The Moscow film archives are a slice of the Soviet Union in formaldehyde. The glass facade suggests transparency but the only thing on display is a tiled corridor and the occasional pillar. The building could just as easily house a clinic, or the offices of the food inspection service, if the sign beside the entrance did not read: GOSFILMOFOND, the State Film Fund.
The day I walked in, the uniformed guard ushered me immediately through the archway of a metal detector.
‘Dokumenti,’ he commanded, and, after a doubtful glance at my papers: ‘What are you here for?’
I felt like saying: ‘For Kara Bogaz: The Movie,’ but that might have sounded over the top.
‘I have an appointment with the conservator, Igor Vasilyev.’ In the empty minutes I spent pacing the tiled floor, I pondered the contrast between what lay on the two sides of those glass walls. Outside, sophisticated Moscow went bustling by. The film archives were just down the block from the celebrated shopping boulevard of Tverskaya, known until the late 1980s as ‘Gorky Street’. As soon as the Soviet bell jar was lifted in 1991, the capital city’s nightlife had blossomed along that eight-lane thoroughfare. Former state shops for milk, vodka and liverwurst were transformed into clubs and casinos, with flocks of nighthawks moving along the pavements beneath illuminated billboards for Lancôme and L’Oréal. During the day it was the jewellery stores that caught the eye, alongside the foreign-exchange offices with their bulletproof cashiers’ windows.
There was nothing newfangled, however, on this side of the archive windows. Igor Vasilyev’s professional title was ‘conservator’, and for good reason. And suddenly, there he was: a gaunt-looking fellow in a dustcoat. He apologised for not shaking hands; his were dirty from carrying piles of film tins. ‘Everything is ready. Would you follow me?’
We walked away from the sunlight, along a corridor and down a flight of stairs. The sign above the door with its light-trap of vertical rubber flaps read: ‘Cinema 1’. When the red light glowed in the corridor, a viewing was in progress. The theatre itself was cosy, arranged in four rows of twenty overstuffed seats.
‘Precisely,’ the conservator replied when I asked whether this was where the censors had held their prerelease screenings back in the Soviet days.
Igor Vasilyev filled out a receipt and handed it to me. I must have stared in shock at the little slip of paper, because he said: ‘Your television colleagues would think that was an excellent deal.’ A single projection of The Black Maw (‘an artistic film with soundtrack, based on the screenplay by Comrade K. Paustovsky’) was going to set me back 130 dollars. Apparently I had been mistaken; modern times had indeed penetrated to the heart of these archives.
I didn’t feel like haggling, and besides, this was the first time I’d ever hired a cinema solely for myself, so I counted out the notes with feigned nonchalance. Then Igor Vasilyev extinguished the lights and let his projector hum.
Nervous, dancing letters appeared on the screen: ‘Yalta Film Studios presents…’ followed a few seconds later by: ‘Kara Bogaz – The Black Maw’. Then, to the strains of martial music, the credits rolled past, including a striking number of non-Russian names. Mechmedov in the role of shaman Ali-Bek; Bekarova as the widow Natsyar.
‘This was the Turkmen people’s cinematic debut,’ Igor Vasilyev whispered. ‘These are, as far as we can establish, the oldest existing images of Turkmen actors.’
Before I could ask what year the Kara Bogaz film had appeared, ‘1935’ flashed up.
I was curious about the bay, and about the sulphate-mining operations in the 1930s. What had they looked like? The film had been shot on location, and about five minutes into it I saw the settlement of ‘Kara Bogaz Harbour’, viewed from the sea. Stone sheds along a paved quay. Deserted wharves. A wind turbine for the production of electricity. Plain barracks amid heaps of sand. The camera’s eye came to rest on a platform supporting two wooden barrels: drinking-water reservoirs. The barrels were normally filled with spring water from the Caucasus. But as in 1931, when Paustovsky had waited fruitlessly in Krasnovodsk for the tankers Frunze and Dzerzhinsky, the two ships were again running far behind schedule. As the water supply dwindled, bickering broke out between the Red engineers and the Turkmen workers. The screeching violins made the desert heat palpable, drum rolls rumbled at the approaching clash between Bolsheviks and nomads. The latter, after all, had set up their kibitkas at the settlement’s edge, chopped the sulphate into blocks and transported it on camel-back, all in return for fresh water.
