The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

This is a book about minorities drawn to Soviet communism and the avant-garde. The initial focus is the 1920s and early 1930s and the allure of Moscow for the world’s downtrodden and oppressed. The Bolsheviks, it seemed, had eliminated racism in the USSR while supporting anti-imperial struggles around the world. At roughly the same time, a loose grouping of artists and writers sympathetic to the revolution—retrospectively labeled the Soviet avant-garde—emerged at the forefront of modernist experimentation. Through such distinct but overlapping movements as futurism and constructivism, they enacted an unprecedented alignment of political and artistic vanguards—the artist as bona fide revolutionary.

I am linking here two phenomena that have each been thoroughly studied but rarely in tandem: the Soviet Union of the interwar years as a site of cultural innovation and the Soviet Union as a beacon of racial, ethnic, and national equality. These two sources of allure help to explain what, in hindsight, might seem strange: that the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s had a magical, even religious significance for many minority and non-Western artists and writers. For reasons discussed in the following, my focus is primarily (though not exclusively) on those from the United States. The Jamaican American poet Claude McKay described his 1922 journey to Moscow as a “magic pilgrimage.” Likewise, the Jewish American poet Moishe Nadir called his 1926 visit a “pilgrimage” to the “holy land of the Soviets,” and in 1932 Langston Hughes wired the organizer of an African American delegation to the USSR, about to set sail from New York, “YOU HOLD THAT BOAT CAUSE ITS AN ARK TO ME.”¹

As indicated by Jacques Derrida after his own 1990 visit, such descriptions can be seen as part of a “rich, brief, intense, and dense tradition” of Western travelogues casting the USSR as a “mythic (ahistoric, in illo tempore) and eschatological (mosaic or messianic) space.”² My task is to connect this tradition to questions of race and ethnicity—something that makes little sense in our postsocialist present, accustomed as we are to dismissing the Soviet Union as a monolith that failed to accommodate difference. Moscow’s attempts to do so can be summarized by the official prescription that culture be “national in form, socialist in content,” which blandly meant that Bolshevik decrees were to be published in multiple languages and propaganda posters were to feature minority costumes. Thus, one basic aim of this book is to recapture the magic behind the “magic pilgrimage,” more specifically, to explain how, via the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, marginalized minorities could suddenly envision themselves at the forefront of both modernism and revolution. As a growing number of scholars have shown, these pilgrims and would-be pilgrims were certainly looking for Moscow’s brand of multiculturalism and Leninist critiques of imperialism.³ However, they were also seeking the creative possibilities opened by the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vsevolod Meyerhold—this lionized branch of the international avant-garde that, as Slavists well know, had itself long been fascinated by minority and non-Western cultures. From the alignment of art and revolution emerged many striking, eccentric ways of expressing cultural difference—visions of political and artistic vanguardism that deepened rather than erased ethnic particularism; visions of world revolution in which the ethnic Other took the lead. These visions, I argue, enable us to unlock the suppressed utopian potential of minority and avant-garde cultures alike—the former as revolutionary and experimental; the latter as inclusive and decolonizing.

To be sure, this is a counterintuitive pairing. Ethnic, minority cultures connote tradition and descent—one’s inheritance from the past. Avant-garde, on the other hand, is a military term (the vanguard of a unit) with political and aesthetic connotations—the revolutionary vanguard and artistic avant-garde each progressing toward a liberated future.⁴ Suffice it to say for now, the historical avant-garde employed montage for the sake of creating new meanings, and this book employs precisely this technique, beginning with the pairing of ethnic and avant-garde—the goal being to estrange and renew both terms. I do so through a new grouping that I call the ethnic avant-garde, which on one level refers simply to the many diverse artists and writers—figures like McKay, Nadir, and Hughes—who were drawn to and often visited interwar Moscow. Through the variety of translations and cultural productions emerging from these encounters, they became active participants in Soviet efforts to transform perception and to decenter the West—in experiments with art and equality that opened radical, forgotten horizons for American ethnic minorities. The ethnic avant-garde encompasses, for instance, Mayakovsky’s “Afro-Cuban” poems and Hughes’s translations of them; Nadir’s accounts of the USSR as a “red-haired bride”; and a Soviet futurist play about China that became Broadway’s first major production with a predominantly Asian American cast.

However, beyond these concrete cultural encounters, I also present the ethnic avant-garde as a largely unrealized utopian aspiration, one that ultimately exceeds the Soviet Union of the interwar years. It is the dream of advancing simultaneously ethnic particularism, political radicalism, and artistic experimentation, debunking the notion that particularism yields provincialism. More to the point, though, the ethnic avant-garde foregrounds a distinct way of seeing—a “transnational optic” that, for the contemporary reader, makes it possible to discern unexpected connections among radical artists and writers from many different countries.⁵ The figures covered here themselves cultivated such an optic, motivated by the similar potential of avant-garde and minority cultures to level hierarchies and bring art into life—that is, to shatter or open exclusive canons and to dismantle the divide between high and low. Techniques like cinematic montage enabled not only these ends but also alliances across racial, ethnic, and national lines. Blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, and Russians could see themselves as part of a collaborative effort to harness both perceptual estrangement and minority cultures for a Soviet-centered world revolution. Of course, such utopian aspirations were arguably doomed to be suppressed and forgotten—crushed by Stalinist terror and overshadowed by socialist realism—but remnants of this interwar ethnic avant-garde nonetheless survive into the present day.

To lay this grouping’s historical and conceptual foundation, this introduction begins with an overview of the Soviet Union’s political and artistic allure for minorities and non-Westerners around the world. I illustrate this through various interpretations of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International—the famous protoconstructivist icon now best known as Tatlin’s Tower, first displayed in Petrograd in 1920. Consisting of two intertwined iron spirals that cut through the heavens like a telescope or a cannon, the never-built tower positions the Soviet Union of the interwar years at the forefront of both world revolution and global modernism, of both the Third Communist International (Comintern) and the international avant-garde. In the first part of this introduction I make use of the tower to rethink notions of both revolution and avant-gardism—to impart to them a variegated temporality that encompasses past as well as future. The task here is to articulate that distinct way of seeing that is central to the ethnic avant-garde—more specifically, an ability to see both the political vanguard and artistic avant-garde as compatible with the past and descent. In the second part of this introduction I apply this way of seeing to notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Here I will juxtapose American and Soviet efforts to overcome biological racism and to come to terms with the two countries’ respective, exceptionally diverse populations. This will take us on an excursion to Soviet nationalities policy, linguistics, and ethnography, which will lead us back, in a roundabout fashion, to Tatlin’s Tower. Its telescope design opens an estranging lens on avant-gardism, world revolution, and minority cultures alike. Its spirals provide the scaffolding for the ethnic avant-garde.

More specifically, the aim has been to decenter Paris, which even during the interwar years could be considered passé. Walter Benjamin named it, in 1935, the capital of the nineteenth century, the city’s revolutionary ambitions having long given way to urban redevelopment and “monuments of the bourgeoisie.”⁷ He hinted that the twentieth century demanded new, radical alternatives to build on the ruins of the Paris Commune, and as Clark has shown, he himself felt Moscow’s pull as a new potential center. And so we turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from Paris to Moscow, from the iron and glass of shopping arcades to the iron and glass of Tatlin’s Tower. Indeed, the tower’s 400 meters were explicitly intended to overshadow Paris (the Eiffel’s mere 324). This was Tatlin’s shot across the bow of Western Europe—his assertion of Russia, not France, as the center of cutting-edge modernism. The key ingredient was revolution—the Soviet avant-garde’s union of artistic and political rupture, its ill-fated embrace of the Bolshevik vanguard.⁸

The tower, again, marked the alignment of two internationals—the Communist International and international avant-garde. In 1920 these were still in brief harmony: many still hoped that the avant-garde’s project of perceptual estrangement could serve the revolution, and the tower was intended not just as a monument to but also headquarters for the Comintern—founded in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin to coordinate radical movements around the world. Accordingly, the tower was to have been a machine for making revolution, with communist radio emanating from the top and agitational slogans projected onto the surrounding clouds. Within the iron spirals, Tatlin planned three glass structures, each spinning at different speeds. A large cube at the base was to have rotated once a year and hosted the organization’s polyglot congresses, with representatives from all corners and races. A pyramid in the middle was to have rotated once a month and housed the Comintern’s executive committee. In the early 1920s it included M. N. Roy, the Indian anti-imperialist who helped found the Mexican Communist Party, and Sen Katayama, a founder of communist parties in Japan and the United States. A cylinder at the top was to have rotated once a day and housed the editorial offices for the organization’s many publications, published in multiple languages.⁹ In short, the scores of seemingly random trusses gathered into a coherent movement would have reflected the Comintern’s diverse yet coordinated activists. This monument to artistic experimentation and world revolution was to have tripled as multicultural center.

