The concept of historical sedimentation took on life in various early Soviet critical enterprises as a way of thinking about the relationship between “the old and the new.” Marx, of course, had written of capital as an accumulation of the life energy of the worker and of the commodity as “dead life,” gothic visions of the ongoing haunting of the present by the past.1 But the figure of sediment as historical accumulation had particular power in the Bolshevik cultural imaginary. Russia’s soil had long been understood as the repository of its history and identity, commonplaces of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation. One year after the Bolshevik Revolution, the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii wrote that historians should move below the surface to deeper layers, which were “not barren fossils, but fresh soil on which you can sow and reap.”2 Yet in the revolutionary society the Bolsheviks were building, this historical sediment was more often regarded as a symbol of its rigid past and its developmentally belated alterity; as Michael Kunichika notes, “The post-Revolutionary generation … discerned the obdurate persistence of the past everywhere in the landscape.”3 Language, culture, and everyday practices were widely understood to be shaped by archaic structures—the sedimented life of previous epochs that now threatened the revolutionary potential of the present.
In the Soviet social and human sciences, sedimentation was a common figure for talking about psychological, linguistic, and cultural processes before it became a commonplace in continental philosophy and critical theory, in the works of such figures as Husserl, Adorno, and Merleau-Ponty, or in historian Reinhart Koselleck’s model of the “sediments of time.” Soviet discourses of sedimentation owed an unacknowledged (and inadmissible) debt to Freud.4 The founder of Soviet cultural-historical psychology, Lev Vygotskii, wrote of the human character as a “sedimentation” (otlozhenie) of the unconscious life plan.5 The figure recurs in the work of the Bakhtin Circle, where historical residues have an unstable potential to either enrich or deaden new literary and cultural production. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, fixed systems of language are described as a “deadening sediment [omertvevshim otlozheniem] of the actual language formation” and the creative individual act of speech.6 The spontaneity-consciousness dialectic is mapped onto the Saussurian parole-langue paradigm, and special value is assigned to the “spontaneous” parole. In short, the utterance has the spontaneous force to break through linguistic sedimentation, to revolutionize and reshape its structures, in a dialectical process akin to what Merleau-Ponty would later call the “spontaneity-sedimentation dialectic.”7 In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concludes that although inherited folk images have accumulated “dead sediment,” they may also be “enriched” by this residue, a repository of the collective creativity of the masses that could not be tapped under previous political orders.8 The writer Konstantin Paustovsky gave a comical cast to these geological metaphors of the psyche in his novel The Black Island (Kara-Bugaz, 1932), where a mad geologist raves that extraction of coal, oil, slate, and ore will release the “psychic energy compressed in these strata…. Against limestone we will release the young and powerful energy of the alluvial strata.”9
Lev Trotsky took the more cynical view in Literature and Revolution, writing of the “barely noticeable sediment” of culture covering the millennial backwardness of Russia.10 Trotsky’s formula crystallized a common apprehension: under the thin deposit of Soviet modernity was a deep stratum of primitive culture that reached into geological time and could not be easily excavated. Even after the revolution, the lifeways and worldviews of the peasantry had remained largely unchanged: their primitive agricultural practices, the stagnancy of their political, cultural, and social life, and their folk-Orthodox cosmology. Furthermore, fears that Russia had been and always would be an oriental despotism, associated with forced labor and large public works projects, lay just under the surface of the Bolshevik myth of spontaneous mass mobilization. Sediment, soil, deposits, and fossils were among the recurring metaphors for the legacy that this revolutionary society inherited from the past—a past that like real material sediment could fertilize the ground for future growth, as Bakhtin or Kliuchevskii suggested, or threaten Soviet civilization. Bolshevik culture, then, was troubled by a deep paranoia about its foundations, a suspicion that these historical sediments and strata might undermine its utopian aspirations.
