostly serious; the spectator is reminded through captions that, before the revolution, Russia was “popu-‐‑lated by 180 dominated nationalities,” and that “forced russification and con-‐‑frontations organized from above by some groups against the others” had left its mark on the peoples’ minds.

However, as the film continues, a mixture of pictures of exotic people (like an old woman from the Far North smoking a pipe) with representations of “ordinary” institutions of culture is shown in the process of their “adapta-‐‑tion” to local customs. The latter, however, is no less exotic than the former. Indeed, here we see indigenous men from the North coming to a club wear-‐‑ing fur clothes and women going to an ambulatory clinic in a yurt. The long-‐‑est and probably most lively episode of the film is based on footage shot in a Roma club (according to the inscription, the “club is a cultural hearth for the transformation of the Roma into settled people”). We are shown a kinder-‐‑garten where children are washing their faces (the film stresses hygiene as an important condition for progress) and creating a performance on an anti-‐‑

28 For more on racialization, see Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies, 71–83; and Irene

Molina, “Bortom vi och dem, teoretiska reflektioner om makt, integration och strukturell diskriminering,” in Stasliga uttredningar, ed. Paulina de los Reyes and Masoud Kamali (Stockholm: Staliga Uttredningar, 2005), 41.


colonial topic as a part of a day of internationalism. However, from the cap-‐‑tions it is clear that “colonial exploitation” (and, thus, problems connected to colonial discrimination as such) exists only outside of the USSR, and the main aim of the film is to assure the Soviet people that the problems connected with colonial discrimination do not exist under state socialism.

Only some, particularly young, women are shown as active in the realiza-‐‑tion of the new cultural politics: two Bashkir women invite an old man and a boy sitting on a bench in the club (“The club in Bashkiria does not wait for the people to come [to the club; the club ‘comes’ to the people]”) while, as part of the story about cultural work in Asia, several young women weaving carpets are shown, appearing under the phrase “The cooperative of women-‐‑weavers free from the power of husbands.” Still, most of the women belong-‐‑ing to different ethnic groups are shown in this film as part of the masses in need of guidance and cultural enlightenment. It is possible to say that, like the film In Single File, the film on cultural institutions created for those from the “dull corners” and those living in “ignorance of the nomadic life” uses images of non-‐‑Russian people, particularly women, in order to stress the supremacy of the Soviet approach to modernization and the colonial past.

“Backward” Lands and “Dominated” People

Finally, after analyzing the representation of women of ethnic minorities in the films dedicated to the solution to the women’s question as such, in this section I examine four films produced in 1929 and 1930 (three by Vostokkino and one by Soyuzkinokhronika) dealing with the Volga-‐‑Ural region. Three films are devoted explicitly to the territories populated by the people usually presented in Soviet publications as “people of the Orient”:29 Mari, Tatars, and Bashkirs. The fourth film, Four in the Boat, deals with the wider region around the Volga River. The films were made mainly by young producers and cam-‐‑eramen educated in Moscow. Most of the filmmakers did not belong to the region under study but were involved in the Soviet project of producing a “new national” cinema in several different regions.30

All four films, to a greater or lesser extent, were created for educational purposes: they sought to provide ethnographic knowledge about the every-‐‑day life, history, and economy of those peoples not belonging to the majority. The narratives of “other” people mostly start with the presentation of their

29 See Gradskova, ”Raskreposhchenie natsionalki.” 30 For example, Nikolai Anoshchenko was the producer of the film On the Border of

Asia, a cameraman for Country of Four Rivers, and had earlier produced a film about Chechnia, Zelim-‐‑khan: Kino (Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, ed. S. Yutkevich (Moskva, 1987).) V. Pateipa, the cameraman for the film Mari People, was born in Abkhazia and participated in making several films about the Caucasus.