Understanding this requires stripping the tower to its two constituent spirals, which chase each other but never touch, starting and ending at different points. One spiral, call it the vanguard spiral, evokes the tensions of forging world revolution: its balance of centripetal and centrifugal movements evokes the push and pull between Soviet center and non-Soviet peripheries, as well as between different societies caught in different stages of development. The other spiral, call it the avant-garde spiral, also twists time and space, but for more formal ends—for “the creation of a new world of sensations,” as Viktor Shklovskii put it in a review of Tatlin.¹⁰ These sensations opened the way for ever more varied understandings of revolution. Nikolai Punin described the spiral as the “classical form of dynamics,” promising liberation from “all animal, earthly, and reptile [presmykaiushchikhsia] interests”—the tower as escaping the bounds of time and space and leaping into a socialist future. However, the tower also gestured to the distant past: Punin noted too Tatlin’s use of iron and glass, the “two most primitive [prosteishikh] materials, for which fire was, to the same degree, the giver of life”—materials that concealed a “severe and red-hot simplicity” evoking the “birth of an ocean.” From this perspective, the two spirals evoked not simply a socialist future but also a sleeping giant from time immemorial. The result, according to Punin, was “an ideal, live, and classic expression…of the international union of the workers of the globe.”¹¹

All this points to a vision of revolution sweeping back and forth between future and past and becoming ever more inclusive as a result. On the one hand, the tower anticipated a liberated, unified humanity. Unlike traditional monuments, it eschewed a single heroic type and, in line with Soviet constructivism, advanced a world free of hierarchy and superfluity. Trotsky praised its exclusion of “national styles,” its transcendence of past division and prejudices.¹² However, as indicated by Punin, the “classic” tower also gestured to the distant past and, from the moment of its unveiling, was seen as a vestige of premodernity. Several have noted its likeness to the Great Mosque of Samarra (ca. 846–861) in present-day Iraq, which Tatlin may have visited during his youth as a sailor. He certainly visited Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, and some have seen the tower as a composite of ruins from those places.¹³ The suprematist painter El Lissitzky called it a reworking of ancient Assyria’s Sargon Pyramid. In turn, as Svetlana Boym has emphasized, “the Sargon monument was considered an inspiration for the Tower of Babel, which was in itself an unfinished utopian monument turned mythical ruin.” Accordingly, just as Nimrod’s tower glorified a united humanity speaking a single divine tongue, Tatlin’s was to have joined all peoples in a shared, liberated society; and arguably the result of both failed enterprises was the scattering of nations.¹⁴

The tower was thus read as advancing a universal form, but one with vaguely Middle Eastern forebears; it evoked a single world civilization, but one drawing from every people and culture. This flight of fancy enables us to broaden revolution beyond modern bounds to its original, astronomical connotations—revolution as, in Hannah Arendt’s words, the “recurring, cyclical movement” of stars. This makes the notion of the tower as telescope all the more apt, with the different rotation speeds (day, month, year) corresponding to the “celestial rhythms” of earth and moon.¹⁵ Reinhart Koselleck similarly expands revolution by linking it to premodern eschatology—both marked by expectations of salvation and efforts to accelerate time.¹⁶ In short, while revolution is typically understood as a distinctly modern leap into the new, it can also refer to a perspective outside time and history. Indeed, many Russians viewed the 1917 Revolution as “an apocalyptic moment, as a time not of forward linear progress but of a sacred break in temporality.”¹⁷

It is understandable, even predictable that an avant-gardist like Tatlin would evoke such iconoclastic views of revolution, opening the term to a Pandora’s box of myths and legends. Remarkably, though, at least in the early 1920s, the political vanguard found it necessary to do something similar, that is, to articulate a vision of revolution able to accommodate all the world’s peoples. If the tower referenced both a liberated future and ancient civilization, under Lenin’s guidance, the Comintern finessed the stagism (i.e., from feudalism to capitalism to socialism) typically associated with Marx. That is, at least in its earliest years, the Comintern evinced a flexible, open-ended approach to history and revolution—similar to but to a lesser degree than its planned monument. According to Lenin and Leon Trotsky, democratic revolution could immediately give way to socialist revolution (Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution); “backward” nations could combine and leap over historical stages (Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development); and countries where capitalism was not fully developed (e.g., Russia itself) offered the best opportunities for undermining the global capitalist system (Lenin’s “weakest link” theory).¹⁸ In short, the last could become first. A “backward” nation could serve as the vanguard of world revolution without having to advance through capitalism—Russia providing the key case in point. For Trotsky, the fact that the country had been “backward” (i.e., predominantly agrarian) on the eve of revolution was a virtue; Russia’s “amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” made possible the Bolsheviks’ success.¹⁹ Accordingly, in advance of the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920, Lenin famously called for communists to support “revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies.” This meant that the Comintern would organize not only the “advanced” Western proletariat but also “backward” minority and colonized groups around the world—what Lenin called “oppressed nations,” suffering under the rule of developed, imperialist “oppressor nations.”²⁰

My detour from artistic avant-garde to political vanguard points once again to a basic congruence between the two, and indeed, Tatlin took pride in combining “purely artistic forms with utilitarian goals.”²¹ This is not to say that Tatlin’s design was a crude reflection of Leninist policy, but rather that this policy enables a better appreciation of the design. It enables us to see Tatlin’s interweaving of the modern and premodern not simply as an instance of abstract, universal form but also as an expression of the way and how of world revolution—of the need to attract revolutionaries of all stripes, colors, and stages of development. More to the point, already at the time of its November 1920 unveiling, the Monument to the Third International was a monument to a world revolutionary movement increasingly oriented toward Asia and Africa. That August, the Red Cavalry’s assault of Poland—monitored throughout the Second Congress and later immortalized by Isaac Babel—had been narrowly repelled, shattering hopes of a European revolution.²² This prompted the Bolsheviks to turn their attention elsewhere: in September 1920, the Comintern convened the “First Congress of the Peoples of the East” in Baku, Azerbaijan, drawing thousands of predominantly Muslim delegates from a broad swath of land, from Turkey to India to Korea. There Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev pledged Soviet support for all the world’s “oppressed peoples” in a “holy war” against Western imperialism²³—one that was, again, to have emanated from a recast Tower of Babel. The political vanguard (Zinoviev) and artistic avant-garde (Tatlin) here close in on each other, both expressing similarly expansive, indeed premodern visions of revolution.

Admittedly, my interweaving of vanguard and avant-garde has been a bit heavy-handed, especially considering that Tatlin likely envisioned his tower for Petrograd, not Moscow, and originally as a commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution, not the Communist International.²⁴ Indeed, it may be for the best that his design was never realized given the Comintern’s much-maligned subservience to Soviet state interests, the frequent accusations of world revolution betrayed.²⁵ Functioning as that organization’s administrative center would likely have diminished the tower’s nostalgic appeal, and I do not care to crush the monument under the Third International’s weight. Rather, having noted the momentary, complementary congruence of vanguard and avant-garde, I will now separate them again, or keep them separate à la Tatlin’s two spirals—again, chasing each other but never quite touching. I will use the tower as a springboard to yet more eccentric, inclusive visions of world revolution, related but not bound to the Bolshevik vanguard.

This formulation—related but not bound, encircling but not touching—allows us to see the vanguard and avant-garde neither as synonymous nor as completely at odds. More specifically, it enables us to salvage the avant-garde’s “utopian surplus” from the abortive histories of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist International. At the same time, it enables us to draw from these histories a revolutionary political horizon that bolstered the Soviet avant-garde’s long-standing interest in other peoples and cultures. The avant-garde was obviously tied to the catastrophic history of the Bolshevik vanguard. However, as evinced by Tatlin’s Tower, the avant-garde also “side shadows” alternative possible histories—indeed, alternative ways of imagining the flow of history.²⁶

My contention is that through works like the tower, Soviet avant-gardists unseated the Hegelian notion of historical development, which had long posed Western Europeans at the lead of “World Spirit,” Russians lagging, and Africans excluded altogether.²⁷ Again, the Bolshevik vanguard had complicated this stagist view just by sparking socialist revolution in Russia, but the avant-garde went much further. Wedding perceptual estrangement and romantic anticapitalism, it articulated visions of revolution in which even lost civilizations and ancient religions could play a role.²⁸ The writings of one of Tatlin’s close friends, the futurist Velimir Khlebnikov—now most famous for his zaum (transrational) poetry—are here exemplary. Many have discussed Khlebnikov’s eccentric approach to time, namely, his effort to predict the future by measuring the intervals between past historic events, as well as to find through zaum the common origin of all languages. However, as Harsha Ram has shown, such efforts also led him to embrace non-Western cultures and, specifically, to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as an Asian revolution. “We know that the bell that sounds for Russia’s freedom will not touch European ears,” Khlebnikov declares in his 1918 manifesto, “An Indo-Russian Union.” As a result, Russia must embrace its Asianness: “We, the citizens of the new world, liberated and united by Asia, parade triumphantly before you…. Our path leads from the unity of Asia to the unity of the Stars, and through the freedom of the continent to the freedom of the entire planet.” For Khlebnikov, Asia serves as the key to making the revolution global as well as timeless: the manifesto credits “the will of Fate” for the union’s creation and proclaims the unity of “three worlds—the Aryan, the Indian, and the Caspian, the triangle of Christ, the Buddha and Muhammad…. We have plunged into the depths of past ages and collected the signatures of the Buddha, Confucius and Tolstoi.” Imparting to the revolution an eternal, religious quality, this call for an “Indo-Russian Union” exceeds what Ram describes as the Bolsheviks’ “gestural solidarity” toward Asia, for instance, Zinoviev’s “holy war” at the Congress of the Peoples of the East. Unlike Zinoviev, Khlebnikov actually identifies with Asia, which opens the way for a more inclusive vision of revolution—resonant with, but not limited to, Comintern outreach.²⁹