As the Bolsheviks endeavored to build socialism on this historical ground, Soviet culture of the first Five-Year Plan found the figures of sedimentation and excavation tropologically useful. The historical sediment that Trotsky and others had spoken of metaphorically was materialized in the very ground of the Soviet construction site, and the earth itself became a target of the violent assaults of Soviet modernization. This was dramatically visualized in the film Turksib (1929), directed by Viktor Turin from a screenplay by Viktor Shklovsky, where railroad workers wage an “attack against the stubborn earth!” (v ataku na upriamuiu zemliu!). In a long montage sequence we see workers use shovels, jackhammers, dynamite, and earth-moving machines in their multipronged assault on the “intractable, stubborn earth, well-fed over centuries” (nepokornaia, upriamaia, vekami upitannaia zemlia).11 Only after the laborious excavation of this Asian ground, culminating in dramatic shots of exploding earth, may the new railway proceed. Years before, in 1923, writer and land-reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov had called on the authorities to foster an “explosive culture” and make widespread use of dynamite in reshaping the land in the countryside, changing first its surface and, later, reconstructing it at deeper geological levels.12 Platonov, who had personally overseen land reclamation work (melioratsiia) in the Russian provinces in the 1920s, explicitly identified the tsarist past with an infertile landscape: “We will have true Bolshevik soil. Now we just have ravines, sand, and bare clay. That’s not ours—it’s tsarist territory!”13 In addition to dynamite, the tractor was another tool of the violent attack on the soil as the central site of the nation’s millennial backwardness. Rolling off the Fordist assembly line, the tractor materialized the assault on the sedimentations of history, the soil, and on the age-old habits of the peasantry. Construction and industrialized agriculture, then, constituted two lines of assault on the deposits of Russian history. Bolshevik soil needed to be situated in a new complex of meanings in this revolutionary society: materially transformed, but also symbolically reterritorialized.
Undoubtedly the most powerful Soviet literary work dramatizing excavation on the Soviet building site is Platonov’s subversive short novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan, 1930). The plot is simple: workers assemble to build a workers’ home, while collectively caring for the orphan Nastia, who becomes a mascot for their endeavors and a symbol of the communist future that they are building. The entire span of the novel is coterminous with the excavation of the foundation pit under the future workers’ home. As one worker, Chiklin, digs in the “soft topsoil” of the foundation pit, he thinks of himself as “annulling nature’s old order.”14 He visualizes the geological strata of the site as he violently swings first a shovel, then a more destructive pickaxe: “Beneath the soil for some reason there’s sandy loam. Then clay and after that limestone. The earth needs the touch of iron or it lies there like some fool of a woman.”15 Chiklin rains blows down upon these “dead places” in the pit, attempting to break up their static order.16 The engineer Prushevsky also thinks of the world as “nothing but dead building material.”17 He “pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it by those parts of it that he had already converted into structures.”18 But the workers never succeed in converting the foundation pit into a structure, and Prushevsky openly raises the question of whether this foundation can support socialist construction. He thinks about the layers of the pit as a materialization of the Marxist base and superstructure: “The walls of the excavation rose up on either side of him; he could see how the topsoil rested on a layer of clay and did not originate from it. Could a superstructure develop from any base?”19
Platonov’s story suggests that it cannot, and the engineer’s idea of the topsoil and clay as distinct layers echoes Trotsky’s remark that a thin sediment of culture rests on a primitive bedrock from which it does not originate. Nastia sickens and dies, and the grief-stricken Chiklin breaks into the storeroom for a spade, throws himself into the insuperable pit, and starts to dig. With the soil frozen, “Chiklin had to cut the earth into blocks and prise it out in whole dead pieces. Deeper down was softer and warmer; Chiklin plunged into the earth with slashing blows of his iron spade and soon disappeared, almost to his full height, into the quiet of its inner depths—but even there he was unable to exhaust himself, and so he began to batter the ground sideways, gaping open the earth’s cramped space.”20 The workers never successfully excavate the dead matter of the foundation pit; instead of building a workers’ home, they convert the site into a grave of socialism when they bury Nastia’s body within it. Platonov’s antiproduction novel was never published in his lifetime, but the tropes that he uses and the association of the construction site with the burial site were common to other cultural texts. The enraged violence that Chiklin and his fellow workers direct at the earth and the old order it represents was normalized under the slogans of the “war with nature” and “war with the primitive.” The Bolsheviks were launching an assault against their nation’s backwardness, located in the very ground on which they stood: the material and historical inertia of their foundations demanded violent action.