As a heavily laden salt caravan waddled out of view at an infuriatingly slow pace, the bay at Kara Bogaz slid into view for the first time. It was blinding; the glare from the screen was bright enough to light up the darkened cinema. Recoiling was impossible, but my elbows dug deeper into the plush upholstery. Amid the whiteness, vague contours slowly materialised; the bay at Kara Bogaz was a reflecting pond with a corrugated head of foam, produced not by the waves, for there were none, but by coagulated Glauber’s salt. Crystalline ripples sparkled in the sunlight along the shore.
The screen version of Kara Bogaz was somewhere between a documentary and a dramatised reconstruction. Under the strictures of Socialist Realism, the Soviet artist could depart from reality only when extrapolating from present-day events to those of the future; the only reason to do so, in turn, was to speculate on the promise of what was yet to come. Had this ‘artistic film with soundtrack’, I wondered, traced the course of actual events, or raced ahead of them? Could I expect clues as to what had happened to the bay later on? Or was I viewing pure propaganda, a construct from beginning to end?
Paustovsky had built his screenplay around the dramatic struggle for drinking water. The hero of his film is the manager of the chemical plant, a steadfast war veteran with a highly evolved sense of right and wrong. This character, ‘Miller’, finding himself faced with unexpected adversities, deals with them by means of sage decisions or, failing those, by means of daredevilry.
To solve the water shortage, and to win over the Turkmen to the socialist cause, Miller takes an unconventional tack: he has his engineers knock together a machine which will desalinate seawater by means of solar power. Although the current technology is in no way up to this challenge, the rational capacities of the Bolsheviks are brought to bear against the Turkmen’s superstition. Or, in the words of the screenwriter, ‘Soviet man will catch the sun in a mirror, the way the kibitka-dweller catches a fox in a sack.’ The nomads don’t believe for a minute, of course, that the newcomers from the north will actually make the salt water of the Caspian drinkable. What is at stake is nothing less than an ultimate proof of superiority: compared to the tsarist raiding parties of old, a very civilised way indeed to lay claim to all low-lying territories between Krasnovodsk and Persia.
‘Who is it who has given you this water to drink?’ Stern as a schoolmaster, Miller addresses the camel-drivers. ‘We, the Bolsheviks. For all time, you and your grandchildren will remember us and be grateful.’ The Turkmen nomads would do well to realise that Stalin, ‘the new ruler of the desert, who abides in Moscow’, is not out to enslave them. On the contrary, the Soviet strongman preaches ‘friendship between the peoples’.
But what had the nuts and bolts of that friendship actually looked like?
Amansoltan Saparova, the chemical historian I met in Moscow, had helped me with my research. In a letter from Ashgabat she directed me to Paustovsky’s original background material: two volumes of the periodical The Turkmen Spark. Alongside her thesis on the history of the Turkmen sulphate industry, the wealth of information in those yellowed and crumbling magazines allowed me to test the veracity of Paustovsky’s book and screenplay. A striking number of details turned out to be accurate. Paustovsky may never have reached the bay, but he went to work like a conscientious scientist, not a wild-eyed novelist. He had drawn his dialogue and events from unadulterated reality – or at least from the pioneering life as he found it in the pages of The Turkmen Spark.
The protagonist, Miller, was based on Yakov Rubinschtein, manager of the Kara Bogaz Chemical Combine. A Polish communist, Rubinschtein was a war veteran blessed with enormous reserves of energy. Like Paustovsky he had spent the years of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in restless wanderings through the Ukraine and the rest of central Europe. Their paths had crossed more than once (they had spent time simultaneously in both Kiev and Odessa), but neither there nor on the Caspian coast had they ever met. Paustovsky portrayed him as a no-nonsense Soviet manager. Those who worked under Rubinschtein gave him the nickname ‘The Indefatigable’, which given his love of discipline and his demanding nature was perhaps not intended as a compliment. Ever since the days of Lenin’s ‘wartime communism’, the industrious Pole had proved himself a pioneer of the Soviet peoples’ economy, and it was his appetite for action that caused him to be chosen for the Kara Bogaz mission.
‘If Rubinschtein can’t get anything out of the Turkmen desert,’ people in Moscow said, ‘no one can.’
Paustovsky did his best to get to the essence of the man’s existence on the shores of that remote bay. In The Turkmen Spark he read about the countless obstacles Rubinschtein had encountered: opium-smoking, superstition, backwardness. Glaring inequality between the sexes. To deal with this latter problem, the women’s section of the local Party committee had banned the wearing of the piranji, the most constrictive and opaque of local veils. Had it not been Lenin’s wife, after all, who had summoned the first (Uzbek) Muslim girl to the podium at the 1919 Komsomol conference and ostentatiously lifted her veil with a flag?
