by Max Kozloff

Soviet photographs between the world wars often reveal more than a kinship with the Russian silent cinema: they seem like extracts from it, actual places of a saga we can hold in our hands. Both media obviously have in common their survival from a defeated grandeur, devastating in its illusions. But the renowned cinema has been degraded by the passage of time and mostly exists for us now as blurred shadow on poor stock. Contrarily, the far less known photographs present themselves as vignettes from that same spectacle, immobilized, with contrasts sharpened and details retained. Whether film or photography, though, the historical value of the picture consists in its special, period denial of the very history it pretended to record, the unspeakable present of Stalinism. Here, the cultural ability to disguise a nightmare as a utopian dream fascinates a world continuing to adjust to the death of the Cold War. Wherever else totalitarian state propaganda may have imposed itself, in Russia such bombastic imagery was nevertheless visualized by art often on a serious level, (ignited by libertarian modernism), that speaks to us with an unintended pathos. For even the formal discoveries of the Soviet picture carried with them strange closures, moral as well as psychological.

The film was presented as a continuum that sweeps around key images, sometimes recurrent motifs conceived beforehand in terms of a design guyed within a frame. Turbulent narrative activity burgeoned through space, and while developed or interrupted by cuts, was blocked out always in relation to the authoritative containment of that frame, instead of the frame being psychologically dissolved in the absorbent flow of events, one feels that the action was brought to the frame and knowingly configured to stamp an indelible-frequently a symbolic-impact in the memory. In the same way the camera dwelled on faces, reiterated within a compressive space, leaving no question of the director’s investment in an iconic sensibility.

For their part, Russian photographers started out from the iconic-a locked-in reserve of which they make us very conscious. All the more did they seem to yearn for an egress from the frame, which was expressed by pressure against its margins. That is, objects, people, and vistas poked beyond the edges with such insistence as to suggest a new uncontainability of the phenomenal world. In western Europe, a comparable pressure existed about the same time, the late twenties. But there, unexpected photographic cropping came about spontaneously or it echoed devices of modernist painting, such as the Bauhaus’s. A machine aesthetic and therefore an ideal of efficiency dominated European vanguard art, inspired by redeveloped economies. Lacking any such infrastructure, the Russians discounted the rational tone but emphasized the dynamic spirit, and specially the insurgent, rampaging vectors of such a pre-war vanguard as Futurism. Never had photography been as kinesthetic, as metaphorically caught up with those traversals of space in evident time we associate with cinema. One has only to compare Moholy-Nagy with Rodchenko to see how much further the Russian took still photography along such apparently fluid and dizzy vantages, forecasting endless others, so that the frame seems as open and omnivorous a fitting as a movie screen, exploding with presences.

Of course the photographic frame acted as a permanent field of fixed imagery while the movie screen worked as a staging area for fugitive impressions. The fact that the two photographic media emulated each other suggests more than the impact of arts fusion theories in cotemporary thinking. A synthesis of the arts and crafts, in a non-hierarchical, industrial setting was a feature of left bourgeois as well as Russian revolutionary aesthetics. But the convergence of film and photography had a very different import in Russian agitprop than in European modernism.

The latter was anti-realist and a historical. It was obliged to address itself to cultivated audiences rather than mass, illiterate publics, as in Russia. There, the requirement to report the progress of a new society led to an early accent on the documentary, as in the film maker Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (cinema-truth), a sort of avant-garde newsreel. And even Dovzhenko’s lyrical film Earth was said to have been originally suggested by a newspaper account of a peasant murder in the Ukraine. Apparently reportorial and transcriptual techniques were part of a breakout impetus: the artists extricating themselves from the sentimental artifices of Salon painting, the genteel stage, and romantic fiction, in their place were installed values associated with rapidity of eye and first-hand witness, and if life were let into the visual field kicking or bumbling, and not a little chaotic, so much the better.

On the other hand, given the scantiness of communications and the regime’s illegitimacy for the majority of the populace, particularly from Lenin’s death in 1924 through Stalin’s definitive seizure of power, by 1929, photographic media were assigned a didactic, coercive mission the very opposite of documentary. And this conflict of aims was articulated in the tension between the attributes of film and photography as they were brought into play with each other. It now seemed as if film, cinema and still, were to use up all their reserve for light in the task of structuring the fugitive moment. By its momentum, contrast and gestures, the visual field constantly demonstrated how it, along with the productive environment itself, could be assembled before one’s very eyes…into an artifact that existed outside real time. In photography, this constructive process was expressed as a kinetic emblem; in film, as an emblematic continuity. Rather than being digested through the subjectivity of people, in their individual circumstance, the visual moment had to bear the supposedly public weight of a "collective" -everyone's and no singular-consciousness.