This chapter is about the joint cultural and geopoetic projects the Soviets undertook in the 1920s and 1930s to de-sedimentize the archaic cultural stratum that figures like Trotsky identified below the surface of socialist modernity. Soil symbolized the primitive ground under modern Soviet culture, but it was also the very material substance of the agrarian economy and peasant life. Efforts to change nature and create a new Soviet political subject were understood as a single, integrated project, grounded in a Marxist understanding of how human potential must be realized through the labor-mediated remaking of the natural world. Socialist labor provided the spontaneous vital energy to reshape the Soviet landscape—the inert material body of the nation—as well as the politically and psychologically inert Soviet subject. In this chapter, I consider how the Soviet construction site becomes the ground for the violent assault on historical sediment—material, political, and psychic. This chapter focuses on two novels that reflect on sedimentation and excavation as processual metaphors for the transformation of nature (through Soviet construction) and the reform of human nature (through perekovka, or political and psychological reform): Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Falls to the Caspian (Volga vpadaet v kaspiiskoe more, 1930), and Bruno Jasien´ski’s Man Changes His Skin (Chelovek meniaet kozhu, 1932–1933). Each of these texts depicts the construction of canals, one in the heart of “Asiatic” Russia and one on the Asian periphery. The juxtaposition of these two spaces is central to my analysis because despite the expected differences, the authors of these works associate the past and its sediments with Asian belated development.
Like the Russian nationalists discussed in chapter 1, many Soviet theorists and writers used soil as a figure for Russia’s departure from universal laws of historical development. Once again, this specificity inhered in culture (for which soil was a metaphor) and place (with soil as a synecdoche), but it also inhered in the material properties of actual soil, which set the conditions for agriculture and construction. The Soviet version of soil-based specificity departed from the Romantic nationalist version in its negative valuation. If Russia’s Asian soil exempted it from the common path of European nations, this was not the uniquely fertile basis for a great national destiny but an aberration that could only hold it back from Marxist development.21 Soil is troped as archaic and Asiatic, and the state that rules over it resembles an oriental despotism. The archaic soil under the construction is indeed a threat to its stability, but even more terrible are the monumental labor projects, depicted as “monoliths” that demand the sacrifice of human bodies.
What unites these works is the suggestion that the process of excavating this “Asian” soil threatens, paradoxically, to restore oriental despotism. These works speak to the fears that the Soviet state cannot reform its archaic historical ground because the violence it employs to de-sedimentize its past results in Asiatic restoration and further historical accumulation—namely of newly sacrificed bodies, buried in the ancient soil under the Soviet construction site.
In 1993 the journal USSR in Construction ran a photo-essay by Aleksandr Rodchenko depicting construction work at Belomor Canal. The caption of one dramatic two-page photomontage highlighted the construction’s violent assault on the sediments of history: “The attack on the land took place with spades and explosives, iron and fire!”22 The Belomor Canal was one of the most infamous and symbolic of Stalinist land-works projects—from 1931 to 1933, thousands of prisoners worked in brigades under the supervision of the Soviet security agency, the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU). Workers were so poorly supplied that it was said that they even excavated the earth for the 150-mile canal linking the Baltic and White Seas with their bare hands.23 Gorky commissioned a brigade of writers to travel to the newly completed canal in 1933, and the resulting document, the History of the Construction of the Belomor Canal (History) was an avant-garde work of collective authorship, produced to publicize an allegedly new and humane Soviet penal institution that would reform political and criminal convicts through labor projects—a process called perekovka, or reforging.24 The association of hydroengineering with state violence was firmly established when all Soviet hydroengineering projects, on the basis of the “success” of the Belomor Canal, were exclusively entrusted to Soviet security agencies: the OGPU, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).25 Aside from their symbolic or plot function, OGPU agents are mimetic fixtures in production novels of hydroengineering.