This is to distinguish once again the Soviet avant-garde from the Bolshevik vanguard but also to distinguish the Soviets from their Western counterparts and competitors, many of whom also happened to be drawn to minority and non-Western cultures. Khlebnikov’s manifesto seems to anticipate Ezra Pound’s Cantos LII–LXXI (1940), which connected Confucian China to the American Revolution and, in turn, fascist Italy. Of course, such efforts to harness non-Western cultures for modernist innovation often bore a racism and Eurocentrism that ultimately kept these cultures at a distance—a distance that Khlebnikov sought to overcome.³⁰ Indeed, the anti-imperialist underpinnings of his Indo-Russian Union seem to align him more closely to James Clifford’s Paris-based “ethnographic surrealists,” who in the 1920s used “cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms” to destabilize received notions of the “real,” “normal,” and “beautiful.” Drawing inspiration from works like Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), this group sought to unlock “the full human potential for cultural expression” through the sense that “something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic.” Such experimentation—this taste for the exotic—of course helped make interwar Paris a vibrant cultural hub, including for many artists and writers of color.³¹ However, in contrast to Tatlin and Khlebnikov, the ethnographic surrealists lacked the Comintern’s revolutionary politics, directed against the very forces that made African artifacts so readily available in Paris. As Clifford writes, the ethnographic surrealists sought to decenter Europe and offered “resistance to oppression and a necessary counsel of tolerance, comprehension, and mercy” (145). But this group stopped short of both world revolution and of identifying with (rather than just embracing) the Other.³²

Khlebnikov, in contrast, was part of a long Russian tradition of identifying with the Other—a tradition that bears elaboration given the handle it provides on the Soviet avant-garde’s relation to minority and non-Western cultures. That is, we must follow Khlebnikov down the rabbit hole of Russian modernists and avant-gardists identifying in particular with Asia. This will take us to the prerevolutionary years, then to the alignment of this tradition with the Bolshevik Revolution, followed by its resonance with pilgrims like Claude McKay. My starting point for this brief excursion is an influential group of painters from the second decade of the twentieth century who called themselves the neoprimitivists and who counted Khlebnikov and Tatlin among their many allies. At first glance, this group’s works and writings seem to mimic Western chinoiserie in claiming “the beautiful East” as the key to disrupting perception and continuity: “We are striving to seek new paths for our art, but we do not reject the old completely, and of its previous forms we recognize above all—the primitive, the magic fable of the old East,” wrote the painter Aleksandr Shevchenko in 1913.³³ Accordingly, the Asian faces in his painting Laundresses from the same year evoke the angled African masks of Picasso’s Les demoiselles. However, as art historian Jane Sharp has emphasized, the “neo” of this primitivism lay in its avowedly anti-Western stance. In the words of another of its leaders, Natal’ia Goncharova, “I turn away from the West because for me personally it has dried up and because my sympathies lie with the East. The West has shown me one thing: everything it has is from the East.” Thus, if the West had long cast Russia as laggard in world historical development—Russia as “Byzantine” and “semi-Oriental” in the Enlightenment imagination—the neoprimitivists (akin to the nineteenth-century Slavophiles) turned this into a source of defiance and pride.³⁴ “We are daily in the most direct contact with Asia,” Shevchenko boasted. “We are called barbarians, Asians. Yes, we are Asia, and are proud of this, because ‘Asia is the cradle of nations,’ a good half of our blood is Tatar, and we hail the East to come, the source and cradle of all culture, of all arts.”³⁵ In short, just as with Khlebnikov, the neoprimitivists not only drew from but also identified with the premodern and non-Western. They claimed to regard themselves as Other and Asian—Russia as, in the words of one member, “the avant-garde country of the East.”³⁶ By this view, Russia itself was, according to Sharp, “colonized by the West, economically and culturally dependent on the prior ‘civilizing’ accomplishments” of England, Germany, Italy, and France. This means that in contrast to Western chinoiserie, neoprimitivism can be seen as something of an anticolonial discourse, with a “devotion, even subordination” to Asia that hinders any conflation with Saidian “Orientalism.”³⁷

However, though Russian artists and writers may have considered themselves “Asian” vis-à-vis Western Europe, they were most certainly European vis-à-vis the empire’s non-Russian peoples. This is to say that Russians could be just as distant and condescending toward the czar’s non-Russian subjects as Westerners could be toward African peoples and cultures.³⁸ Here again, though, the key distinction was revolution, with 1917 imparting an anti-imperialist edge to Russian identifications with Asia. That is, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian-turned-Soviet artists and writers came not only to identify with but also to mobilize the Other: Asia became a rallying point for revolution. Perhaps the most striking and famous example of this is the symbolist Aleksandr Blok’s 1918 poem “Scythians”—a 1920 edition of which Goncharova illustrated in Paris. It cast the Bolsheviks as the eponymous nomadic tribe from the Black Sea steppes, reigniting an age-old battle between Asia and Europe:

As Ram notes, in the often empire-inflected tradition of Russian writing about Asia, this poem marks the inward collapse of East and West—“no longer dichotomies but perspectival thresholds through which Russia could contemplate the crisis of her imperial destiny.” Indeed, by casting the revolutionary masses as Asians, Blok came not only to contemplate this crisis—namely, a revolution proclaiming the Russian Empire’s end—but also to endorse it, to self-identify as “Scythian.”⁴⁰ This is despite the poem’s prophetic anticipation that efforts to forge world revolution, to bridge East and West, would yield orgiastic bloodshed—the devouring of partisans and enemies alike. As the poem ends, Europe can escape certain doom only by uniting with this cannibal tribe: in a flip side rendition of the hymn “The International” (“…unites the human race”), Blok invites “the old world” to heed “the barbarian lyre” and join “the brotherly feast of labor and peace.”⁴¹

Again, these lines—along with the works by Khlebnikov, Shevchenko, and Goncharova—emerged from a long tradition in Russian art and letters of using Asia as a means of self-definition. Russian symbolists like Blok had a particular predilection for looking eastward for apocalyptic renewal.⁴² The distinctness of this tradition makes all the more remarkable the fact that outsiders latched on to it as well, for instance, Claude McKay. Though he apparently had limited prior exposure to Russian literature, he writes in his memoir that during his 1922 visit to address the Comintern’s Fourth Congress his “senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor and movement of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by the forces of revolution.” While there, he composed a sonnet titled “Moscow” to try to capture this splendor. It can be read as an affirmative, though probably unintended, response to Blok’s “barbarian lyre”—a reading reinforced by the regular use of rhymes and iambs found in both “Scythians” and the sonnet:

Blok’s “barbarian lyre” here harmonizes into McKay’s “amorous sounding tones”: once again the Bolshevik Revolution is cast as an Asian revolution, with the Soviet capital here becoming something from Arabian Nights—dazzling colors mixing with communist red, and Lenin holding court in a golden fortress. To be sure, just as “Scythians” emerges from a distinctly Russian literary tradition, “Moscow” evokes Western romantic Orientalism, and accordingly, McKay’s rhymes and iambs as well as (characteristic) choice of the sonnet form impart to his poem a lulling, retrograde quality. But not just Orientalism: “Moscow” also exemplifies what Bill Mullen has termed Afro-Orientalism—black appropriations of Asia that serve to sidestep the “crushing oppositional hierarchies” of American racism.⁴⁴

Taking a step back, we can say that Khlebnikov, Blok, and McKay wrote from quite different contexts and yet arrived at similarly strange, counterintuitive visions of the Bolshevik Revolution. Each cast it as an expression of archaic desires and passions, and about the clash of cultures (East versus West) rather than classes. Though not necessarily bound to the party or Comintern, these estranging views, I would like to suggest, served to extend the revolution’s reach—to make it more appealing to non-Europeans, McKay here providing a case in point. Again, he was in Moscow to address the Comintern, specifically on the plight of African Americans, and as others have shown, he helped shape the organization’s views on the so-called Negro question. However, far more poignant than his participation in the Fourth Congress is McKay’s very enchantment with Moscow. As he recalls in his memoir,