While they survive in many random sizes, the photos were often deliberately worked up as large exhibition prints, almost posteresque in effect. They were meant to capture the eye before they described any condition. One picture, actually just a snapshot, reveals how the stage management of an exemplary thirties Soviet image was put together-behind the scenes. El Lissitskiy, once a prime vanguard figure, and Georgiy Zelma are shown as they posed and lighted a model impersonating an October revolutionist, who was to be featured in a spread on the military, for the monthly "U.S.S.R. in Construction". Their evidently deadened, academic rehearsal of it in the studio confirms the ferocious vacuity of the image as it was printed in the magazine. Most likely the snap is complicit with the mock-up, even as it reveals it. By any reckoning, this must be a rare tableau. With its freedom of design and sparkle of witness, it exposes a dulled practice of the late thirties by means of the enterprising style of a decade earlier.

Some memorabilia of the photographers have posthumously trickled out from the homes of their families, and give us an idea of how these men regarded themselves. Their formal work appeared in Pravda, Ogonyok, and, above all, the awesome "U.S.S.R. in Construction", the main clearing house of Soviet imagery for foreign consumption. A few of them were employed by the Soyuzfoto agency. One operated out of the information Department of the Magnitigorsk steelworks. Now, in the field, we see Georgiy Zeima, profile, in the charade of a conqueror, one foot upon a stone chimney, as if it were a body. Arkady Shaikhet poses on a balcony of some building, as if to take one of those tilted, familiar bird’s eye shots of the city street below. Georgiy Petrosov raises his Leica way above his head, conceivably in the act of photographing over some impediment-a crowd?-at eye level. As they smile good-humoredly, with their apparatus at the ready, these men are positioned for an overview, hardly the horizon of an average worker. Their desired vantage is quite bluntly the panoramic, by which they assert their optical power.

As short range, this power demanded an unusual sufferance from its human subjects. They had to submit to being inspected, say, from under their chin or from behind an ear lobe. Yet they were not the targets of merely voyeuristic gazes. A commanding energy of design subordinated any erotic nuance or individual interest. Rather, the camera was squinched into the unlikeliest places in order to exalt its own, transgressive but utterly detached act of looking. As in the camera, so in these photographs, heads pretend to be ignorant of surveillance at excruciatingly close quarters. Rodchenko attacked the conventionalized camera viewpoint "from the navel" as authoritarian, since it allowed only for a single alignment, not the degravitized and liberating perspectives that excited him. He had collaborated with Dziga-Vertov in the early "newsreels" and was a virtuoso of montage. It was natural for this highly aesthetic Constructivist to depreciate "photo-pictures" and proclaim his own "photo-moments that have a value as documents and not artistic objects." Certainly these moments, instead of being momentary, were meant to endure by virtue of their contrast with any conceivable psychological viewpoint. They do not accord with the perspectives of social human beings but rather with creatures that fly or crawl. The actual sizes of things, and their scale, relative to each other, were constantly aggrandized or diminished. Even as he eulogized them for their scientific spirit, the photographs of Rodchenko and his talented followers kept on knocking rational effects out of plumb. Near and far, up and down, were juxtaposed raw with a deliberate excision of any gradients between them. Viewers were invisibly levered off any ledge or base from which to locate their engagement with a scene. A whole middle distance of street contact dropped out of sight. Banished, too, was any introspection or reflectiveness on the part of the image-maker. In a powerful photograph, Boris Ignatovich’s seemingly leviathan (close up) sculptured foot could crush the ant-like citizens who walk in the background at the Hermitage. The urban world was charged as an arena in which people and things are in some kind of exhilarating, but also sinister and adversarial relationship to each other. There ensues a weird tension whose defiance of gravity and logic re-invests old power symbols, just as much as new ones, with a dynamic they could never have had before 1917.

When the camera was trained on events in the country, these internally jagged, hyper-modern formats added zing to anachronistic subject matter, out of phase with its time. The news that the twentieth century even exists, in its characteristic technology, only now percolates to the supposedly dazzled peasants in the endless fields and outlying steppes. Many Soviet photographers are concerned with an iconography of "arrivals." A village waif grins at the movie camera. The Tatars delightedly hear their first phonograph recording or radio broadcast. One of their number with a knowledge of Russian reads or translates for the crowd from Pravda, which miraculously wreathes everyone in smiles. From the distant center come benevolent tidings and new materiel which they are presumed to have longed for as a sign that will redeem them from their archaic ways. "Is it coming?", "It has come!", repeatedly shout the poor muzhiks in Dovzhenko's Earth. As a rickety tractor finally lumbers across the meadow. Here is the moment in which a thing implacably material and profane is raised into a spiritual presence, ecstatically received.