Such projects were declared not only to discipline nature but to reform workers as political subjects.26 The History of the Construction of the Belomor Canal opens with a paraphrase of Marx: “In changing nature, a person changes himself.” This model provided a framework for understanding the relationship between material and psychological de-sedimentation. The epigraph’s source, from the first book of Capital, identifies labor as “a process between man and Nature … by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] between himself and nature.” Crucially, Marx identifies man himself as “a force of nature” who attempts to control and make use of “the materials of nature” precisely by “set[ting] in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands…. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”27 The transformation of nature, then, is understood not only as an external act, but as an internal act that reforms the human subject. Marx proposes that humans should manage this exchange with nature “in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.”28 By disrupting the inertia of nature through land reclamation, hydroengineering, and other such projects, the state has the power to transform its psychologically sedimented human subjects. This was the ideological basis of the linkage between the Soviet transformation of nature and the reforging of human political subjects (perekovka).
Gorky picked up this thread just a few months after the Belomor Canal expedition, issuing an influential recommendation on literary themes to writers. He urged writers to show “the enormous value of physical labor, as it changes not only the form but also the quality of matter, as it masters elemental forces, creates a ‘second nature.’ ”29 Gorky defines this second nature as “socialist culture,” and identifies physical labor as its catalyst. The labor at Belomor was forced labor—only dialectical violence could disrupt the static and sedimented structures of nature and human nature. Gorky had already introduced the public to the project of reforming criminals at the earliest experimental labor camp in a series of sketches for the journal Our Accomplishments in 1929. Discussing the Bolshevo show camp outside Moscow, Gorky wrote of “the profound social and pedagogical value” of “reorganizing the criminal psyche.” Evgeny Dobrenko remarks on this link between the transformation of nature and the psyche: “The discourse of violence against nature grew into the discourse of violence against the human masses. Actually, Gorky’s favorite phrases—‘the transformation of nature’ and ‘reforging [perekovka] of human material’—are synonymous.”30
In the History of the Belomor Canal the treacherous sediments of nature and human nature are combined in the single image of quicksand (plyvun’). A practical threat to the stability of the entire canal construction, quicksand also provides a metaphor for the political unreliability of the labor force. The kulaks ordered to dig in this substance are called “human quicksand” (chelovecheskii plyvun’), and the national minorities (natsmeny) in the camp are likewise described as “loose and unsteady,” also evoking quicksand.31 Soviet construction, then, is destabilized both by archaic Russian elements (the kulaks) and by the natsmeny, who are coded as backwards, Asian, and superstitious (they drop their shovels and run in fear of the volatile substance they are digging in).32 They are the little brothers of the Great Russian nation, who, in a common trope, must leap “across a thousand years—from feudalism to socialism.”33 Just as quicksand must be stabilized on the construction site, the camp administration must shore up the instability of these archaic elements by “mixing” them with the “best quicksand workers [plyvushniki] from other brigades.”34 The national minorities and the class enemies in the camps are considered survivals of a deep past and are an unreliable foundation for the construction of the socialist canal. Like quicksand mixed with cement, they must be reinforced with more politically reliable laborers to complete the work.
While official discourse troped Asia as the site of backwardness, to some observers the violence involved in monumental state efforts to excavate historical ground and build a new Soviet land suggested that the Soviet state was paradoxically returning to its despotic “Asiatic” origins. No sooner did the Bolsheviks seize power than observers began to describe the new order as an “Asiatic restoration.” The main outlines of this critique may be seen in Osip Mandelstam’s 1923 essay “Humanism and the Present” (“Gumanizm i sovremennost”). Mandelstam warns of the “monumentality of the forms in the social architecture that is approaching,” noting that “there are epochs which contend that they care nothing for man, that he is to be used like brick or cement, that he is to be built with, not for.” Mandelstam’s description of the new social architecture of the Soviet state makes clear the threat of a restoration of oriental despotism with its monumental forms, and he compares it to the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires. He concludes, “If the social architecture of the future does not have as its basis a genuinely humanistic justification, it will crush man as Assyria and Babylonia crushed him.”35
Subsequent versions of this critique, particularly during and after the Stalin period, would place special emphasis on one particular form of “Asiatic” monumentalism revived by the Soviet state: the forced-labor excavation and construction of vast systems of canals for transport and irrigation.36 In the 1950s Karl Wittfogel made a political critique of the Soviet Union as a hydraulic despotism, drawing on Karl Marx’s own model of a distinctly Asian sociopolitical order, the Asiatic mode of production (AMP).37 Marx originally proposed that the climate and geography of Asia created conditions under which strong states consolidated around massive forced-labor irrigation projects—the defining feature of the AMP. The other features associated with this mode of production were state ownership of property, state management of water and natural resources, and a ruling class of bureaucrats. Discussions of the Asiatic mode of production in the early Soviet period, then, raised questions not only about the development of the Soviet Asian periphery but also about the Soviet center—specifically about the legitimacy of Soviet power, given its apparent continuities with Russia’s despotic and “Asiatic” past.