Against the background of the public veil burnings organised by the Soviets in the oasis towns of Central Asia, Paustovsky introduces ‘the widow Natsyar’, an outcast whom the children pelt with camel dung. A group of strong-willed Russian women take her under their wing and send her to Baku – wearing a ‘European dress’ – to work in the textile mills.
This top-down imposition of Soviet mores meets, of course, with resistance from the tabibs: the shaman guardians of Turkmen tradition. In Kara Bogaz, Paustovsky depicts them as ‘practitioners of barbaric cures’ who apply nigh-fatal bloodlettings and treat burns with a ‘urine compress’. Their nefarious influence, however, is not limited to the mutilation of their fellow tribesmen: no, the tabibs also incite the salt workers to rise up against the Russian foremen.
An attempt to systematise the mining operations runs up against just such a conspiracy. The engineers have devised a way to allow the salt from the bay to precipitate in pans, thereby making it easier to collect. But at Lake Number 6, the Turkmen toss a spanner into the works: they refuse to dig an inlet channel through a marlstone outcropping. The foremen are mystified until they discover that the tabibs are behind this. The shamans have warned the workers that ‘Allah will cover the earth with a black crust’ as soon as the first pick strikes marl. In the film, however, the conflict is represented by the nomads destroying the desalination machine when the rumour goes around that it possesses diabolical powers.
Such explosions of real or near violence were common, according to The Turkmen Spark. But like Miller in the film, who finally wins the workers’ respect by beating them in a horse race, Rubinschtein refused to be cowed by such destructive outbursts. Personal charisma alone enabled him to recruit and motivate large numbers of workers. By the summer of 1931, his chemical plant already had 4,900 labourers (mostly Turkmen and Kazakhs) under contract. This was all the more remarkable in view of the speed with which the Soviets, with their veil-burnings and agricultural collectivisation, had made themselves deeply hated. Nomads refusing to submit to the Red authorities folded their tents and formed long caravans headed for Persia and Afghanistan. It was an open secret that, with the exception of the coast and the oases, the Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan was rapidly emptying.
Individuals like Rubinschtein were able to slow the exodus. It helped, of course, that he had at his disposal hundreds of young, idealistic Komsomol volunteers from all corners of the Soviet Union. The young people introduced competitions between the salt-mining crews, with rewards for surpassing production quotas, and the ‘Order of the Camel’ for the most sluggish brigade. As a result, sulphate extraction during the pioneering years exceeded all expectations. Rubinschtein made the quota imposed for the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) within only four years, a feat for which the Kara Bogaz Chemical Combine was awarded the ‘Red Banner’. On that festive occasion, which was celebrated on 17 October 1932 and made all the national newspapers, Comrade Rubinschtein was the guest of honour.
‘Today the shores of Kara Bogaz are no longer a hotbed of nomad superstition,’ he concluded his speech. ‘We have transformed the desert into a socialist enterprise that compares favourably with the other great construction projects of the Soviet Union.’
The first time I read about the personal fate of this Red manager was in a footnote in Amansoltan’s thesis:
Jakov G. Rubinschtein (1895–1938). Arrested in May 1937. Condemned to ‘death by execution’ by the Supreme Military Court in Moscow in October of 1938, on the basis of Article 58 (‘counter-revolutionary activities’). Posthumously rehabilitated in June 1956, ‘due to a lack of evidence and the falsification of documents related to the case’.
What had gone wrong? Rubinschtein, I realised perfectly well, was only one amid the hordes of victims of the ‘purges’ in the period 1937–39. But how could a Soviet manager both fall from grace and serve as model hero for a Socialist Realist film?
I sent a postcard to Amansoltan in Ashgabat, asking if she could tell me anything more about this unfortunate Pole. In her reply, she said that she had only been allowed to see the ‘certificate of rehabilitation’, but that a personal dossier did exist. That dossier was now undoubtedly open to the public.
But not, as it turned out, to foreigners. When I asked a Russian linguist from Moscow State University to make enquiries on my behalf, however, the Socio-Political History Archives granted her almost immediate access to dossier number 140527. The first of twelve exhibits in the Rubinschtein case was a questionnaire or ‘executive enquiry’, which the manager of the chemical combine had been required to complete in September of 1933.
Nationality: Jew
Origins (class or rank): middle-class
Party member since: 1917
Membership number: 0616978
Party functions: Member Central Committee Socialist Republic Turkmenistan, Chairman of Regional Committee Kara Bogaz
Foreign languages: Polish, German, (English, with the aid of a dictionary)
Revolutionary activities before 1917: participant in ‘Levitsa’, illegal Socialist Party of Poland, 1910–1914
Repression experienced before 1917 (in connection with above-mentioned activities): prison terms in Warsaw, Prague, Lublin, Sedlets, Ostrog, Wolynsk, Odessa
A separate document, marked with official stamps and initials, proved to be a ‘psychological profile’ of Yakov Rubinschtein. With regard to his personality type, the authors of the profile noted two strong points and one weak.