In the first years after the revolution, agit-trains and steamers, kiosks, buses and trains, festooned with news photographs, were sent out to remote districts. Now, photography was directed to record a later stage in the process of news reception, under the generic heading of "progress." But if so, it was a progress that echoes the industrial revolution of a hundred years before, in the West, as well as the techno-conquests that accompanied it, when the European camera colonized pre-industrial peoples over vast territories.

The time-warp that runs through Soviet photography has not received as much comment as it should. When the Russian camera celebrates the building of railroads and canals, Arctic exploration, or the schooling of backward farmers, and when it, remarks upon the ethnographic diversity of tribes, all of which it does between the world wars, the view tells of a center wishing to have understood that its will has been communicated to enthusiastic peripheries. The early Western versions of these scenes are familiar to us. They imply the ruthless displacement of natives and the ravaging of nature, none of which were even perceived as costs by the acquisitive audiences back home. In contrast, the Soviet re-run of this old out-reach to "autonomous" frontiers was stylized by a completely disjunctive modernism. And this is very unfamiliar because the cliches of primitive development and the rhythms of Futurist utopianism, quite in a limbo of their own, are in conflict without being acknowledged. A viewer is irreconcilably placed in two time zones at once: not the confidence of the present as it studies the living past, but the spectacle of the past awakened to a future that does not exist.

Even stranger, the collision of two cultures, be it great Russian with Uzbek or Kazakh etc., falls to signify. In the nineteenth century, at least, the image didn’t imply that alien and sullen natives looked upon the advent of the European with the thought that their lot would be instantly bettered. But this is especially what Social Realism assumes, against all historical evidence, and with such frequency of protest that we can make out the fear that motivated it. Underlying this massive propaganda drive is the dread that the improvised center will not hold and that the new will not triumph over the old. Such was the insecurity of a system gripped by time that slipped through its hands and isolated in a space too vast to overcome. In the countryside, Bolshevik perspectives of time and space converged traumatically. For the cities, and with them the proletariat responsible for the advancement of the state's industrial base, were only to be fed by leeching all foodstuffs from the peasantry, a class so gouged, set out to famine, and murdered, that, as much as it could, it fought back…

Intended for city readership, photographs depicted peasants of whatever race in the most positive light, hospitable to the camera, tamed, enthusiastic in the work they freely do for the modem Socialist state. Where the peasants ferociously resisted the kolkhoz (the new farm collective), they are shown unanimously-though stiffly-voting in its favor at village council. So, too, we are to believe that Muslim women gladly tore off their veils in denial of their ancient culture. As for Asiatics overall, they're characterized as vigorous heroes of folklore.

In one of the really great and certainly most operatic images of the period, Max Alpert's "Construction of the Fergana Canal", 1939. Immense native trumpets and drums encourage the sweeping mass of Uzbek laborers on to their work. As a pictorial moment this could well have been influenced by the passages in Elzenshtein's "Alexander Nevskiy" that describe the surge of medieval peasants who join under the prince's banner. The photo gives the same sense as the film of a whole irresistible people underway, united in o common purpose, and massed in picturesque columns. Elzenshtein himself, who might have seen Alpert's image, planned to do an epic on the building of the canal, as if to cycle back into his new film a "documentary" treatment of o contemporary subject that reflected his earlier grandiose vision of Russian history. At the last moment before filming, Stalin, who called the shots everywhere in Soviet culture, canceled the entire project

One begins to understand how photographic imaging systems were hostage to the strain between party line and personal rule in the ideology that monitored them. Cultural diversity, an obvious fact of life in the Soviet Union, could not be celebrated as a source of strength in a national effort at the same time as its tribalism implied resistance to economic diktat. The more a certain Oriental and exotic flavor was packaged in photography, the greater its suggestion of integral social groups that could compete with and remain outside the state's control. Even the somewhat "liberal" Russian ethnographic photographs, that have a vaguely tourist air about them, though far less racist than Nazi ideas about non-Aryans, are particularly hollow in effect. It is true that the Bolsheviks In November, 1917, immediately proclaimed the right of non-Russian peoples to sovereignty and succession. Native languages were encouraged and for a while In the twenties, anti-Semitism was made a crime. But In the Stalinist thirties, from which date many photos of happy ethnics, these rights had long been rescinded and all dissent from massive Russification had been hounded underground. Similarly, the peasants had once been granted some independent ownership of land, along with profit farming, during the New Economic Plan. But under the Five-Year Plan. their holdings had been seized and collectivized by the state, which "disappeared" resistors into the gulags and deported untold numbers into industry as slave labor. Given these facts, the objective of photographers was to attribute a mythic vigor to the action of a people who had in truth been broken in spirit.