212 Yulia Gradskova

“natural environment.” This is particularly characteristic of the film Mari People, where ethnographic observations of nature and the traditional life of the local people dominate the visual images while ideological messages are present mainly in captions. Indeed, flashing fast shots of churches without crosses while showing Krasnokokshaisk,31 the capital of the Mari republic, and the hands of a doctor exposing signs of illnesses among the Mari are rare examples of visual propaganda of the new life in the first two parts of the film. Nevertheless, the substance of the film is devoted to the environment in which the Mari people live: the water and banks of the river, forests, and vil-‐‑lages with wooden houses. We also observe the traditional occupations of the local people: scenes of men logging in the forest and shots of everyday life in a village. The film about Tatarstan, The Country of Four Rivers, starts in a sim-‐‑ilar manner: the river followed by images of wheat fields. In this case, each of the four rivers forming Tatarstan’s territory is also shown on a map. The film On the Border of Asia also shows a river and spacious steppe territories. Finally, Four in One Boat opens with water as well: the Volga river. However, the last film quickly stops showing nature and presents the four people at the center of the narrative—three young men and one woman traveling along the Volga in a boat.

The films on the people of particular regions, however, did not limit themselves to showing the “unknown” parts of the country. Through naming local peoples’ living spaces, ethnicities, and languages, the film-‐‑stories can be seen as participating in the creation of a demarcation between newly estab-‐‑lished Soviet ethnicities32 whose important “differences” from each other still had to be established. Finally, the films on inhabitants of the regions can also be seen as participating in the creation of a new Soviet community through depicting those people assumed to be different (the “other”) as more similar, and thus indicating a movement toward homogeneity. This situation has been described by Irina Sandomirskaja as “not-‐‑as-‐‑yet-‐‑sameness,” a step to-‐‑ward the full sameness of being declared a Soviet citizen.33 This movement toward a future common socialist happiness was indicated through changes in people’s everyday lives, appearances, occupations, and behaviors.

Not all the films dealt equally with all three tasks. Moreover, their plots and lengths created different possibilities for stressing one or another aspect of the movement towards the new happiness. I will start with the film that seems to most clearly demonstrate the classic story of “the other,” showing their colorful exoticism and the horrible result of the lack of civilization (Mari People). I will then explore the variants in presenting the anti-‐‑colonial stories

31 Now Ioshkar-‐‑Ola. 32 For more about the creation of Soviet ethnicities, see Francine Hirsh, The Empire

of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Kadio, Laboratoriia imperii.

33 Sandomirskaja, “One Sixth of the World,” 10.


of the Bashkir and Tatar national pasts. At the end of this section, I explore an attempt to create a subject with a new perspective on the region of my inter-‐‑est and its problems: the “proletarian tourist.”34

The “Other” as an Object of Curiosity and Observation

Ethnographic shots of a Mari village take central place in the film Mari People. We see women with traditional female chest-‐‑jewelry and embroidery and men in white clothes. People are first shown near their houses and later at work—taking fishing nets from the water and mowing—and then eating together during the break from work in the fields. Men and women are shown working together, both dressed in simple gray-‐‑colored clothes and resembling Russian peasants. However, the camera soon brings us back to folkloristic pictures with embroidery and religious ceremony. It is easy to suppose that the scene with embroidery is partly staged: a woman looking at the camera displays one piece of clothing after another as if in front of a pro-‐‑spective buyer. The religious celebration in the forest invites the spectator to watch the killing of an animal (the blood from its throat is shown in close-‐‑up) at a gathering of people. Later in the film we also see a rather detailed ethno-‐‑graphic presentation of a traditional wedding celebration in the village.

However, simultaneously with the visual ethnographic story about local customs and decorations, the captions commenting on the images tell us an-‐‑other story with the help of “the scientific Bolshevik” language of the mod-‐‑ernization of nature and people. In the written text, the “forest” is first of all an important resource for industry—“the best in the whole country for the plane industry and musical instruments”—while the “land,” unfortunately, is not the best for agricultural production. The presentation of embroidery mentioned above is accompanied by captions indicating its usefulness for the common good: “The embroidery made by Mari women is well known; it is even exported abroad.” The spectator also learns scientific information about the people on the screen: the Mari are said to belong to a “Finno-‐‑Ugrian tribe” and constitute the major part of the region’s population (53%). Before the colorful episodes of a traditional village wedding ceremony, visual and verbal images coincide more than in the rest of the film: this part describes illnesses among the local population and displays the hands of the doctor showing men’s necks, two women severely deformed by goitre, and the faces of those suffering from trachoma. Thus, the captions and images of factories, hospitals, and Mari-‐‑language newspapers shown in the last part of the film imply that the life of the Mari people will change: their land and they them-‐‑

34 For more about the importance of excursions as forms of active participation by

the Soviet people in the process of education, see Plaggenborg, Revoliutsiia i kul´tura, 239–41.