As others have noted, this passage combines racial pride on the one hand and a willingness to become an “ikon”—that is, to accept the Comintern’s latent essentialism, the role of “stand-in African” assigned to him.⁴⁵ But I would also like to emphasize a more subtle allure operating here: his spelling of “ikon” (as opposed to “icon”) suggests that, as he was being foisted above Moscow’s streets, he imagined himself as a religious icon (ikona) and, hence, “omen of good luck”—Jamaican American poet as Russian Orthodox saint, painted on wood, kissed by parishioners.⁴⁶ In other words, not only did McKay admire the “Byzantine” qualities of Moscow’s “jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires,” that is, Orthodox churches, but also, in a sense, he himself became “Byzantine,” identifying with Russia just as Khlebnikov and Blok identified with Asia.⁴⁷ McKay was not alone in doing so: the Soviet Union’s perceived exoticness also impressed Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who in 1924 became the first African American to receive Comintern training in Moscow. Upon his return to Chicago as a communist organizer, he “affected a Russian style of dress, sporting a robochka (a man’s long belted shirt) which came almost to his knees, ornamental belt, high boots and a fur hat.” By one account he resembled a “Buddhist monk”; by another, a “veritable Black Cossack” whose “high cheekbones gave him somewhat of an Oriental look.”⁴⁸

All this is to present Moscow and the revolution as uncannily inclusive, as promoting not only class-based equality but also unexpected cross-cultural encounters. These encounters had the power to transform perception, giving rise to these feverish visions of the Bolsheviks as Asian and blackness blurring with Russianness. (Indeed, to boost recruitment in the early 1930s, black communists in New York distributed busts of Aleksandr Pushkin and flaunted his Ethiopian ancestry.⁴⁹) To be sure, not all minority visitors to interwar Moscow found the city so welcoming: incidents of racism were reported to and punished by Soviet authorities.⁵⁰ However, the point here is not to gauge the extent to which such visions corresponded with reality but to pursue the imaginative possibilities that they opened. These visions are particularly useful in undercutting received notions of the Soviet Union as “cold, stern, rational”—as a gray place where utopian dreams went to die.⁵¹ Tatlin, Khlebnikov, Blok, and McKay highlight instead the colorful allure of revolution, the “magic” behind the “magic pilgrimage.”

Such visions were widespread enough—both in the USSR and beyond—that at least one prominent Soviet official felt compelled to weigh in. Clearly these artists and writers had gone too far: in 1926 Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky asserted, “Yes, we shall rise at the head of Asia. We shall even arm Asia with European thought, but not for the purpose of ‘crushing her skeleton’ with our Scythian embrace.” Contra Blok, Lunacharsky insisted that the Bolsheviks were “by no means opposed to European civilization” and that the world revolution would fulfill, not destroy this civilization. According to him, too many Western communists—disenchanted with modernity after World War I—had given in to “decadent mysticisms and passivities.” This led them to place “much less hope in their own proletariat than in those phantom hordes which their imaginations invoke out of Asia.” In addition to being anti-Marxist, the problem with such fantasies was that they were stifling revolution in Europe, strengthening the resolve of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. Thus, Lunacharsky declared, “we must absolutely establish our position in this question and destroy the myth that we are the banner-bearers of a new religion.”⁵² In short, visions of the Bolshevik Revolution as premodern and Asian were to cease, but this was far from the final word on the matter. Just two years later, the director Vsevolod Pudovkin released his own “phantom hordes” to the world in his stunning film The Heir of Genghis Khan (1928, released in English as Storm Over Asia). Set in Mongolia during the Russian Civil War, it shows British expeditionary forces capturing what they believe to be Genghis Khan’s heir, but their efforts to turn this modest hunter into a puppet ruler end with him tearing down their headquarters with his bare hands, riding on horseback with sword raised, and leading a horde that literally blows the British across the steppe. “O, my people, rise in your ancient strength and free yourselves!” read the film’s final intertitles. Lunacharsky’s declaration notwithstanding, notions of the Bolshevik Revolution as an Asian revolution persisted.⁵³

He does so through his description of the “new optics” that he gained in Moscow, which informed his subsequent theories of both revolution and avant-gardism. Moscow bombarded him with “vivid perceptions” that resulted in part from the astounding “degree to which the exotic surges forth from the city.”⁵⁵ He later came to associate these perceptions with surrealism, recalling near the start of his 1929 essay on the group surrounding André Breton,

What I am suggesting here is that Benjamin’s Soviet stay informed his subsequent views on surrealism—a visit to Moscow in 1926 as akin to reading Breton or smoking hashish. These experiences opened dreamlike, unexpected ways of seeing, though Moscow was unique in that the source of this disorientation was the city itself. This becomes more evident by turning from Benjamin’s experience of space there to his experience of time. According to him, his Moscow writings concentrate “less on visual than on rhythmic experience, an experience in which an archaic Russian tempo blends into a whole with the new rhythms of the Revolution.”⁵⁹ He elaborates on this blend in his essay “Moscow,” where for the locals “minutes are a cheap liquor of which they can never get enough…they are tipsy with time.” In the face of nothing turning out as planned, he concludes that, in his use of time, “the Russian will remain ‘Asiatic’ longest of all.”⁶⁰ Thus, here again we find an association between Russia and Asia, though at first glance this is merely a Westerner’s complaint about Slavic “backwardness”—bafflement that the revolution could have unfolded here.

Similar to Trotsky, though, Benjamin was able to transform this seeming deficiency into a virtue. In Moscow he was able to rethink the movement of time, to stretch and imbibe minutes so that time itself became an intoxicant. The resulting uncertainty—for instance, whether the hotel would deliver his morning wake-up knock (presumably he kept his door closed)—became a source of possibility:

Here we find more echoes of Tatlin, Khlebnikov, Blok, and McKay, but with this difference: Benjamin uses such descriptions explicitly to articulate new understandings of both revolution and the avant-garde. The key is this use of seichas, which, as he indicates, when spoken can be translated as “at once,” though the literal breakdown of this common word—typically translated simply as “now”—is “this-hour” or “this-moment” (seichas). What I would like to suggest is that the Russian seichas anticipates what Benjamin would call now-time (Jetztzeit) in his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” As others have elaborated, now-time is precisely that sense of time not functioning as expected—“a random time, open at any moment to the unforeseeable irruption of the new.” This erratic time (an eccentric cousin to “combined and uneven development”) interrupts chronology through “a mediation between different temporalities within the present.” More specifically, “through the prism of the historical present” now-time seeks to capture “the presence of history as a whole”—a history awaiting revolutionary redemption.⁶³

In his 1940 theses, Benjamin illustrates now-time through Robespierre’s embrace of ancient Rome, the fact that “the French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.”⁶⁴ We can add to this his accounts of Asiatic Russians and Samoyed conductresses—these instances of seichas that take on revolutionary significance when recast as Jetztzeit. Through this Benjaminian lens, they become constellations of past and present that serve to shatter the continuum of history, or as he famously calls it, “homogeneous, empty time.”⁶⁵

Benjamin’s 1929 “Surrealism” piece similarly decouples the avant-garde from progress. In Peter Osborne’s words, one of the essay’s achievements is its “reintroduction of historical time into the conceptualization of Surrealist experience”—its emphasis on temporal as well as spatial estrangement.⁶⁶ Specifically, Benjamin praises Breton as “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.” According to Benjamin, embedded in such relics are destitution, thwarted desires, and, thus, revolutionary nihilism. In short, he praises surrealism for its disruptive invocations of the past—more specifically, its ability to substitute “a political for a historical view of the past”—which for him is what makes this branch of the avant-garde revolutionary.⁶⁷ However, Benjamin elaborates on this only much later (in the 1940 theses as well as in “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century”) through his notion of the “dialectical image,” which he defines as “images in the collective consciousness in which the new and the old are intermingled,” and more cryptically as “the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.” While we can label as surreal any image that bridges distant realities, Benjamin’s dialectical image is more ambitious, running across “the whole horizon of the past” like “ball lightning” in order to arrest historical progress, in order to capture “now-time”:

One vivid illustration of this coupling is Benjamin’s juxtaposition of the modern bomber plane with Leonardo da Vinci’s dream of airplanes that would deliver mountain snow onto sweltering cities in the summer. That is, the dialectical image refers not to an actual image but to a particular way of seeing or reading—one able to detect past, thwarted utopias in “a thousand configurations” of present-day life, from Parisian arcades to Samoyed conductresses to wooden toys. The dialectical image reveals in these fragments of the everyday traces of a “communistic society at the dawn of history.” It captures history’s disappointments but also the unfulfilled hopes that persist alongside them—dreams, in Michael Löwy’s words, of a “lost prehistoric paradise.”⁶⁹