Comrade Rubinschtein stands out by reason of his great self-discipline and exceptional diligence. He possesses unconditional loyalty, making him extremely well-suited for operational management. Besides these positive qualities, his political awareness (his ready knowledge of Marxism-Leninism) is clearly below the mark. Because of this weakness, he should preferably serve under the supervision of a general manager.
The dossier contained no incriminating documents, until the year 1934. But that does not mean Rubinschtein led a carefree existence in his headquarters beside the bay at Kara Bogaz. From 1932 the production graphs began showing a downward slide; it may not have been the manager’s fault, but Moscow demanded highgrade sodium sulphate nonetheless. With no quarter given.
*
At first – according to minutes taken at a salt conference in Leningrad cited at length by Amansoltan – Rubinschtein had garnered a certain amount of sympathy for the harsh conditions under which he worked. An agronomist from the Academy of Sciences had carried out experiments concerning the cultivation of vegetables and grapes at Kara Bogaz; the speech he delivered at the December 1933 conference was a sobering one: ‘Even the gentlest of breezes cause the dust to rise and cover the settlement. This saline powder makes its way into the barracks and harms all manner of machinery. The absence of trees – it has proved impossible to raise them there – has a depressing effect on the colonists. Owing to a lack of vegetables and herbs, the Russians (but not the Turkmen or Kazakhs) suffer from all kinds of illnesses, including scurvy. Add to this a shortage of drinking water, which must be shipped in from Baku, and you will have an inkling of the ordeals to which our pioneers are subjected.’
In Leningrad, in the midst of a dark and icy arctic winter, the Supreme People’s Commissioner of Turkmenistan, Comrade Atabayev, gave a fiery speech in which he announced plans for the construction of eleven new chemical plants. ‘Natural scientists once believed the bay at Kara Bogaz was a dead pool, but I tell you today: it is a living table of the periodic elements.’
One out of every three elements in the arrangement codified by the chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, better known in tsarist Russia as the former inspector-general of vodka, could be found at the bay in extractable quantities. Sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine and bromine, but also metals such as magnesium and tungsten, and the radioactive elements strontium and radium. The Turkmen people’s commissioner envisaged an entire belt of chemical plants rising up around Kara Bogaz, serving not only cotton cultivation in Central Asia (with the production of artificial fertiliser and defoliants) but also the defence requirements of the Union as a whole.
Unfortunately, though, the pace of extraction was lagging sorely. By December 1933 the first processing plant had yet to be finished. Yakov Rubinschtein lacked everything: cement, fuel oil, tools, food – but the most dire shortage was that of drinking water.
On screen, thirst among the desert proletariat starts taking on Old Testament proportions. At one of the salt-collection areas, a Russian foreman falls flat on his face from dehydration. He loses consciousness. The barrels, as it turns out, contain only a shallow layer of water, and a fight breaks out among the Turkmen. There is shoving and screeching, women yank each other away from the tap by their braids and lash out wildly with wooden jugs. A baby wrapped in swaddling clothes is almost crushed in the commotion.
The scene is remarkably realistic, and I let myself be carried away for a moment by the idea that the actors may have been kept on a diet of dry hard tack to make their struggle for water look as convincingly vicious as possible.
In reality, water – fresh water – was rationed at the bay. In an act of outrageous optimism, Yakov Rubinschtein had a fountain installed on little Lenin Square at Kara Bogaz Harbour. All it sprayed, however, was salt water, and any drops landing on your face and hands dried almost instantly into white flecks.
Could one actually live in a chemical town where summer temperatures quickly rose above 50 degrees centigrade? The fact is that people did live there. In 1933, including the encampments around the salt-collection areas, as well as the outpost at Lake Number 6, there were some 17,000 souls bivouacked along the bay at Kara Bogaz. Each worker had the right to four square metres of living space, but in practice had to make do with two. There were no latrines or sewers, hygiene was nonexistent. There were not enough schools, canteens, crèches or storage huts. Having no desire to spend all day staring at the horizon in the hope of fresh water from Baku, Rubinschtein ordered the workers to mix their concrete with seawater. Although not particularly good for the quality of the walls, this was the only way construction could proceed apace. When Rubinschtein inspected the construction site, of course, he could not have failed to notice how brittle and crumbly this ‘salt concrete’ really was.