From the time that Marx first introduced the concept into political theory, the AMP has presented problems of interpretation for students of historical materialism, from Soviet ideologues to contemporary postcolonial scholars. Marx’s earliest discussions of a special “Eastern” social order, in his pieces on “The History of British Rule of India” for the New York Daily Mail and in his Grundrisse, were never fully integrated into his teleology of historical development, leaving others to interpret or inscribe meaning in his texts.38 Marx’s concept of the AMP evolved within a tradition of Western conceptions of the East, including that Asian peoples were “slaves by nature” (Aristotle), that the Asian climate produced “weak” nations (Montesquieu), and that Asian states were stagnant (Hegel).39 Economic theories of oriental despotism also influenced Marx’s formulation of the AMP, including the work of political economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In “The British Rule in India,” Marx wrote of Asia that “climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works, the basis of Oriental agriculture…. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works.” He thus explained the desertification of previously “brilliantly cultivated” regions as the result of those regions’ complete dependence “on a Central Government” for “artificial fertilization of the soil,” and consequent vulnerability to the collapse of irrigation systems in the absence of such a government. This dependence, Marx notes, “explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.”40 This original conception of a distinct “Asian” social order was rejected by the Stalinist regime in part because its geographically and environmentally specific model suggested a distinct path of development for the arid lands of Asia, including Soviet Central Asia.
Moreover, the AMP raised questions about Russia’s own development and the legitimacy of Soviet power in the context of its Asiatic past. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georgii Plekhanov had warned of a potential “restoration of our old ‘semi-Asiatic’ order.” In his History of Russian Social Thought, he wrote that “old Muscovite Russia was distinguished by its completely Asiatic character. Its social life, its administration, the psychology of its people—everything in it was alien to Europe and very closely related to China, Persia, and ancient Egypt.”41 Plekhanov declared that Russia’s leaders were either oriental despots, like Ivan the Terrible, or they used “despotic means to advance ‘Westernization,’ ” as in the case of Peter the Great.42 At the Stockholm Congress, Plekhanov singled out Lenin’s proposed land policies as particularly dangerous, warning, “It will be all the more easy for our restoration to return to that nationalization because you yourselves demand the nationalization of the land, because you leave that legacy of our old semi-Asiatic order intact.”43 While Lenin agreed that Russia had historically been Asiatic, he rejected Plekhanov’s fears that a premature revolution might lead to a restoration of oriental despotism and asserted that state nationalization of land differed qualitatively from Russia’s old Asiatic order.
After the revolution the theoretical debate concerning the AMP was increasingly shaped by Soviet realpolitik, particularly questions about the role the Soviets should play in advancing “less developed” nations, both outside and inside Soviet borders. Chinese politics exerted the most overt influence on the Soviet discussion of the AMP in the 1920s and very early 1930s.44 But while China was the ostensible and immediate subject of this debate, the conclusions drawn had serious implications for understanding Soviet development. It was possible to critique Russia as an oriental despotism before the revolution, but this line of argument was too liable to generate suspicions that Soviet rule carried on this continuous tradition. By the early 1930s the vigorous debate surrounding the AMP was resolved, and the unilinear historical model of the piatichlenka (the five-stage model of development) became the new Party line and stilled further debates.45 The AMP was now understood as an Asian variant of feudalism, not a distinct (and self-perpetuating) historical stage of development. As Marian Sawer notes, for the next thirty years Soviet political theorists simply “read the concept out of the Marxist canon.”46 The triumph of the piatichlenka was significant because it was a rejection of site-specific models of development. Asian—and Russian—historical ground no longer had distinct properties that required a distinct path of development. This general line forcibly suppressed lurking suspicions that Russia and Asia were not ready for socialist development. In short, it was an attempt to de-sedimentize the historical foundations of Bolshevik power.