Several have noted the avant-gardist underpinnings of Benjamin’s dialectical image—its montagelike juxtaposition of present and past, its reliance on “discontinuous multiplicity,” its experimental effort to uncover “what is ‘truly new’ in the present.”⁷⁰ At this point, though, it is necessary to present a more precise definition of avant-garde vis-à-vis Jetztzeit and the dialectical image. Of course, the most prominent definitions of this term turn on the alienation of artists (as Renato Poggioli has it), the tearing down of art institutions (Peter Bürger), and the dismantling of high-low divides (Andreas Huyssen). However, in his discussion of Benjamin, Osborne adds another definition that complements rather than replaces those that went before and that here proves useful: the avant-garde as “that which, in the flash of the dialectical image, disrupts the linear time-consciousness of progress in such a way as to enable us, like the child, to ‘discover the new anew’ and, along with it, the possibility of a better future.”⁷¹ In short, Osborne defines avant-gardism as the abandonment of empirical history, that is, of the chronological succession from old to new. In its place, this avant-gardism reimagines the movement of time, indeed, imagines the cessation of time—or, at the very least, keeps alive memories of those past, thwarted utopias for the sake of future redemption. This requires opening notions of the avant-garde to both new and old, specifically to premodern, nonlinear understandings of time—as Susan Buck-Morss puts it, the “ur-old theological myth of worldly utopia as the origin and goal of history.” Thus, Osborne’s connection of dialectical image and avant-garde enables us to reconcile the latter to the archaic and traditional.⁷²

Bringing this back to Moscow, Benjamin’s encounter with the Tibetan lamas now assumes added significance. Not only is this a surreal encounter, but with the lamas’ refusal of closed doors, it also hints at that “communistic society at the dawn of history” later referenced by him. Here we find a constellation of past and present—older forms of communism in the heart of twentieth-century communism. (Indeed, Benjamin notes in his diary the lamas’ “red and yellow coats,” the same colors as the Soviet flag.⁷³) We can apply a similar reading to McKay’s “Moscow.” Even though its sonnet form is not discernibly experimental, it can still be considered avant-gardist in Osborne’s sense of the term. Blurring Byzantine hues with communist red, the poem has the effect of undercutting empirical history; and indeed, from this perspective, McKay’s traditional use of form only accentuates the poem’s combination of archaic legend and socialist revolution. Similar readings can be applied to Blok’s “Scythians,” Khlebnikov’s “Indo-Russian Union,” and of course Tatlin’s Tower. Though hailing from distinct artistic traditions (Russian symbolism, futurism, and constructivism, respectively), each of these examples constellate past and present so as to estrange but also advance the project of world revolution. In short, Benjamin’s dialectical image enables us (with Osborne’s help) to group these very different figures into a shared avant-garde. Oriented toward both future and past, this was an avant-garde that was open to cultural difference—indeed, one in which “Asiatic” Russians and Tibetan lamas could play leading roles.

It would be premature to call this shared avant-garde the ethnic avant-garde. Rather, the point so far has been to lay out the notions of revolution and avant-gardism undergirding this grouping. The task now is to unpack the accompanying notion of the ethnic, which up to this point I have vaguely associated with “oppressed nations” and premodern cultures. The challenge now is to arrive at a more precise understanding of this term so as to better fuse it with the avant-garde. More specifically, I would like to suggest that, just as it is possible to rethink notions of avant-gardism via the Soviet Union, the same can be done for ethnicity.

As noted, a growing number of scholars—predominantly Americanists—have shown how Moscow’s promises of equality appealed to a veritable who’s who of black activists and intellectuals, including McKay, Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Largely missing from this work, however, has been an emphasis on the jarring and, I think, productive gaps between American and Soviet conceptualizations of difference. In this second part of the introduction, I highlight these gaps in order to arrive at a new, defamiliarized understanding of ethnicity—one also oriented toward both past and future and therefore well suited to the avant-gardism spelled out in the preceding. Making this claim requires a detour from avant-gardist discourses to those of race, ethnicity, and nationality. To be sure, there is historical overlap among these discourses, beginning with the fact that the now ubiquitous term “ethnic” and the “ethnicity paradigm” came into formation in the early decades of the twentieth century, that is, at roughly the same time that the likes of Tatlin and Benjamin sought new ways of seeing. However, the ethnicity paradigm emerged in a very different place, namely, the United States, which explains this book’s pairing of the U.S. and the USSR. Through much of the twentieth century, these vast, diverse countries laid competing claims to global preeminence by touting domestic inclusion and assailed each other’s failures to live up to stated ideals.⁷⁴ From the perspective of the post–Cold War present, American civil rights and “multiculturalism” apparently prevailed over Soviet nationalities policy and “multinationalness” (mnogonatsional’nost’). Nonetheless, Soviet approaches to countering racism still provide useful, estranging counterpoints to the now-globalized discourse of American ethnicity.

Simply because it does seem so familiar today, my starting point is ethnicity. During the interwar years, it remained a malleable and open-ended concept, emerging from the efforts of social scientists to unseat the notion that biological racial divides were intractable and that races could be ranked as superior or inferior. Ethnicity instead emphasized cultural differences that were socially rather than biologically acquired. Beyond this antiracialist stance, however, there was much room for variance. The anthropologist Franz Boas, for instance, valorized distinct cultures and sought to appreciate them on their own terms. Against the linear evolutionist notion that some were “advanced” and others “backward,” he instead dispersed different groups spatially in a simultaneous present that allowed for cultural intermixture. However, several have noted a latent assimilationism in his work, with Johannes Fabian charging Boas’s synchronic, culturalist emphasis with simply ignoring rather than remedying the problem of Western anthropology’s “denial of coevalness.”⁷⁵ The sociologist Robert Park, on the other hand, emphasized the ability of cultures to adapt and transform, especially in urban settings, and viewed assimilation as a means of social progress. His assimilationism, in contrast to Boas’s, was overt, though several have noted a latent nostalgia for cultures lost in the process.⁷⁶ Thus, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have noted, from its earliest articulations in the 1920s and 1930s, the American ethnicity paradigm has been marked by tensions between pluralism and assimilationism, or what Rey Chow has more recently called particularistic practices and universalist aspirations. Chow describes this tension in terms of time: even today, in the eyes of the dominant society, the ethnic Other is confined to “an earlier (temporally arcane) condition of humanity” but also cast as “politically avant-garde” and “future-oriented, always looking ahead to the time when the United States will have fully realized its universal ideals.”⁷⁷

Chow’s use of “avant-garde” emphasizes the term’s typical, forward-looking connotation, something I have complicated through the dialectical image and Benjamin in Moscow. However, she also underscores the different temporalities of ethnicity, which here gestures toward both descent-based identities and forward-looking politics, to both past and future. This suggests that one way to link ethnicity and avant-gardism (as framed in the preceding) would be to emphasize their similarly variegated temporalities. However, for Chow this aspect of ethnicity is not something to celebrate but an expression of its contradictory, irrational nature. Her project is to correct this by situating ethnicity vis-à-vis class in a globalized present. Thus, in order to link ethnicity and avant-gardism during the interwar years, I find it necessary to follow a different route, to turn away from American discourses of ethnicity and to channel this term through Moscow, just as I did with the avant-garde. More specifically, in the following I juxtapose the American ethnicity paradigm with its Soviet analogue—Soviet nationalities policy.

If American ethnicity was wrought by tensions between pluralism and assimilationism, the particular and universal, the past and future, what I would like to suggest is that the Soviet concept of nationality allowed for, if not resolved, these tensions. For American minorities drawn to the USSR, this concept made it possible to look both backward and forward—to embrace descent-based particularism in a way that advanced universal equality. This is evident, for instance, in Richard Wright’s much-cited encounter with the writings of Joseph Stalin, himself a minority (Georgian) who served as the Bolsheviks’ first commissar for nationalities affairs. In Chicago of the early 1930s, Stalin’s essays on the national and colonial question prompted Wright’s conversion to communism, but also, in William Maxwell’s words, his “movement from fear to relative faith on the subject of African-American folk culture.”⁷⁸ That is, whereas Wright—under Park’s influence—had previously disdained both this culture and his own southern roots, Stalin’s writings prompted a reconsideration. As he recalls in a 1944 essay,

I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to listen to the stammering dialects of people oppressed for centuries by the tsars. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meaning and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living. And I had exclaimed to myself how different this was from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America.⁷⁹

I subsequently highlight the shortcomings of Soviet nationalities policy, but the point for now is that, in the 1920s and 1930s, it seemed to provide an alternative to American approaches to difference—and, in particular, to Boas’s latent and Park’s overt assimilationism. This becomes more evident by turning to another of the architects of the ethnicity paradigm, the philosopher Horace Kallen, who in 1927 did make the “magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, named it one of two “frontiers of hope” for all Jewish people (the other being Palestine), and today is regarded as a forefather of late twentieth-century liberal multiculturalism.⁸¹ Hailing from a German Jewish immigrant family, Kallen is now best known for coining the term “cultural pluralism,” which has come to be associated with the antiassimilationist strand of the ethnicity paradigm. What I would like to suggest is that the Soviet concept of nationalities was quite compatible with this strand, that is, compatible with Kallen’s notion of pluralism. This becomes evident by juxtaposing two seminal texts that were written just two years apart but have not yet been discussed together: Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” (1915) and Joseph Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question” (1913). The point here is not influence but defamiliarization. Placing into dialogue the fathers of American cultural pluralism and Soviet nationalities policy reopens a historical moment in which concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationality remained unformed and contingent.

