Matt Payne and Viktor Turin both provide context on the creation of the Turksib railway. Payne’s piece exists in conversation with many of the forces we have been discussing recently in Central Asian modernization efforts by the Soviet state. Much of what he describes sound similar to what we have been discussing with the unveiling campaign, from the collaborative role of Kazakh intellectual elite to resistance on the part of the less privileged (Payne 225, 232). A significant element his narrative adds to our understanding of a modernizing Turkestan is “the rage of the European coworkers.” (230) I found his analysis of “pull mechanisms” and “push mechanisms” compelling as a way to think about the mixed results of the campaign. (238)
With regards to the film, Payne’s chapter is also complementary. He has a point that seems especially applicable: “Nativization was core policy if an ambitious, complex, and prolonged effort by the Soviet state to build ethnically based nations within the context of a politically and economically unitary state.” (224) The film repeatedly emphasizes the importance of political and economic unity, especially in light of the biodiversity of the state. Even in Kazakhstan, the water from the mountains crucially supports the harvest of cotton and grain in the dryer valley below. Lagging production causes “a problem for Turkestan — for Siberia — for the Soviet Union,” so what is problematic for one region is problematic for everyone. The film also draws a visual metaphor between the procession of camels in the snow in Turkestan and the line of horses working in the snow in Siberia, uniting their projects while also allowing for national and cultural differences. Crucially, the film frames the enemy not as Central Asian society, but the natural forces of the region. Only through the deployment of modern Soviet railroads can the people overcome the harsh living conditions foisted upon them by the desert. The people happily welcome the Soviet surveyors to their village, and are integrated into the workforce for its construction and the project of harvesting natural resources. Even at the end, a camel happily nuzzles the tracks, showing the harmonious and productive coexistence of traditional Kazakh methods with modernity. The film corroborates Payne’s account of a religiously-motivated fear of modernization; while he mentions one worker calling the train a “Satan cart,” the film shows someone calling a locomotive the “devil’s chariot.” (Payne 236). Ultimately, the film frames modernization as a necessary and benevolent force for Central Asia. It claims that “1445 km of steel will weld Turkestan,” presumably into a culturally coherent and productive nation for the Soviets’ purposes. As the map depicts the progression of the construction, the Kazakh landscape becomes more legible to the audience, with the names of towns and visual landmarks appearing. In this way, the Turksib line legitimates the existence of Kazakhstan.
I know about film almost exclusively from a US perspective, where during this period even light hearted comedies often had specific ideological agendas, so I have many questions concerning the production and reception histories of Turksib. From where did Turin get funding? When was the music for the film composed (is it contemporaneous or composed for a later release)? Who would have seen this film and in what context/s? Do you think this film effectively argues for the existence of the Turksib railway? How would you put it in dialogue with Portrait of Lenin, which also purports to meld the best of Central Asian tradition with Bolshevik ideology? Do its methods support or undercut the prevailing Soviet line we’ve seen in the region from Payne and others?
On top of your proposition that “the Turksib line legitimates the existence of Kazakhstan” through its propaganda uses that we have seen in cartography and film, I think we should interrogate Payne’s line of causality which suggests that the Turksib did actually generate a proletarian national identity for some Kazakhs. He writes, “Kazakhs certainly did forge a new identity in the industrial establishments of the 1930s, but not one that Russians handed to them ‘by fraternal aid'” (241). I believe his claim is that struggle for employment and equal treatment on the Turksib line led to the huge increase in the proportion of Kazakhs doing other industrial work in the 1930s. In this way, it would seem that the Turksib construction did actually see the question “‘Are we not workers as well?'” (241). Do we have the evidence to approach this railway as not only a propaganda instrument, but also a definite constructor of material realities for the indigenous people of Kazakhstan?
While watching the film, I was comparing it to Dziga Vertov’s /The Man With The Movie Camera/ (shown in Hum 220). In that film, there is nothing like the disasters or natural forces shown in /Turksib/. The worst miseries shown are a divorce filing and a funeral procession. Transportation takes on slightly different meanings in the two films. In Vertov’s film, there’s a scene where Vertov is being filmed whilst standing in a moving car filming a moving car, another where a firetruck is rushing to a scene, some shots of trolleys, and heavily edited train footage that all seem to point elsewhere than a message, necessarily, of progress, but rather, I think, activity and energy—the train shots however are rather surreal, which makes me think that the appropriate interpretation is that the machinery of the modern age is disorienting, difficult to really grasp, and awe-ful.
This could be contrasted with the car of Russians arriving in that village in /Turksib/. Initially to the village folk, the car was menacing, perhaps a harbinger of some doom; then it became a source of curiosity and a hub of interest. The train, also, is portrayed initially as something to be feared, then eventually becomes this means to progress.
Ultimately, it gives me the impression that Vertov’s film served to give a state of the Union at the time of filming, in all its varied complexity, and provide some enthusiasm for what is to come, whereas /Turksib/ was making the case for a future that should be welcomed.
Regarding the film making the case for the Turksib railway, I think that it’s really interesting that the text repeatedly refers to the fact that instead of cotton, people in Turkestan grow grain, and that without a railway, the land can’t be “freed” for cotton, “for all of Russia.” This argument unlike the argument that a railway creates a Kazakh nativized proletariat, as Payne’s chapter talks about, is focused more on the imperial gains for the USSR as a whole than the benefits (albeit benefits that are proscribed from the imperial Bolsheviks) for the Kazakh’s themselves.
More on “the rage of the European coworkers”, its interesting how affirmative action initiatives are seen as huge boosts in privilege, when usually- and clearly in this case- the case is that minority/marginalized people are brought into incredibly hostile spaces, and their presence in those spaces is usually necessitated by economic conditions. And of course, in the text we see more anti-Islamic action, perpetrated by common people and by employers.