214 Yulia Gradskova

selves will become part of the new, more modern, and happier Soviet community.

The Past Suffering and Soviet Normalization of the Dominated People

The two films on the Tatar and Bashkir autonomous republics are longer films that consist of both staged “historical” episodes aiming to represent the history of each of the nations and “documentary” episodes showing the transformation of citizens’ lives during the post-‐‑revolutionary years.

The film The Country of Four Rivers, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the Tatar Autonomous Republic, begins the story of Soviet Tatarstan at the moment when the Tatar population became part of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. From the beginning, the spectator is confronted with the Imperial Russian politics of territorial expansion, and visual and verbal im-‐‑ages are organized around the issues of colonization and domination. Closer to the end of the film, we see a few shots of colonialism in Africa that are supposed to provide a sharp contrast between the life of the Tatars in Soviet Tatarstan (formerly colonized people) and the life of Africans who were still dominated by the European colonial powers. We also witness colonial con-‐‑flict through the text, which begins with a quote from Stalin about how the czarist government gave the best lands in the region to “colonizer elements,” and through intertitles indicating that impoverished Tatars were displaced from the center of Kazan, the capital of the former independent Tatar state, to its outskirts. The captions and intertitles are supported by shots of a poor neighborhood, badly dressed and hard-‐‑working people, a peasant’s horse dying during the agricultural work, and finally, sad and dirty children. We also see a man with an amputated leg who is said to have lost it “taking part in the war for faith, czar, and fatherland.” In order to reinforce the credibility of this story of the past, the film uses pre-‐‑revolutionary shots of the czars’ family members and footage of the first meeting of soviets in Tatarstan.

At the same time, the anti-‐‑colonial stance is mixed with opposing views. Thus, the Volga is called “Mother Volga, the Great Russian river,” and the Tatar population is not shown merely as an exploited group but rather as a nation divided into two classes: the poor Tatars and the Tatar “bourgeoisie.” The latter is depicted through images of a large house and a shop in the cen-‐‑ter of Kazan with an inscription in Russian and Arabic, as well as through images of a mullah in a white gown and some Tatar politicians (who are rep-‐‑resented as counter-‐‑revolutionary). Finally, the fear of pan-‐‑Turkism, charac-‐‑teristic of Russian imperial policy at the turn of the nineteenth century,35 also

35 See Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman

and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 92–93.


finds a place in the film: beneath the shot of Istanbul, we can read that Tatar bourgeois politicians “were thinking: Istanbul, Orient, Islam—the united state of all the Muslims.”

The final three parts of the film (of six) are dedicated to the new happy life of Tatars in the Soviet country. These parts are also partially staged, sometimes quite imaginatively. One such scene deals with the problem of smoking: a boy in a red Pioneer tie explains to a middle-‐‑aged man that smok-‐‑ing near wooden houses can cause a fire and endanger the village. The most remarkable, however, is a scene about convincing village women to organize a kindergarten. While in the beginning of this scene women in traditional clothes are sitting in a circle on the grass, rather skeptical towards the words of a woman-‐‑agitator wearing a knee-‐‑length skirt, in the end they agree with the city woman about the need to organize a kindergarten in the village. This occurs after the “voting for” was performed by the children themselves: the children sleeping in the baby-‐‑carriages, covered by white cloth, wake up after they understand that only a minority of the gathered women are in favor of kindergarten; the children thus “raise their hands” from the carriages and take away the cloth protecting them from the “big” problems of the outside world.