Accordingly, the thrust of both essays is their common effort to work through terms that, in the second decade of the twentieth century, were still up for grabs. Pronouncing the failure of Anglo-Saxon “Americanization” in the face of “primary ethnic differences,” the Kallen essay claimed that what appeared to be assimilation was actually the first step toward “dissimilation”: new immigrants learned English in order to attain economic independence, but once this was achieved, the “solitary spiritual unit” of each “ethnic group” expressed itself through “arts, life, and ideals”:

In short, one could become both more American and more ethnic, though as many commentators have noted, this vision relied on a latent racialist logic that willfully ignored blacks. Put differently, Kallen failed to disentangle his vision of culture from race,⁸³ a failure that is reflected in his inconsistent use of terms. As seen in this passage, he presented “ethnic” and “national” as synonyms, and elsewhere used “national group” in place of “ethnic group” (218). He also evidently linked “nation” to a combination of blood and culture, and in the same essay coined the term “natio” to identify each group’s irreducible kernel—the result, he wrote, of “biological processes” and man’s “psychophysical inheritance” (219, 220). According to Kallen, “external” factors, such as economic and political ties, only masked the “internal” constant of the “natio,” expressed in “inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms,” that is, particular cultures and languages. In response, America should strive to be a “symphony of civilization” that combined “harmony and dissonances and discords” into “an orchestration of mankind” (220).

More than his pseudoscientific essentialism, Kallen’s wavering between “ethnic” and “national” would have irked Stalin, whose 1913 essay sought precisely to distinguish and champion the latter term. Published when the Bolsheviks were just a branch of the larger European left and directed against an Austrian social democrat’s endorsement of “cultural-national autonomy,” the essay defined the nation as a stable, historically constituted community of people with a shared (1) language, (2) territory, (3) economic life, and (4) “psychical disposition, manifested in a community of culture.”⁸⁴ According to him, neither a “tribe” nor a “race” (which he regarded as premodern groupings) could fulfill all four criteria, the most important being territory. Each nation (a modern grouping) was to be granted its own fixed territory, although he added that various nations should be required to coexist within larger autonomous regions—that is, “such crystallized units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, etc.,” each with its own “national minorities.” Coexistence within a single region would spur the gradual displacement of national by class divisions. However, Stalin’s emphasis on territory did not mean a complete dismissal of culture and “psychical disposition”: when laying out this part of his definition, he noted that while “national character” changed with the “conditions of life,” nonetheless “it exists at every given moment, it leaves its impress on the physiognomy of the nation” (6). Thus, Stalin imparted to each nation a fixed inner essence—or “ethnos,” as Soviet ethnographers later called it.⁸⁵

In short, Kallen and Stalin both allowed for the fixedness of descent-based identities (“natio” and “ethnos,” respectively), and both stressed the persistence of language. On the other hand, as noted, Kallen downplayed the importance of “economic life,” though interestingly, in a 1924 republication of “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” he subtly revised his earlier dismissal of class vis-à-vis “natio.”⁸⁶ This leaves the fourth and most important part of Stalin’s definition, territory, which anticipated the Soviet Union’s division (and ultimate dissolution) into national republics (e.g., Russia, Uzbekistan, Armenia) and, within each republic, smaller “national minority” regions (e.g., Chechnya, Tatarstan). Within these territories, members of the titular nationality (e.g., the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan) were given preferential treatment in government hiring and university admissions—a policy known as nativization (korenizatsiia) and described by one historian as a precursor to U.S. affirmative action.⁸⁷ Stalin’s emphasis on territory also anticipated the Comintern’s 1928 and 1930 calls for an autonomous African American republic stretching from Maryland to Arkansas—the so-called Black Belt, eerily similar in shape to Uzbekistan.⁸⁸ Remembered today mostly as a historical oddity, this assertion that African Americans constituted a Stalinist “nationality” might seem to emphasize the gulf separating American and Soviet conceptualizations of difference. However, Kallen’s pluralist vision also emphasized territory, situating different groups geographically—the Irish in Massachusetts and New York, the Germans in Wisconsin, the Scandinavians in Minnesota. According to him, each group settled not in small, diverse units but in “a series of stripes or layers,” which made it possible to delineate discrete ethnic territories in both rural and urban settings (192).

To be sure, Kallen did not then conclude that each American ethnicity should be granted its own region or republic. Nonetheless, when he visited the USSR in 1927, he immediately seized on the importance of territory, particularly for Soviet Jews. According to him, an autonomous region would enable them to cease being “an alien minority among suspicious neighbors” and to instead become farmers—or as Slezkine has since put it, to transform from rootless Mercurians to rooted Apollonians.⁸⁹ In Kallen’s words, the granting of territory would mark the emergence of a Soviet “Promised Land” marrying communism and Zionism:

The rather sensational conclusion to be drawn from Kallen’s travelogue is that the founder of American cultural pluralism himself looked to Stalinist nationalities policy as a positive model. With their four-part definition of the nation and emphasis on territorial autonomy, the Bolsheviks seemed to him well suited to the task of reconciling universalism and particularism—of making Soviet Jews both more Soviet and more Jewish. (The fact that Jews were proportionally overrepresented among the Bolsheviks’ ranks, unmentioned by Kallen, may have lent credence to this conclusion.⁹⁰) Accordingly, historian Francine Hirsch has helpfully described Soviet nationalities policy as promoting “double assimilation”: “the assimilation of a diverse population into nationality categories and, simultaneously, the assimilation of those nationally categorized groups into the Soviet state and society.”⁹¹ Thus, the Soviets could have their cake and eat it too: maintain fixed national identities within a melting-pot-style whole.

As noted, the official cultural expression of this balance was “national in form, socialist in culture.” This was the rigid prescription that, for instance, plays staged in Moscow be translated into Uzbek and adorned with “Asiatic colouring”—as a disappointed Langston Hughes encountered during his 1932 stay in Tashkent. The state delineated and enshrined local languages, folk styles, and literary forebears, but in a programmatic, top-down manner that paralyzed them in time.⁹² More pressingly, however, Wright, Kallen, and the many other foreigners drawn to Soviet nationalities policy missed (at least initially) the fact that “double assimilation” could be both “high-minded and vicious”—could advance both minority uplift and state terror. Indeed, as Hirsch has shown, the efforts of Soviet linguists, ethnographers, and census takers to demarcate local identities came to assist the state in the management and punishment of peoples—for example, in the late 1930s, the mass deportations of entire nationalities deemed enemy or “unreliable.”⁹³ This suggests that Wright and Kallen were quite simply wrong about the Soviet Union. Indeed, when Moscow finally did establish a Jewish Autonomous Region in 1934 (with considerable Jewish American backing), it literally chose a frontier: a remote stretch of land in the Russian Far East that failed to draw many permanent settlers. As an aside, those who did make the trek eastward met a group that would soon be sent westward—Korean farmers who had migrated to the same region from the late nineteenth century onward, had benefited from Soviet-sponsored cultural institutions, and had championed the Comintern’s stance against Japanese imperialism. In 1937 Stalin deported them en masse to Central Asia, fearing they might serve as Japanese spies.⁹⁴

Any effort to revisit Soviet nationalities policy—including its relevance for American ethnicity—must confront such contradictions head-on. While “double assimilation” might have provided an alternative to the ethnicity paradigm’s universalism-particularism tension, this came at the cost of a new, more troubling set of tensions—between, on the one hand, minority uplift and world revolution and, on the other, state terror and Stalinist autarchy. However, just as it was possible both to connect and distinguish the Comintern and avant-garde, the same can be done with Moscow’s nationalities policy vis-à-vis a distinctly Russian and Soviet way of seeing the Other. More specifically, despite the betrayals and disappointments of this policy, it is possible to distill from it a certain practice of Soviet ethnography that is fascinating if not quite redeemable, that highlights anew a productive gap between the USSR and the West, and that brings this all back to Tatlin’s Tower and the avant-garde.