Later in his personal dossier, this would be referred to as ‘complicity in Trotskyite sabotage’. But that was later.
As time went by, Moscow became increasingly dissatisfied with Rubinschtein’s progress reports, in which the balance between success and setback tilted increasingly towards the latter. His excuses began sounding thin to his superiors. Time and time again, for example, he complained of the ‘falling sea level in the Caspian’, a phenomenon Soviet scientists were also worried about. Annual variations of a few centimetres were par for the course, but after 1932 the seawater began descending by dozens of centimetres each year, and some years by as much as half a metre. The hydrologists all had their pet theories. One presented an analysis of precipitation in the Volga basin, another claimed that irrigation projects in the Black Earth Region had begun to take their toll. Hypotheses aplenty (the seabed was collapsing due to oil extraction at Baku!), but no one had a definitive explanation.
From the management offices of the chemical combine, however, the changes could be seen with the naked eye: the mouth of the funnel from the Caspian into the bay, which once roared with water, was becoming choked with silt. Along the approach to Kara Bogaz Harbour, the industrial outpost built beside this narrow strait, shallows and sandbanks appeared. From the pier, onlookers could often hear a helmsman’s every curse.
Until now, the extreme rate of evaporation in the lagoon had always ensured an insatiable influx. Over the course of five or six kilometres the water had come rushing in through the twisting Adzyi Darya (or ‘Bitter River’), dragging with it all fish in the vicinity and leaving them pickled and belly-up in the vaporiser. Only the seals were strong enough to resist the tow, and seemed to derive as much pleasure from this ‘seafall’ as they did from the surf along other stretches of the coast.
But as the Caspian sank, the wild inflow dwindled and freighters could no longer reach their moorings. Sacks of dehydrated sulphate, the chemical combine’s most important product, lay piled on the quayside, but how to get them into the holds?
‘We have no choice but to pursue the receding sea,’ the harbour master announced, and so Rubinschtein had the wharves extended further and further towards open water.
Hydrochemists from the Academy of Sciences arrived equipped with a navy-grey launch, diving suits, pH meters and a chest full of sealable test tubes for their water samples. According to their calculations, any further reduction in influx would disturb Kara Bogaz’s ion balance; crystallisation would then no longer result in valuable sodium sulphate (Na2SO4), but in sodium chloride (NaCl). Or, to put it more prosaically: in table salt. To avert that, the Academy called for the strait to be dredged as quickly as possible. Should such measures fail and the bay lose its function as sulphate generator, they recommended that a pumping station be built to transfer more water from the Caspian into the lagoon.
Moscow dismissed these proposals as too costly. It was not unthinkable, after all, that the waters of the Caspian would rise again of their own accord. Perhaps the fall was simply part of a natural fluctuation or cycle, and therefore temporary. Who could say?
But no one within the Central Control Commission, a watchful Communist Party organ, was interested in such technical blather. What they saw was that the output of the chemical combine, under the leadership of Yakov Rubinschtein, was waning fast. Sulphate production in 1933 had achieved no more than 60 per cent of the level budgeted by Moscow, and the forecasts for 1934 looked even more dismal.
In preparation for a possible disciplinary investigation, the Control Commission ordered the combine’s manager to draw up a brief autobiography. The result – a three-page report dated 1934 – was added without comment to his personal dossier.
Rubinschtein had rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and begun the account of his life as follows:
I was born in Warsaw in 1895. My father sold insurance and earned money on the side by selling lottery tickets. My mother was a housewife. I am the eldest son. After me, they had another son and a daughter. Between the ages of six and nine I attended cheder (Talmud school). After that, until I was fifteen, I went to a vocational college (which I was not able to complete owing to a lack of money). That is why I then took private lessons from a student by the name of Pzyibysyevsky, in order to participate in the exams on a non-matriculating basis. Pzyibysyevsky was a member of the Polish Socialist Party (the “Levitsa”). He considered me educable and asked me to distribute printed matter. I became involved in the work of the Levitsa and brought reading material to Sedlets, where I was arrested for the first time in 1911 (I had already passed the vocational exams by then). After two months in jail I was released on bail as a minor, under my father’s supervision.
