Imperial Transnationality: On Soviet Screens

Andy Byford, Connor Doak and Stephen Hutchings raise big, provocative questions in their essay, just as they did in their earlier book, Transnational Russian Studies. If that book championed the deparochialization of Russia relative to other areas of the world with a discrete history, now Byford, Doak and Hutchings advocate attention to Russia’s imperial heritage and to the need to divert ‘epistemic focus away from the traditional Russia-dominated “centre” towards the heterogeneous and proportionally neglected non-Russian “periphery” ’.1 They cogently argue that naïve particularism and celebration of triumphalist nation-building projects may be risks such recentring. They also searchingly illuminate the pitfalls of some ‘decolonialist’ work, with its illusionary exemption of Russia, historically and presently a European power, from critiques of ‘Western imperialism’. At the same time, they point out that ‘Though one of the world’s largest empires, Russia has, nonetheless, often perceived itself as subject to social, economic or cultural colonization by “the West” ’2 – a conviction recently exemplified in the view, widespread among many ordinary members of the Russian public, as well as government leaders and creators of state propaganda, that a nuclear power with the world’s fifth biggest army was so threatened by a neighbour stripped of nuclear weapons in the 1990s and with an army less than one quarter the size of Russia’s that it ‘had to’ engage in a preventive all-out invasion.3 ‘Decolonizing the Transnational’ makes compellingly clear the extent of the challenges to the field that emerged on 24 February 2022. I personally would not assign a large measure of blame to cultural studies and cultural history for the failure to predict the catastrophe itself. Our disciplines are traditionally focused upon the resonance of events and the long-term processes from which these emerge; they do not have a predictive remit. But many of us in the Russian field have been late to ask even basic questions about the country’s relationship with its (former) imperial possessions. We have averted our eyes from the crude rhetoric of subordination applied to non-Russian neighbours and ignored the systematic denial of their linguistic and cultural autonomy.4 We have given insufficient attention to Russia’s non-Russian neighbours, whether those in the Russian Empire, the USSR or the Russian Federation, and to the excellent analyses of ‘coloniality’ as a concept and reality produced in those cultures in recent years.5 A rare plus, if one can call it that, in the present situation is the opportunity to reflect upon and confront issues that we have formerly evaded. That said, ‘reflection’ is a challenge, given the ‘disorientations’ that we face. The ‘crossroads’ metaphor in the subtitle of Byford, Doak and Hutchings’s essay may suggest too straightforward a process of discrimination between interpretive strategies, which arguably extend beyond the ‘decolonial’ and ‘transnational’ forking paths. One may, in the first place, doubt the extent to which Russian and Soviet history consistently adhered to a position that is adequately described by either term. So much, at any rate, was the drift of a recent lecture by Alexander Morrison, the author of a landmark history, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia.6 In Morrison’s view, the revanchist nationalism of today’s Russia is something very different from the ‘Tsarist imperial elite cosmopolitan’ that promoted non-Russians into key positions in the government and military and from the utopian, transformational, radically modernizing aims of Soviet rule (at least in its early decades).7 Thus, pathways exploring ‘nationalism’ (not the same thing as the ‘national’) also straggle off from the unmarked territory into which 24 February 2022 has pitched us. Rather than extensively re-examining overall categories, another possible response might be to eschew the imposition of these and attempt to speak in less abstract forms of the types of hegemony and interrelationships with existing and historic ‘others’ that have existed within and outside the territories of Russia. I agree with Morrison that Putin’s Russia in significant ways does not resemble either the imperial or the Soviet past. It follows that an interpretive schema which does not work in one era might be applicable in another. In particular, the post-Stalin era, for all the promotion under Nikita Khrushchev of early Soviet utopianism, also required the application by ‘precarious autocrats’ at the centre and in the regions of an ‘inclusive politics’ that allowed the accommodation of cultural difference, albeit (by intent at least) never ‘bourgeois nationalism’.8 Certainly, representatives of non-Russian ethnic groups clustered in leadership roles of mainly symbolic importance (such as the chair of the local Supreme Soviet, a post to which women were occasionally appointed, an indication of its insignificance in terms of executive decisions). But from the mid-1950s onwards, first secretaries of the Communist Party were usually selected from the local elite. To be sure, second secretaries were usually outsiders with connections to the powerful Department of Party Organizations in the Central Committee. However, recent research has challenged the traditional understanding of these figures as all-powerful ‘viceroys’, emphasizing that the nature of the power (a)symmetry could depend on incidental factors and personal dynamics.9 In contrast to the mass repressions of 1930–50 and the ‘settler colonialism’ of the late 1940s (including the settlement of serving or demobilized military personnel), the emphasis after 1953 lay on ‘equality in difference’. This in turn made policies inconsistent: expansion of opportunity and the capacity for self-expression in the 1960s and a shift to Russification (for example, of school