Other representations of the “new life” in this film include factory work-‐‑ers (the accompanying text explains that “now the Tatars constitute 30% of workers”); a “new Tatar woman”—a woman working with a machine at a factory, looking like a typical working-‐‑class woman with a kerchief tied back; Komsomol members; Red Army soldiers; a Tatar academic theater; tractors, newspapers, and books on the Tatar language (Latin transcriptions mainly36); and students: “there were twenty-‐‑seven Tatar students before the revolution, but now we have 3,672 Tatar students.” This new life, however, is threatened by “hidden enemies” (obviously connected to the bourgeoisie) who attempt to set fire to the kolkhoz’s hay and ultimately are accused by the people’s court of “wrecking”. Thus, the “new life” is guaranteed through victory over the old local enemy—the Tatar national bourgeoisie—and through the collec-‐‑tivization of agriculture.

The film On the Borders of Asia is longer than the film about Tatarstan, but has similar rhetoric, structure, and visual images. The film begins in the sev-‐‑enteenth century. We see the Bashkirs in traditional costumes with an accom-‐‑panying proverb explaining the traditional way of life for the local people: “Where there is grass there are cattle; where there are cattle there is a yurt.” The people, however, have to pay taxes to the czar in Moscow, and later we

36 About the campaign for the Latinization of alphabets and its consequences, see

Michael Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998) and Francine Hirsh, The Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

216 Yulia Gradskova

see Russian soldiers walking over the steppes and Russian settlers giving vodka to the Bashkir people. We are also presented with text about the vio-‐‑lent arrival of industrial capitalism to Bashkiria, the expropriation of the land for the sake of Russian entrepreneurs, and prohibitions forbidding Bashkirs from having arms, smithies, or living within thirty kilometers of cities.

The class division of society is not as central here as it is in the film on Tatarstan, but the “lack of culture” (like in the film on the Mari) is presented as the main enemy of revolution and the local people’s happiness. The revo-‐‑lutionary changes in the life of the Bashkir people appear rather early (in the first part, we see a document on the organization of the Bashkir ASSR), but the spectator has to return several times to the “dark” past in order to com-‐‑pare and understand contemporary problems. The nomadic lifestyle of the Bashkirs is the main target of the film. It displays herds of horses destroying the grass, senseless violence during the traditional wrestling competition (a small girl cries because her father was severely beaten in such a competition), and men eating an abundant dinner while women work hard cooking all the food. The producers of the film criticize the “backward customs” of Bashkirs, such as giving a guest place of honor and the best food in the house, and as-‐‑sociate them with a lack of hygiene and the spread of syphilis. However, most of the negative effects of the traditional Bashkir way of life are at-‐‑tributed to the “czarist policy” that “brought Bashkirs to a backward every-‐‑day life.”

The symbols of the new life, as in the film on Tatarstan, include factory work, tractors, education in one’s native language, kindergartens, and news-‐‑papers. Furthermore, as in the film on the Mari people, the captions (and, to a lesser extent, images) stress the importance of the natural resources of Bash-‐‑kortostan for the entire Soviet Union: “big forests could secure carbon for the whole Urals’ industry.” However, compared with the other two films, this one pays more attention to the upward social mobility of some representa-‐‑tives of the Bashkir population. The Bashkir man is transformed from a handworker to an excavator operator, eventually becoming the director of a factory and a member of the local government. We also see further variations on images of the “new woman”—from construction workers and women ex-‐‑changing their traditional jewelry for a kolkhoz’s tractor to women in mili-‐‑tary uniforms. The internal enemies of the new life are shown as ignorant rather than entirely malicious (they say that the earth will not give harvest if worked by a machine like a tractor). However, it is the external enemy, the enemy of all the Soviet people, that becomes not only the reason for extensive military preparation, but also an explanation for the need for the unity of all ethnic groups—“everybody should defend the Soviet Union!” In addition to the idea of the Bashkirs becoming part of the new Soviet people by confront-‐‑ing the common enemy in the upcoming war, the last part of the film pro-‐‑poses one more allegorical version of the new Soviet Bashkir identity. A Bashkir worker expresses his decision to join the Bolshevik party and gives


his oath to continue working at the factory until the five-‐‑year plan is fulfilled. Thus, the Soviet normalization of Bashkortostan is represented not least through the symbolic end of nomadism.