Young Yakov did not let himself be deterred by a mere prison sentence: during the years prior to the First World War he spent time in any number of jails and labour camps. His mother, brother and sister emigrated just in time to the United States, where they found employment in a factory making Panama hats. Father Rubinschtein remained behind, but was banished from Warsaw because his eldest son was a militant socialist. He died in a provincial Polish town in 1919. By then Yakov had already moved to the Ukraine, where he remained active in the underground until the Bolsheviks’ arrival. For almost a year he fought as an officer in the First Cavalry Army under General Budyonny – the same ‘Red Cavalry’ immortalised by Isaak Babel. After the civil war he occupied a great many administrative positions, ranging from chief inspector for the meat industry to director of Russo-Canadian merchant navy relations.
Sensitive to the times, Rubinschtein ended his ‘autobiography’ by admitting to two earlier indiscretions, thus complying with the unwritten law compelling one to self-criticism.
‘In 1929, during a meeting of the Party cell, I defended erroneous Trotskyite standpoints concerning the agricultural issue. A few days later I recognised the error of my ways and admitted my mistake publicly.
‘In 1930 I was reprimanded by the Central Control Commission for rashness and tactlessness (I had failed to take timely notice of sabotage activities in the canning industry). The reprimand was accompanied by a ban on the carrying out of administrative functions for a period of two years, a decision corrected and rescinded by the Central Committee of the Communist Party at the time of my appointment as manager of the Kara Bogaz Chemical Combine.’
By the mid-1930s, as the hydrochemists had predicted, the consistency of the ripples of salt along the coastline had changed. The reduced influx resulted in the saline solution coagulating, so that, rather than miracle salt, table salt was precipitated.
The first person to be confronted with this phenomenon was the captain of the tug Serbia, who was towing a barge full of sulphate blocks from one of the collection areas to Kara Bogaz Harbour. Amansoltan had cited his report in full in her thesis.
‘The sea was becalmed,’ the captain informed Rubinschtein. ‘We were crossing the bay at three-quarter throttle, and although the boilers were up to pressure we noticed that we were losing speed.’ The captain had just given the order ‘full speed ahead!’ when the tug suddenly began to judder and lose momentum. Soon the Serbia came to a standstill, her engines still pounding. The captain ordered a sailor to inspect the propeller. The boy reluctantly jumped overboard, took a deep breath and resurfaced a minute later with the announcement that he could not find the propeller. ‘There’s a chunk of salt where the propeller should be,’ he shouted, to the general hilarity of the crew. Believing the sailor to be delirious, the captain then dived from the stern himself – only to arrive at the same conclusion.
Table salt. Yet another catastrophe had been visited upon Rubinschtein. First his harbour had silted up, and now worthless salt was sticking to everything. Before long he began receiving disturbing reports about quality controllers at Astrakhan who had rejected batches of sodium sulphate because of contamination (‘of as high as 20 per cent’) with sodium chloride. Although not stated in so many words, the suspicion virtually leapt from the page: Comrade Rubinschtein was trying to compensate for his unsatisfactory production figures by ordinary fraud. His Jewishness did nothing to help the situation – and the next item in the dossier showed that the net was closing around Rubinschtein.
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL reads the stamp at the top of the letter sent on 1 April 1937 to Nikolay Yezhov, newly appointed head of the NKVD intelligence service. In it, Secretary Titov of the Turkmen Communist Party complains about the ‘amateurism’ of two Turkmen NKVD agents who have failed time and again to collect sufficiently damning evidence against Comrade Yakov Rubinschtein.
‘It seems clear to me that the Turkmen office of the NKVD is absolutely incapable of dealing with this matter. Perhaps it would be better to have the investigation of the head of the chemical combine led directly from Moscow?’
By way of attachment, Titov sends along a carbon copy of the ‘reprimand’ received in 1930 by the suspect – for that is what Rubinschtein has become. The fact that the Party sanction was ‘corrected and rescinded’ almost immediately was apparently of little importance, for the secretary makes no mention of it. The next document is couched in weightier terms. It is a secret ‘decree’ issued by the Presidium of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan on 10 May 1937.
Having taken into consideration:
The report from Comrade Gotlober concerning the counterrevolutionary, Trotskyite activities within the Kara Bogaz Chemical Combine, including sabotage and espionage, as supported by evidence from the federal bureau of the NKVD;
Having established:
That the sulphate deposits at the Bay of Kara Bogaz have, owing to mismanagement, been in a state of decline for a period of at least five years;
That, despite an investment of 17 million roubles, sulphate production has declined from 78 thousand tons in 1932 to 70 thousand tons in 1936;
That the experimental sulphate plant built by Rubinschtein and his cohorts has been constructed in a manner tantamount to sabotage (the walls are made of concrete of an inferior quality);
The Party Presidium has decided:
to accept the report from Comrade Gotlober, unamended and in its entirety;
to order the arrest of Rubinschtein by the proper authorities.