The key here is, in Slezkine’s words, a “linguist, archaeologist, historian, folklorist, and ethnographer” named Nikolai Marr—one of the most prominent and powerful Soviet academics of the 1920s and 1930s.⁹⁵ This is despite the fact that his eccentric theories have long been discredited, and indeed, as Slezkine, Clark, and others have shown, it might be best to characterize Marr more as a poet or fantasist than a scholar. Hailing from Georgia and dismayed by the dearth of linguistic research on the Georgian language, he claimed to discover a new, ancient family of languages that happened to originate in Georgia and that found its purest contemporary manifestations in Georgian and Armenian. This “Japhetic” language—named after the biblical Noah’s third son (according to legend, the ancestor of Georgian kings)—was meant to unseat Western linguistics and its emphasis on Indo-European languages. Over time, the scope of the theory grew bolder and broader: Marr proceeded to discover Japhetic traces in all the languages of the world, from Native American tongues to Chinese, and asserted the existence of a previously unknown Japhetic civilization that, in ancient times, spanned from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caucasus to Asia Minor. As Marr himself suggested in 1923, this unified civilization, which superseded racial, ethnic, and national divides, was comparable to that which culminated in the Tower of Babel. The biblical tale was, in his words, “the tale of Japhetic reality,” though according to him, the Japhetic civilization was scattered not by the hand of God but by Indo-European invaders—the forebears of contemporary Western Europeans, whom he never failed to condemn as oppressors and imperialists.⁹⁶ This was “provincializing Europe” par excellence: in response to the perceived slighting of Georgia by the West, Marr claimed the Caucasus as the seat of a world civilization that preceded Indo-European “barbarism.”⁹⁷

If Marr had what we would now call a subaltern perspective, one of its distinguishing features was the expectation that Soviet power would restore this lost civilization—would restore the Babel legend’s single divine language. Already a respected senior academic by 1917, after the revolution his views received official endorsement and weighed heavily on all scholarly efforts to think about minority languages and cultures. His monumental success resulted from his ability to align his theories with the new political landscape: in the 1920s he wedded his Japhetic theory to a crude Marxist evolutionism positing that languages were mere superstructure, which meant that class and economic base determined language more than race, ethnicity, or nationality. By this logic, it was because of economic development that the earliest sounds enunciated by primitive man—which Marr identified in 1926 as sal, ber, yon, and rosh—had evolved into more complicated languages and would continue evolving through intermixture. Thus, languages did not belong to discrete families but followed a set path determined by economic stages, though with each intermixture, the original sounds as well as elements from every language would remain intact. This evolutionary process would continue until the final economic stage, socialism, was achieved, and the result would be a new world language based, in his words, “on the final accomplishments of manual and sound languages—a new and unified language wherein supreme beauty will merge with the highest development of mind.”⁹⁸ Nationalities and “ethnic cultures”—also mere superstructure according to Marr—would likewise give rise to a unified humanity, akin to the lost civilization posited by his Japhetic theory (rebranded in the late 1920s as his “New Theory of Language”), which in turn evoked the Book of Genesis.⁹⁹

For my purposes, the most salient aspect of “Marrism” is its alignment with the Tower of Babel legend, which provides an unexpected link between Marr and Tatlin. Both can be seen as updating the legend; both incorporated it into their eccentric visions of the socialist world to come. However, Marr underscored more explicitly than Tatlin—and more vividly than his fellow Georgian Stalin—the notion that even in this future world, each language and culture from the past would be preserved. Here was a diachronism that posited the existence of “backward” and “advanced” peoples (against Boas’s synchronic emphasis) but vehemently rejected placing them in any hierarchical relationship (against the biological racism often associated with such evolutionist schemes).¹⁰⁰ Indeed, in his pursuit of both socialist unity and Japhetic forebears, Marr insisted that one could be both “backward” and “advanced” simultaneously: a single people could encompass within it “every epoch of the cultural history of mankind, including even our own modernity.”¹⁰¹ In line with Benjamin’s constellations of past and future, Marr advanced a class-based evolutionism built on premodern ruins. That is, he situated all peoples in a class-based evolutionary track that paradoxically remained distinct from notions of linear progress—an evolutionism at odds with homogeneous, empty time. Accordingly, Marr was a leading promoter of one of the more bizarre (and enduring) practices of Soviet nationalities policy—the systematic assignment of ancient cultural forebears to each people.¹⁰²

To be sure, this counterintuitive, contradictory evolutionism may have been pure fantasy, dreamed up by Marr to serve various professional and political needs. And while Marr and Tatlin may have conveyed similarly iconoclastic takes on time and history, it is important to note that while Tatlin’s Tower never got off the ground, Marr’s theories enjoyed official state sanction from the 1920s through the 1940s. Until his death in 1934, Marr himself prominently served on several key commissions and institutions that both informed and were informed by Soviet nationalities policy. His close association with the regime, coupled with the professional and physical harm that befell his detractors, has cast a long shadow on his legacy.¹⁰³ However, his (again, roundly discredited) theories did bear some salvageable fruit in the form of an ethnographic practice that emphasized empathy and close collaboration—a stripping away of the divide between scholar and subject. Marr’s goal was to serve the periphery, to show, in Vera Tolz’s words, that minorities “were not peoples outside history but central to understanding the origins of European civilization and key players in its development.”¹⁰⁴ As Tolz has shown in her recent study of Russian-turned-Soviet Orientologists (including Marr), the result was a commitment to valorizing and preserving minority cultures as well as to treating local informants as equals. This group of scholars criticized their Western colleagues’ complicity with imperialism and view of Asian religions as text-bound and static. In a departure from Western anthropology’s “denial of coevalness,” these Soviet scholars “denied altogether the essential differences between the traditions of Europe and the ‘East’”—for instance, asserting Buddhism and Islam’s compatibility with Marxism and modernity. They embraced the Asian Other but in ways that avoided the pitfalls of Western Orientalism; and indeed, Tolz has suggested that Edward Said’s very notion of Orientalism owes an indirect intellectual debt to Soviet Orientology.¹⁰⁵

Through this turn to Soviet nationalities policy and then to Marr and his colleagues, we have ventured a long way from American ethnicity. As outlined here, in contrast to the then still-emergent ethnicity paradigm, Soviet approaches to difference in the 1920s and 1930s made it hypothetically possible for all nationalities to evolve into a single socialist people but remain both spatially and temporally dispersed. Through Moscow’s nationalities policy, one could be rooted on a clearly defined plot of land (e.g., Uzbekistan, the Black Belt) and simultaneously reconcile past and future, tradition and socialism. The writings of Nikolai Marr pushed this further, imagining difference in such a way that shattered received notions of time and history, combining visions of ancient past and liberated future. This expansive approach to time should ring a familiar bell given its resonance with the modernists and avant-gardists discussed earlier in this introduction—for example, the neoprimitivists’ identification with Asia and the notion of the Bolshevik Revolution as Asian. What this points to is a convergence of avant-gardism and ethnography—bound by estranging yet empathetic views of the Other and the sundering of homogeneous, empty time. Indeed, Benjamin himself was drawn to what he called Marr’s “generally rather strange ideas,” which he saw as invalidating “the concept of race, and indeed of peoples, in favor of a history of language based on the movements of classes”—but always with an eye toward the past: Benjamin sought to use Marr and other leftist linguists to unlock the “ancient truth” of language’s “inherently expressive character, its physiognomic powers,” the goal being to articulate a new, noncapitalist conviviality.¹⁰⁶ Accordingly, in the late 1920s, Marr was in a study group with Sergei Eisenstein and others, pursuing such questions as “the survival of primitive expressive forms in our languages of today.” Likewise, as Clark points out, Marr himself frequently foregrounded the Scythians in his work at “a time when Scythianism was a dominant literary movement in the Soviet Union”—a movement that included, of course, Aleksandr Blok, who was an avid reader of Russian Orientology. And, as one more instance of Marrism converging with the avant-garde, there are clear affinities between his theories of a unified language and futurist zaum poetry.¹⁰⁷ Marr’s four original, prelogical sounds (sal, ber, yon, rosh) themselves seem to echo zaum (e.g., Alexei Kruchenykh’s famous “Dyr bul shchyl” from 1913).

Arguably, these iconoclastic ways of seeing simply could not hold. As Buck-Morss has suggested, the Bolshevik regime ultimately had little use for the avant-garde’s irruptive temporality—useful for revolution, but less so for state building—and in 1934 enshrined socialist realism as official dogma.¹⁰⁸ Through the 1930s, linguists and ethnographers allied to Marr suffered a similar fall from state-sanctioned grace, and in 1950 Stalin himself explicitly rejected Marr’s “Promethean linguistics” in favor of more conventional understandings of language and identity.¹⁰⁹ It thus seems fitting to look to Tatlin’s Tower not just as the conceptual scaffolding but also as an emblem for the ethnic avant-garde. Because the tower was never realized, it today evokes the fleeting aspiration that artistic experimentation could advance in harmony with revolutionary politics. Indeed, there were some who claimed that the tower could never have been built, that it—like Marr’s theories—was unsound. Likewise the ethnic avant-garde as a historical formation was momentary and stunted, but as will be seen, it persisted (and persists) as a utopian aspiration long after the interwar years.