In the central theme of Soviet photography - the performance and meaning of work - all this disinformation is brought to a head. The building of the White Sea canal was a Pharaonic labor that witnessed the deaths of over o quarter million, and then in the end the canal was too shallow to be used. In the December 1933 issue of "U.S.S.R. in Construction", devoted to this project, we read: "In the course of 20 months about 20.000 skilled workmen were trained in 40 trades. They were all ex-thieves, bandits, kulaks, wreckers, murderers. For the fist time they became conscious of the poetry of labor, the romance of construction work. They worked to the music of their own orchestras." Running through this journal and many other Soviet media was the idea that human personalities had be to reconstructed along with the backward industry of the country. Among the negative images in Soviet cinema were those of drunks and priests: now photography was said to have pictured all sorts of one-¬time reprobates and misfits, whom the state was reprocessing as useful citizens. This kind of work was also carried on within the intelligentsia itself, striving for ever greater orthodoxy as Stalin took the country into purges and all-out terror.

Rodchenko and his friends in the October group, for example, were scourged by Alpert, Shalkhet and Fridland of the Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF) precisely on the issue of how the industrial order, henceforth, from 1931, was to be represented. The predilections of the old vanguard were at stake, and inevitably they lost. Accusing their colleagues of a "fetishistic attachment to technology and the machine", the ROPF people, in fact, had a point. After all, how could workers be exhorted to ever more strenuous production - to meet their hopped up quotas - on the basis of very lonely views of the workplace? As pictured by the October photographers, this was an environment where surfaces dominated the field but gave very little idea of how anything got done. The picture may have been rousing as a visual stimulus, though only at the same time as it made moot the relationship of the fabricator to the thing fabricated.

Workers, therefore, needed to bo reintroduced into the picture zone as effective and human agents, engaged in unison with their own kind. Even better would it be to single out one or two of them, a Victor Kalmykov, a comrade Filippov, as exemplary of the doubtless humble but also wholesome and fulfilling lives led by so many of the proletariat. Such figures were put through certain paces, the first in an evolutionary route that took him from the status of landless, shabby, illiterate peasant to become a skilled worker, member of the party and carrier of the Order of the Red Banner, at the Magnitogorsk steelyard, and the second through the round of his daily activities, as a metalworker at the Red Proletarian factory in Moscow, and with family at home. As magazine features, these were among the earlier photo-essays in twentieth century propaganda journalism. They are informed by homely touches and raw particulars. Kalmykov's feet are clothed in burlap, for instance, and he is shown being given the first (and spotlessly clean) bed sheet of his life. Transmitted by the foreign language editions of "U.S.S.R. In Construction," January, 1932, to the depression-era West, which had little sense of Russia's actual crisis, the sentimental genre scenes of Kalmykov and Filippov played well. Of course, instead of "fetishing" technology, they did the same to the state, an entity whose abstractness was supposed to be humanized by its material provisions for deserving workers.

At this point, one can see that the contrast between the imagery of things and that of social relations reflected complementary rather than antithetical approaches to the problem of depicting work. The October (or "Left") mode of photography tautened formal relations; its opponent, lacking the other's visual intelligence, pictorially inventoried objects (including the workers, because they, too, for propaganda purposes, were classed as objects) in a narrative context. Soviet film offers more than a glimpse of how both these tropes were adrenalized by sheer cinematic values. In Dziga Vertov's "Enthusiasm" and a great deal of early Eizenshtein, the action of work cuts through space, much as harvest machines scythe through grain. Here, the culture of production as a relentless build of physical input takes shape in crude tracking shots, arpeggiated by parallel end cross cutting, paced with ever greater rapidity, until it reaches a shattering crescendo. Men and machines are bonded in some unstoppable, mesmeric frenzy. And it finally looks as if the film itself is in a great hurry, under an imminent deadline in which too much visual material needs to be compressed in too little time.