The little we know about the Polish-Jewish manager after that are the two dates included in his posthumous certificate of rehabilitation: on 28 May 1937 he was arrested by NKVD agents (and expelled from the Communist Party on the same day), and on 29 August, 1938 the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Soviet Court sentenced him ‘irrevocably and immediately’ to ‘death by execution’.
I wondered whether Paustovsky had heard about Rubinschtein’s fate. And, if he had, what exactly was he told, and when?
In writing the film of Kara Bogaz, Paustovsky had worked conscientiously towards a glorious ending. But anyone with an inkling of what had actually gone on could only have drawn the painful conclusion that Soviet propaganda had begun to lose all connection with reality. Socialist Realism had ended up in a stand-off with the facts.
In the spring of 1935, while the film was still being shot, scientists became convinced that the waters along which Kara Bogaz Harbour had been built were receding for good, and that the entire settlement had been established at the wrong place. But, fearing Stalin’s wrath, no one dared say that out loud. In her thesis Amansoltan related how one salt-collection area after another was abandoned. The sulphate had simply stopped precipitating. The only source still on stream was artificial Lake Number 6; elsewhere, commercial exploitation of the bay at Kara Bogaz was a write-off. By late 1938 – ten years after it was founded – Kara Bogaz Harbour had become a desolate industrial ruin.
There could have been no greater contrast with what I saw in the little cinema. Paustovsky the lyricist had extrapolated the pre-1932 success story into the future, with a crescendo. In the film he has a futuristic solar desalinator appear on the barren coastline. The installation is equipped with an ingenious network of pipes and electrical control panels. At its festive inauguration, the nomads approach it fearfully. The men are wearing turbans, the women cover their faces with the tips of their shawls. Squatting or sitting cross-legged, clutching earthenware bowls, they watch the Soviet wizards who claim they can make the water of the Caspian fit for drinking.
One of them tastes the water and spits it out – urgh!, that’s salty. Laughter in the hollow amphitheatre. Undrinkable water is flowing through the pipes. But then a stout Russian woman opens a valve with both hands, we hear a hissing and a bubbling and, after a drum roll that lasts at least a minute, water clatters into a zinc bucket. A sceptical tabib is allowed to hold his bowl beneath the tap and, heaven be praised, the water truly is sweet.
Immediately, a chorus erupts. From the cinema loudspeakers comes the voice of a famous ‘people’s artist’, singing about ‘Stalin’s envoys’ who came generously to ‘this far and distant land’. On the screen appear the same men and women who had been watching the demonstration only a minute earlier. Now, however, they are all wearing white blouses and work shirts; their black hair has been washed and cut. They are seen standing at a control panel, bent over a manometer, or working on a cut-off valve with a spanner.
The final shot before the lights come on is a close-up of burst pomegranates and melons: fruit grown in the desert using desalinated water.
‘Turkmenistan: land of milk and honey,’ I said, willing to take the risk that Igor Vasilyev might not appreciate my cynicism.
The conservator was lifting the roll from its spindle, and asked me to hand him the two halves of the flat film tin.
‘I can imagine,’ I ventured, in an effort to tone down my comment, ‘that the audiences back then must have gone home feeling proud.’
‘Audiences?’ Igor Vasilyev wiped his hands on his dustcoat and looked at me sceptically. ‘There were never any audiences.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This film was never released. That’s why you paid the rate for “unreleased material”. It says so on your receipt.’
I fished the scrap of paper from my pocket, but not to check the price of admission; what I needed was something tangible on which to fix my gaze. ‘Unreleased material.’ It took a moment for it to dawn on me: the film had never made it past the censors! But why? Surely not because it portrayed the situation at the bay more favourably than it really was?
I asked Igor Vasilyev whether it had anything to do with Yakov Rubinschtein.
He looked at me in puzzlement. ‘I don’t know any Rubinschtein. In fact, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ If I was interested in hearing the story, however, I should come with him.
‘What you must realise,’ he said when we were halfway down the corridor, ‘is that, in 1935, the atmosphere among those closest to Stalin was already very, very tense.’ Ever since the assassination of Sergey Kirov, Leningrad’s Party chief, on 1 December 1934, the political establishment had been on edge; Stalin had begun using the murder to weed out his closest associates. ‘There was a sense of ill-defined danger in the air at the time,’ Igor Vasilyev explained.