To varying extents, each of the chapters draws from the tower in order to illustrate different aspects of the ethnic avant-garde. Chapter 1 takes as a starting point the tower’s likeness to the Tower of Babel—the ethnic avant-garde as the joining of languages. The case in point here is the futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky’s distinctive poetic form: Soviet critics believed that his fragmented, staircase lines (visually reminiscent of Tatlin’s Tower) and irregular rhymes and rhythms could incorporate minority voices without sacrificing their particularities. The chapter tests this potential by following Mayakovsky on his 1925 visit to the United States via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote two Russian-language poems depicting Havana’s Afro-Cuban community. Langston Hughes later translated these poems in Moscow in 1933, discarding Mayakovsky’s signature form and, in doing so, throwing into question the futurist’s ability to speak for the Other. However, by highlighting the gaps separating Russian and English, English and Spanish, Hughes can also be seen as realizing Mayakovsky’s efforts to cross yet maintain linguistic distinctions. Drawing from various theories of translation, I argue that the two poets are best seen as collaborators in what Walter Benjamin called the task of the translator—namely, the integration of “many tongues into one true language” without sacrificing “the freedom of linguistic flux.”

Chapter 2 turns from language and translation to a futurist technique known as factography, another binding agent for the ethnic avant-garde. In line with Tatlin’s Tower, this technique sought to bring art into life, but it did so by turning from iconoclasm to the “precise fixation of facts.” However, factography understood facts as the result of process rather than reflection, and this left room for experimentation and estrangement—facts as emerging from fragments, lost details, and limited points of view. This self-critical open-endedness allowed for innovative representations of workers, peasants, and Chinese people—the subjects of choice for lead factographer Sergei Tret’iakov. The case study here is Tret’iakov’s play Roar China, an indictment of Western imperialism and exoticism in 1920s China. Drawing from actual events, it was one of the most successful and well-traveled works of its time—leaving a lasting imprint on international Popular Front culture and, in 1930, becoming the first major Broadway production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast. I argue that a close examination of the play, however, reveals factography’s contradictions: for example, despite Tret’iakov’s intent to free China from “backwardness,” when writing the script he prescribed an antiquated, naturalistic style for the actors in Chinese roles. In New York, however, the Asian American actors refused this instruction. Through a combination of lack of experience and (South Brooklyn) accented English, these actors exceeded the roles assigned to them, proving the most vivid and alienating aspect of the performance—and thus achieving the disruptive aims of factography.

While chapters 1 and 2 foreground the utopian promise of the ethnic avant-garde, chapters 3 and 4 reveal how and why we have come to forget this grouping—comprising never-completed projects like Tatlin’s Tower and leaving many bodies in its wake. However, both chapters also emphasize how ethnic avant-gardism carried over into the Cold War years, embedded in dominant discourses on literature and identity. Chapter 3 tracks the ethnic avant-garde’s recalibration into the language of cultural authenticity and inauthenticity. Authenticity typically points to the policing of cultural boundaries, the notion that understanding a community requires membership in that community. As such it undergirded a postwar turn away from the boundary-flouting ethnic avant-garde, but only at first glance. The chapter reveals that, in fact, the language of authenticity was perfectly legible to the interwar ethnic avant-garde—though this group embraced a very specific kind of authenticity, premised on anticapitalism rather than descent. One could be authentically black by resisting mass culture or, more precisely, the commercialization of black culture.

Chapter 3 traces these competing authenticities by trying to solve a puzzle: in 1956 Langston Hughes famously used his autobiography to dismiss a planned Soviet film about African American struggles titled Black and White, after one of Mayakovsky’s “Afro-Cuban” poems. Hughes had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 to serve as a script consultant, but according to his autobiography, the film was ultimately canceled owing to the Russian screenwriter’s “pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts.” In other words, the script was fatally inauthentic—an account I dispute through a discussion of the actual 1932 Russian-language script, which bore none of the wild inaccuracies described by Hughes. In a nod to factography, the Russian screenwriter insisted that it was based entirely on “real facts, borrowed from literary and newspaper sources,” and I show how this emphasis buttressed that other, anticapitalist authenticity. I then account for Hughes’s 1956 dismissal by arguing that his deployment of cultural authenticity enabled him to satisfy American anticommunism (i.e., by throwing into question Soviet outreach to blacks) while concealing the actual, cynical reason for the film’s cancellation (Moscow’s 1930s bid for U.S. diplomatic recognition). That is, he convinced the West that he was authentically black, and the East that he was authentically black and socialist—the latter proven by his steadfast refusal to condemn Moscow.

If chapter 3 shows Hughes masterfully navigating dueling authenticities, chapter 4 shows how notions of the authentic came to heighten the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union. The chapter marks the weaponizing of cultural authenticity: in the United States, the USSR came to be seen as hostile to both particularism and experimentation—the USSR as an inauthentic place, dominated by uniformity and didacticism; versus the United States as a place where authenticity could flourish, in the form of ethnic diversity and artistic innovation. In short, this final chapter traces how the ethnic avant-garde came to be overshadowed by familiar Cold War binaries. The focus here is on the New York Intellectuals’ articulation of a Jewish cultural authenticity that advanced liberal pluralism and opposed socialist internationalism. I show how this was partly in response to the emergence of Stalinist anti-Semitism after World War II, which was especially disillusioning given the leading roles that Jewish artists, writers, and thinkers played in interwar leftist culture. However, amid this turn, I find traces of a messianic Soviet Jewish avant-garde from the 1910s and 1920s—for instance, in Irving Howe’s embrace of the author Sholem Aleichem as someone able to bridge Jewish identity and revolutionary socialism. I argue that Howe used Sholem Aleichem to revive one fragment of the ethnic avant-garde, here again smuggled into postwar America.

The closing image of chapter 4 is Paul Robeson in Moscow in 1949 meeting with his close friend, the Soviet Jewish writer Itzik Feffer at the height of Stalinist anti-Semitism. Soviet officials tried to conceal Feffer’s imprisonment by sending him to Robeson’s bugged hotel room, but through notes and gestures, Feffer made clear that he would soon be executed. Such tragedies, present throughout the book, highlight the bloodstained passing of the ethnic avant-garde—bound, ultimately, not only by multiple temporalities and languages, the desire to bring art into life, and notions of the authentic versus inauthentic, but also by a shared confrontation with terror and disillusion. This final point binds the ethnic avant-garde to the rise-and-fall narratives typically applied to the Soviet avant-garde and the Soviet project as a whole—narratives that tend to culminate in oppression, collapse, and the triumph of global capital. The afterword unseats such schemes by tracing renewed, postwar iterations of the ethnic avant-garde, in particular the emergence of China as a new revolutionary center. Maoism expanded European Marxist discourse through its focus on local contexts and “the conscious transformation of everyday life”—the personal as political—which proved conducive to “identity politics” and to radical rearticulations of “cultural authenticity.” However, under Mao there was no Chinese equivalent to the Soviet avant-garde, and Beijing lacked the creative allure of interwar Moscow. What, then, became of the ethnic avant-garde? As I show through a discussion of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 2010 novel I Hotel, traces of it can still be found in contemporary minority writing. Focusing on cross-ethnic activism in the Bay Area of the 1970s, I Hotel traverses revolutionary circuits from Moscow to Beijing, Cuba to Vietnam, and also joins the postwar New Left to the interwar Old Left. While taking into account revolutionary failures and defeats, it resuscitates many of the features of the interwar ethnic avant-garde, adding to it a host of formal innovations as well as heightened emphases on local resistance and gender equality.

In short, this is no nostalgic celebration. While mining the ethnic avant-garde for new constellations of identity, art, and politics, the book provides a clear sense of its limitations and decline. Ultimately, though, I show how the group exceeds this rise-and-fall narrative—through fragments that survived the transition, and also through an enduring sense of hope coupled with failure, of revolutionary pathos, that still resonates around the world. What it all adds up to is a minority and Soviet-centered remapping of global modernism, one that advances the avant-gardist project of seeing the world anew. More immediately, it also provides the basis for new scholarly and creative communities in the present day—a reforged avant-gardism and internationalism bound by and learning from the ruins of the past.

Mil’ony—vas. Nas—t’my, i t’my, i t’my.	You are mere millions. While we are hordes, and hordes, and hordes.
Poprobuite, srazites’ s nami!	Try and fight with us!
Da, skify—my! Da, aziaty—my,	Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians,
S raskosymi i zhadnymi ochami!	With slanted and greedy eyes!

My liubim plot’—i vkus ee, i tsvet,	We love the flesh—its taste, and color,
I dushnyi, smertnyi ploti zapakh…	And the sultry, deathly scent of flesh…
Vinovny l’ my, kol’ khrustnet vash skelet	Are we to blame if we crush your skeleton
V tiazhelykh, nezhnykh nashikh lapakh?	In our heavy, tender paws?³⁹