As for the “other” women, they do not seem to occupy a central place in any of the three films. Except for some shots of the “new Soviet woman” working and learning, women are presented (as in the film In Single File) mainly through their suffering under colonization from poverty, hard work, and family oppression, or as the obvious objects of the Soviet politics of culturalization.

Between an Old and New Way of Seeing: The Soviet Traveler

In contrast to the other films, the film Four in One Boat seems to be created for a rather different purpose. At the center of this film is a story about a modern Soviet subject—a new traveler—who views the region as a space for sightsee-‐‑ing and recreational activity. The four travelers are city people with obvious Soviet identities: a worker from the assembling department, a club’s instruc-‐‑tor, a factory worker who is an editor of the wall-‐‑newspaper (a self-‐‑produced newspaper glued to a wall rather than distributed), and a cattle-‐‑breeder in-‐‑terested in local history and culture (kraeved). One of the travelers, the wall-‐‑newspaper editor and factory worker, is a woman, Katia. All of them are planning to spend their holiday traveling in the “sailboat of proletarian tour-‐‑ism” along the Volga River, from Nizhnii Novgorod up to the Caspian Sea.

The four travelers’ membership among the “new” Soviet people is demonstrated through how they dress and act during the trip. Thus, one male participant is always shown in shorts (indicating, most probably, his interest in sports and healthy habits), while the young woman is also shown in tight and athletic outfits. The travelers are not only dedicated to healthy activity and well prepared to handle sailing and cooking in the open air, but also have “cultural interests”—they are shown, for example, reading books, using maps, and visiting museums. Although in one scene the young woman cooks dinner while the men fish, for the most part, each of the travelers corre-‐‑sponds to the image of the ideal Soviet “cultured” person with a “correct attitude” for the collective and healthy holiday time.

However, it is exactly the representation of the Volga region through the gaze of the “tourist” that to some extent re-‐‑establishes and re-‐‑essentializes the oppositions described above between the developed/backward and ordi-‐‑nary/exotic. We are briefly shown forests of the Mari region in order to obtain knowledge about the local people: “the forest trade is the central occupation of the Mari-‐‑Finns living near the Volga,” explains the accompanying text. In-‐‑deed, it is the usefulness of Mari traditional occupations, rather than the achievements of the Mari on the way to modernity, that the producers of the film choose to show. The group’s visit to Kazan is the only part of the film

218 Yulia Gradskova

where the former inequalities and tensions of the imperial/colonial context are indicated: we read in captions about 5 million copies of newspapers in the Tatar language and see the inscription “Kazan University” in two languages, Russian and Tatar. Still, these indications only highlight the differences of the particular region rather than show former discrimination and suffering and its consequences for people living in the area.37 Therefore, the perspective of the proletarian tourist becomes the perspective of the normalization of the everyday life of the local people. This perspective silences the problematic experiences of the past rather than inviting the spectator to attend to them, differentiating this film from those discussed above.

The images of most women in these films serve mainly to represent tra-‐‑ditions of the “past” (for in the backward past women wore folk dresses and heavy decorations), while the “new woman” is losing her “specific” national (and even racial) characteristics and becoming a woman like “all the others,” a woman who is represented by her profession and whose ethnic identity is irrelevant. Such a new woman, however, suffers from historical amnesia and is not “interesting” enough for a lengthy representation in the context of films about “the other” from the cinematographic point of view.