The archivist hung his jacket on the rack in his office. Pulling up a chair, he began searching through a drawer. As his fingers tiptoed across the files, he remarked that Stalin had liked to use the term ‘illusion’ when referring to ‘film’, that he considered the feature film ‘the most powerful propaganda weapon of all’. Literature was of a lower calibre, while acrobatics, music and theatre ranked among the handguns. ‘SovKino, the state cinematographic service, was a powerful institution in the 1930s, and awash with funds,’ Igor Vasilyev told me. ‘The head of SovKino enjoyed ministerial status.’
From a dossier marked ‘The Black Maw’ he removed a clear plastic folder containing a clipping from Izvestia dated 27 August 1935. It was a brief article from the ‘theatre and cinema’ section, by the French writer and communist Henri Barbusse.
Barbusse had been in Moscow at the time to present his French-language biography of Stalin, the archivist explained. As a friend of Gorky’s he was received with full honours. In order to acquaint him with the latest achievements of Soviet culture he was shown The Black Maw, which was in the final stages of editing. Barbusse had expressed his admiration in writing, under the title ‘Kara Bogaz’, and it had been published immediately in Izvestia.
I am honoured to have had the privilege of seeing a new Soviet film, even before its public premiere. The film (Kara Bogaz) portrays the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to bring industry and progress to the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. With the application of scientific insights, the Soviets are able to turn seawater into drinking water. In this way, Bolshevik technology leads the way to victory. In this wonderful film, based on Konstantin Paustovsky’s widely acclaimed book, a great many authentically socialist moments have been preserved for posterity.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there? I asked.
‘No, what he wrote was not the problem. The problem was that Monsieur Barbusse had seen the film before Stalin had.’ He and his colleagues, Igor Vasilyev told me, had long been puzzled about why the film had never been released. Finally they had set up their own investigation, which led them to the by-then-elderly son of the director. ‘He told us that the story surrounding The Black Maw was a secret his father had taken with him to his grave.’
What it boiled down to was that Stalin had found out about the article in Izvestia. Annoyed by the fact that he, as First Critic, had been passed over, he demanded an explanation from the head of the cinematographic service, Comrade Boris Shumyatsky. As soon as this Minister of Cinematographic Affairs heard that he was being summoned to the Kremlin, and why, he became paralysed with fear.
‘He thought his fate was sealed,’ Igor Vasilyev said. ‘That, in the wake of the Kirov affair, he would be branded an enemy of the people.’
The best form of defence, Shumyatsky concluded, was attack. He would lie to Stalin. And so he stated flatly that Henri Barbusse had been confused: the Frenchman had seen a film, but not The Black Maw. After all, that was still being edited! The entire misunderstanding, Shumyatsky continued, was prompted by jealous film-makers spreading an ugly rumour. The profession, it seemed, was still rife with sectarianism, but the minister promised to carry out a thorough investigation and to punish those responsible.
‘Back at his office, Shumyatsky decided to wipe out all traces of The Black Maw,’ Igor Vasilyev said.
‘Then it was a wonder that the rolls of film even survived,’ I commented.
‘Oh no,’ the archivist said. ‘He kept them tucked away on purpose. That way, if Stalin asked about it, he could produce them on the spot.’
The minister had of course summoned both Konstantin Paustovsky and the director. The three of them discussed the plan to conceal the whole project as quietly as possible. In order to avoid suspicion the final editing process would continue, albeit on a back burner. But Shumyatsky never presented the finished product, with its ‘great many authentically socialist moments’, for approval to the censor, let alone to the official distribution channels. The strategy he had chosen (burying the thing in the hope that Stalin would forget all about it) was risky, but the alternative (simply releasing the film) struck him as riskier still.
‘Just imagine,’ Igor Vasilyev said. ‘All that needed to happen was for one film critic to recall Barbusse’s article in Izvestia and heads would have rolled.’
‘Lying to Stalin was not what you’d call a minor misdemeanour,’ I suggested.
‘It was a direct violation of Article 58, counter-revolutionary activity, on a par with “squandering public funds”, “Trotskyite sabotage” or the “distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda”.’
The terminology was familiar to me by now. I nodded and said nothing. What could I possibly say?
Before I left, I told Igor Vasilyev about Yakov Rubinschtein, who he was and how he had met his fate. The conservator listened politely – to him, it must have been one story among thousands.
Back outside, it struck me how close Paustovsky had come to sharing the fate of his cinematic hero. Paying no attention to the extravagant shop windows and glittering facades, I hurried down Tverskaya to the closest metro station. Once home, I dived into Paustovsky’s autobiography. I scoured all six volumes, more than a thousand pages, and – just to be sure – his other books as well. A few hours later I knew for certain: nowhere in his work had Paustovsky ever breathed a word about the screen version of Kara Bogaz.