education) in the 1970s, followed by an epoch-making transformation of central-local relations under Gorbachev.10 As Claire Kaiser has recently argued, it was possible in these decades to be both ‘Georgian’ (or Lithuanian, Armenian, Kyrgyz, Belarusian and so forth) and ‘Soviet’.11 Maike Lehmann has likewise argued for a ‘hybrid continuum’ between Soviet and national identity which meant, for example, that purely Soviet city spaces such as Yerevan’s Lenin Square could become the sites of demands for greater recognition of the local past.12 This overall situation applied a fortiori in the field of cultural production after 1953. In their essay (and their book), Byford, Doak and Hutchings and their contributors mainly invoke the areas of investigation and analysis that have traditionally lain at the heart of ‘Modern Languages’ as a university discipline and school curriculum – languages and literature – though the broader field of ‘culture’ also figures.13 Cinema is an area lying within that broader field which illustrates both the fruitfulness of striving to employ, and combine, ‘transnational’ and ‘decolonial’ approaches and the complexities and limitations that might go with such a project. In the brief remarks that follow, I do not attempt to determine overall ‘where the field is heading’ (probably an impossible question to answer, as Byford, Doak and Hutchings themselves contend), but mainly offer a snapshot of how my own work has moved, in the past four or five years, from a largely Russocentric focus to a more complex overall map of disputed terrain. Cinema appeals in terms of a ‘decentring’ study because its very origins were transnational; it represented a French refinement of image projection techniques and technologies that were both long-established and widely dispersed.14 At once prestigious and abject (as late as 1939, there were British establishment figures who felt it would not be appropriate to use film for war propaganda, though such scruples were quickly overcome), it is proper to many different cultural conditions as well as social groups. This has been reflected in the distinguished corpus of work on the transnational in film, beginning in the 1980s, which traces the dynamics of cultural transfer; the mechanics of institutional cooperation, such as co-production; the role of film festivals as sites of national self-promotion, as well as cultural contacts; and the vagaries of reception.15 For all its impressive scope, however, ‘transnational’ in such analysis has primarily focused upon the interaction of filmmakers, cultural establishments and governments across, rather than within, individual states. Attentive as its practitioners are to power asymmetries, they at the same time assume a high degree of autonomy for the participating actors. In this model, self-assertion, of however vexed a kind, is nevertheless possible. Take the case of Western Europe. Audiences here may be notoriously permeable to foreign films, particularly those made in the USA (for its part, a place notoriously resistant to foreign products), yet state subsidies provide insulation against the market. This ‘semi-state’ model lends a degree of overall coherence, even if popular genres in one European country, particularly comedies, often do not transfer well to others, while painstaking co-productions may not win a large audience share in any of the countries whose largesse has sponsored the film.16 In some ways, this model of coherence in state funding versus diversity of production and reception fits the Soviet situation. However, the dominance of Russia (whose studios not only led in terms of number, quantity of films produced and prestige, but also in terms of visibility) precludes comparison with ‘transnationality’ as existing in the EU. Rather, this hegemonic mnogonarodnaia natsiia [nation of many peoples] was characterized by what one could term ‘imperial’ or ‘colonial’ transnationality.17 As Stuart Hall argued in a 1989 essay, the institutional location of the cinema at once raises pressing questions about power relations and undermines easy assumptions about unidirectional cultural control: How can we stage this dialogue so that, finally, we can place it, without terror, rather than forever being placed by it? Can we ever recognise its irreversible influence, while resisting its imperialising eye? That enigma is impossible, so far, to resolve. It requires the most complex of cultural strategies. Think, for example, of the dialogue of every Caribbean filmmaker, one way of another, with the dominant cinemas of the ‘West’ – of European and American film making. Who could describe this tense and tortured dialogue as a ‘one way trip’?18 The description here is equally applicable to the Soviet case of vexed yet engaged dialogue. Certainly, there was ‘irreversible influence’ here too. The accepted route into the profession for aspiring artists from the ‘periphery’ (including provincial Russia as well as the republics) was film school in Moscow (whether the longer-established All-Russian [sic] State Institute of Film (VGIK), founded in 1919, or the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, operating from 1960 onwards). Both institutions were significantly over-subscribed, particularly for the courses training film directors. Both also operated ‘affirmative action’ policies with regard to applicants from non-Russian republics.19 At the same time, study was assimilated to the overall civilizing mission: a 12 November 1958 Ministry of Culture of the USSR order earmarking four places at VGIK for students from the Kyrgyz SSR (as well as four each at the Gnesin Institute and Moscow Conservatoire and two each at the Surikov and Repin Institutes of Fine Art, etc.) referred in its header to ‘measures for the further development of the art’ of the republic, after what the Ministry had deemed sub-standard performances at a recent festival in Moscow.20 While this