Conclusion

The cinematographic representations of people liberated from former op-‐‑pressions, both national and gendered, were very important for Soviet filmmakers, who were expected to depict change and explain the “new life” through visual stories. However, depending on the goals of a particular film, shots presenting non-‐‑Russian (or non-‐‑Slavic) women have different charac-‐‑teristics. The films dedicated to the emancipation of women in the Soviet Union are usually more focused on the most visible achievements of the new equality between men and women. Such images of emancipated women were most easily found among the “more cultured” women—women who belonged to the party and Soviet leadership—and women from the former imperial center (looking like Russians) who “achieved” visible emancipation by becoming kolkhoz leaders or taking part in meetings, military exercises, or “proletarian tourism.” The “other women,” including women of ethnic mi-‐‑norities from the Volga-‐‑Ural region, usually occupy little space in these rep-‐‑resentations and mainly take on the passive roles of listeners, admirers, and pupils. Their racialized images are supposed to contribute to the general de-‐‑piction of common progress. Thus, the “emancipation story” as a whole is supposed to become more convincing. At the same time, the films on the

37 In the last part of the film the tourist group is shown visiting Kalmykia; this

region is represented mainly by exotic Buddhist temples that are openly connected to the backwardness of the local population.


emancipation of women usually do not show private relationships between men and women38 and do not say much about men’s lives in the private sphere or family circle. Nor are men, at least from the white majority, sup-‐‑posed to undergo the same process of culturalization as women.

In the case of the films dedicated to a particular group of people (to Mari, Bashkirs, and Tatars), the spectator is told a story about a difficult past and the beginning of a “new life.” Women as such do not occupy much space in these stories, while the “new woman” does not play a role of her own, but rather symbolizes the achievements of the “progress” of Soviet modernity and the normalization of those aspects of life that were considered to be con-‐‑nected to backwardness (like nomadism and traditional clothes). Even when minority women appear in “new roles” (for example, in military uniform), these episodes are shown chiefly to confirm the progress of nations, not indi-‐‑vidual women.

However, due to the specific cinematographic language of the silent film, a language based on close exposure of the object of filming without any audio component, the Soviet films from 1920 to the early 1930s give us much more complex and revealing information about both “emancipations” than do Soviet pamphlets, newspapers, pictures, and even “scientific reports” of the time. Indeed, even in partly staged Soviet films, women—Slavic and non-‐‑Slavic alike—are supposed to “play” themselves. Thus, while these films do not allow us to access truthful personal stories about “emancipation,” we can “witness” the rather nuanced process of the normalization and partial de-‐‑ethnification of minority women through changes in their appearance, occu-‐‑pations, and ways of communicating with men and the elderly, as well as through their participation in Soviet rituals.

Films

Goskinokalendar [State Cine-‐‑Calendar], no. 53 (Dziga Vertov), 1925. RGAKFD, f. 199.

Na granitse Azii [On the Border of Asia] (Soiuzkinokhronika, Nikolai Anoshchenko), 1930. RGAKFD, f. 4225.

Zasedanie vostochnogo otdeleniia po rabote sredi zhenshchin pri Kominterne [Meeting of the Oriental Department for Work among Women in Komintern], 1920–24. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofoto–dokumentov (RGAKFD), Krasnogorsk. f. 1637.

Mariitsy [The Mari People] (Kulturfilm Vostokkino, N. Prim, cameramen V. Pate-‐‑Ipa), 1929. RGAKFD, f. 2754.

38 In the rare case of a trip of proletarian tourists, a woman is shown in a rather

traditional role—cooking.

220 Yulia Gradskova

V odnu sherengu [In Single File] (Soiuzkinokhronika, I. Setkina), 1930. RGAKFD, f. 3604.

Smotr idet [The Inspection Is On] (Vostokkino), 1931. RGAKFD, f. 12833. Sovkinozhurnal [Soviet Cinema-‐‑Magazine] (Soiuzkinokhronika), 1928.

RGAKFD, f. 12488. Strana chetyrekh rek, Sovetskii Tatarstan [The Country of Four Rivers, Soviet

Tatarstan] (Vostokkino, V. Dubrovskii, cameramen N. Anoshchenko, K. Vents, B. Franuison), 1930. RGAKFD, f. 1459.

Chetvero v lodke [Four in One Boat] (Vostokkino, Nikolai Prozorovskii, cameramen L. Sazonov), 1930. RGAKFD, f. 1402.

Stockholm University [email protected]