Such a fooling tone accords with the historical reality of a state that knew itself to be behind, and desperately tried to catch up with more industrialized nations (let alone to establish its own plant), by means of impromptu policies, stop-gap programs and unreal schedules… executed at no matter what human price. Because it in no way took account of the bodily and psychic costs people would pay, the state, in fact, conceived "progress" as an inhuman development.

Elsewhere, in the German film-maker Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", (1927), though couched as sci-fi or fantasy, this vision was expressed as the quintessentially infernal product of modem times themselves. The proletariat is a class of wretched underground moles, propelled in regimented columns within a screeching environment governed by a remote management of plutocrats accompanied by decadent high-lives. As a critique of capitalism, such imagery (if not the film's actual plot), was more forceful than Diego Rivera's frescos of modern industry at the Ford plant in Detroit. But the fact that painter was an expelled Communist party member working for a capitalist patron did much to complicate the evocation of modem labor. With great poise, Rivera sees the assembly line simultaneously as a depersonalizing force and as a technological marvel. It is serviced by workers who are half robots and half heroic. The finished product of their labors can be utilized by a system which has as much potential for evil as for good.

Needless to say, any such ambiguity of outcome would never have entered the programs of Russian film-makers and photographers depicting working conditions, in the "workers' state", that exceeded the worst infamies of capitalism. As far as the rhetoric of their images is concerned, the long term necessity of the cause which demanded such immediate sacrifice simply existed as an article of faith in the society to come. Magnitogorsk was relatively up to date for its time, being in part furthered by Western expertise. But the Soviet imagery that described that stupendous place belongs to an earlier mind set, in which it makes no difference if work is made to look-subjectively-noble or rough, dangerous, even alienating. For it was the momentum of it all that counted, an almost dynastic impetus that transfigured the horizon of the once empty plain. Just as the modernizing despot Peter the Great beget his new capital, raised from the marsh, so Stalin caused there to be heavy industry, without an adequate material base. The traction and tactility that came out of reportage on Magnitogorsk stand apart from the much smoother rendering of similar subjects in West. We celebrated our modernity by references to geometric ideals that were ultimately Platonic in origin. In Russia, since the only conceivable viewpoint was one that exuded the constructive state, photographers could wonderfully describe the filth and the violence of that construction, and think themselves on good terms with the powers that be. For us. this is a pictorial dividend and an irony that at the time, no one would have savored.

Soviet photography was given its apotheosis in "U.S.S.S.R in Construction". For the first half of its tenure in the thirties, this giant publication - twenty two and a half by thirty two inches, double spread - broadcast the good news of socialist development throughout the Western world. One has to see the magazine, to hold it in one's hands, to fully appreciate the magnitude of one of the great pictorial campaigns of the century. In lay-out alone, it included monochrome printing in four different colors, montage, foldouts in surprising sections, shaped photos, diagrams, charts, pictures juxtaposed flush or running into each other, combination photographs in single frame, overlaps and skewed designs that leapt off the page, - not always coherently, not always effectively, but with a graphic zeal matched by no other journal of its day. The changes of weight and viewpoint of thought and sequence, are often disconcerting and delightful. It was as if the shock designers of the magazine could accomplish instantly for the page what film makers do over time on the screen. Many, if not all the known names in Soviet photography had their day in the great publication, with pictures that have appeared elsewhere in calmer, more settled circumstances.

But by degrees, this volatility became a thing of the past. Later in the decade, very few pictures escaped an inexplicable retouching. Unpredictable outdoor shots tended to be replaced by more controlled interior scenarios. Compositions lost their push and design plodded on, through routine picture stories, such as on an OGPU commune, a kind of boy's reformatory run by the secret service, or a feature on the Maxim Gorkiy Central Park in Moscow. The latter contained a remarkable caption: "Here and there in the park are 'glee parties'. In costumes and masks. Their duty is to turn up in any place where people are getting bored and begin to make them merry." We can well appreciate the lack of merriment in a society where spontaneous public utterance was definitely frowned upon. Already, in 1917, Lenin anathematized "spontaneity", by which he meant the spontaneous demands of the proletariat for better wages and working conditions, demands that had no place in his agenda. But the centrifugal and incongruent energies of whole peoples did not cease through being indiscriminately repressed. The tendency of huge masses to spring out and galvanize the moment in an amazing gyre, was symptomized sporadically in Russian film and photography. It was to be released, and pictured. In an explosively new form with the coming of the second World War.