order might emphasize professional competence (sending opera singers to Moscow for refresher courses, etc.), it was as much ideological as artistic education that Soviet cultural managers had in mind. Similar contradictions afflicted the professional lives of film artists from the non-Russian republics. Trainees from Tashkent would be sent for internships to Uzbek-Film, those from Yerevan to Hay-Film (or Armenfilm, to use its Russian title), from Vilnius to the Lithuanian Studio and so on. However, there were opportunities to escape the silo. A famous case was Sergei Paradzhanov, an ethnic Armenian from Tbilisi who spent most of his working career at the Dovzhenko Studio in Kyiv. Russians from the provinces who were considered promising might find themselves sent to a metropolitan studio – but in one of the republics (a case in point was Mikhail Kalik in Chișinău). While the studios in Moscow and Leningrad were out of reach for most young filmmakers from the republics also, mature artists responsible for a major hit sometimes got contracts at Mosfilm. For its part, Lenfilm engaged several debutants from the Caucasus and Central Asia in the 1960s, when highly-trained graduates were at a premium, though these filmmakers were definitely subject to ‘Othering’.21 It was Mosfilm releases that were most often dispatched to foreign film festivals and most often shown on television. To this day, the ‘informal canon’ of favourite films is dominated by the USSR’s biggest and most prestigious studio, and not only in Russia and not simply among populations in the former USSR whose preferred language is Russian. Filmmakers themselves were well aware of the hierarchies, and resented these: at the end of the 1970s, Georgian filmmakers took violent offence at an article in Iskusstvo kino [The Art of Cinema] arguing that films produced in the republic were not ‘Soviet’ enough. Yet the pushback against irrelevance was also a claim to significance at the centre. It is not difficult to find other such paradoxes. Every Soviet film had to have a version of the script in Russian so that it could be cleared by bureaucracies in Moscow. But hand-written annotations indicate that directors sometimes worked with the ostensible ‘translation’.22 Russian became the lingua franca in cases where actors from different Soviet republics appeared in the same movie; not only would a Russian dub be released for ‘all-Soviet’ distribution, but sometimes the movie would also end up with the original sound track in Russian, which would then be dubbed into the language of the republic where it was made for release specifically there.23 If even the everyday technicalities of production history were contradictory, the same was all the more true of ideological processing. Filmmakers had to mediate between the requirement for a film to have national character and the necessity for it to avoid ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Sometimes a film could slide, after release, from perceived success in terms of the first desideratum to accusations of being ‘ideologically flawed’ with regard to the latter prohibition.24 While cases of capricious shifts in the position of government and Party officials also overtook Russian directors, the nature of the accusations tended to differ and I have not come across another case where the entire output of a Russian film studio was termed ‘ideologically vicious’, as happened to Moldova-Film in 1970.25 Yet filmmakers themselves could create links that deflected, if not entirely evaded, central control, as in Andrei Tarkovskii’s informal mentoring of a young Armenian director. Here, the ‘no-compromises’ position of Tarkovskii’s private diary is abandoned in favour of advice on how to finesse projects so that they might pass unscathed through the filtration in the film bureaucracies. Whether the term ‘postcolonial’ is applicable to the late Soviet film industry overall is a matter of debate.26 Resistance to overall power asymmetries among Soviet artists (as opposed to artists in the so-called ‘Third World’) tended to be veiled and implicit, expressed in, say, a final edit that ostensibly implicated cuts demanded in the film bureaucracies, but retained the emotional colouration and semantic force of the original. Yet relationships could be as ‘tense and tortured’ as those Stuart Hall describes, and the degree of functional independence may be reflected in the rather successful transition to full autonomy in many former Soviet republics (including, for example, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia and the Baltic States). Cinema has always been transnational within the wider world, in terms of reception as well as production. The select company of filmmakers who achieved international renown in the Soviet period includes some mainly living and working outside Russia (Alexander Dovzhenko, Otar Ioseliani and Tengiz Abuladze as well as Paradzhanov). Cinema studies has a long and distinguished history of engaging with non-Russian directors from the Russian/Soviet empires and with questions of hegemony and dominance.27 In this respect, filmmaking has offered greater visibility to artists than literary activity, where the dominance of Russian gave writers using other languages an explicitly secondary status.28 However, there are many major figures even in film who are practically unknown outside the former USSR (indeed, these days, their home countries).29 Now that cinema from post-Soviet countries tends primarily to attract viewers in those countries (if indeed there), ‘transnational’ impact depends to a high degree on the international academy. What is more, the questions that Byford, Doak and Hutchings have raised provide ways of expanding our field of view not just to include more individuals, but also to understand the mechanisms of cultural production in new and rewarding ways.

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