But if the AMP was written out of political theory, visions of oriental despotism continued to haunt the Soviet construction site, suggesting that the matter of history remained charged. The ideological slipperiness of these works is the product of their political moment, between Stalin’s ascent to power and the schematization of plot lines and political messaging in literary narratives.47 Unlike Mandelstam, these authors do not adopt outright the narrative of the Soviet Union as an oriental despotism—indeed, they explicitly contrast oriental despotisms with Soviet state projects. Nonetheless, in these works the pairing remains polyvalent and charged with significance, as the theme of oriental despotism is woven into a dense texture of meanings.
Throughout his literary works Boris Pilniak engages with questions about Russia’s Asiatic past and its persistence in modern Russian life. Pilniak’s 1930 construction novel, The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea (Volga vpadaet v Kaspiiskoe more) depicts an ambitious hydroengineering project in the city of Kolomna, designed to reverse the course of the Moscow river and create a vast system of connecting canals and rivers. Pilniak opens with a geological creation myth, narrating the eternal dialectical struggle between water and earth: rock and soil determine the course of rivers, and they are, in turn, shaped by the erosive power of those rivers. Millennia later, Soviet power is harnessing the hydroenergy of its rivers to destroy Old Russia, symbolized by the ancient geological structures that lay underneath Moscow. Sedimentation materializes in two forms in Pilniak’s novel: fixed in geological strata and mobilized in the form of silt or sand, which threaten to inundate and desertify the Soviet heartland. Both forms of sediment threaten Soviet civilization and are troped as primitive and Asiatic. Water, which “breaks down everything,” is the vital force that captures and transforms sand into riverine silt but also erodes the millennial resistance of geological formations, allowing new channels to be created.48 Pilniak thus depicts the spontaneity-consciousness dialectic through the processes of sedimentation and de-sedimentation, and it is this geological vision of dialectical change that destabilizes the work as a production novel.49
Sediment is a crucial factor in the planning and construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. We read that the Moscow region “was once a seabed, and the engineers carefully studied the deposits of the Jurassic, Devonian, Cambrian, Archaean epochs; the limestone, clay, coal, silica, sand, silt, and peat—the geological construction of the soil.”50 A central question is whether this ancient alluvium can support the new Soviet “monolith”—the dam that will throw back the waters of the Oka river and generate the force needed to reverse the course of the Moscow River. Monoliths, we are told, are not watertight and may subside and crack unless interlocked with watertight ground.51 These new structures, then, are stabilized by excavating unstable alluvium and welding the edifice into the deep geological layers of the Jurassic and Permean epochs: “There the granite of the continent and the granite brought by the will of men were cemented into geology, into the primordial.”52 The hydroengineering project will clear the historical ground under socialism and select its own point of origin in the permanence of deep time.
The monolith is an attempt, in short, to petrify socialist construction. The Soviets are replacing nature with “second nature” and sedimentary rock with a concrete monolith—a new kind of sedimentary structure mixed with human consciousness and will. This attempt to immobilize dialectical change and enter geological time is fraught: the force of water, exemplary of spontaneous energy, promises to break through the inert monolith according to the law of the dialectic. The chief engineer Pimen Poletika “knew the power of water, and like all hydraulic engineers was a little afraid of that power.”53 According to the law of the dialectic, even the most carefully constructed monolith must give way to water, suggesting that Soviet power is temporal, not geological, and its monoliths will someday fall to spontaneous political forces.54
References in the novel to fallen civilizations and ruined irrigation systems also call into question the permanence of Soviet power and its structures. The engineer Poletika speaks about the fragility of Asian civilizations past: “In the memory of humanity flourishing countries have disappeared—Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia. The Tigris and Euphrates were once an earthly paradise, a continuous garden; now there are sands, scorching heat, and desert.”55 Poletika appears to believe that these civilizations have fallen to the entropic forces of desertification rather than the petrifying forces of oriental despotism. In half-slumber, he thinks of how gardens that once flourished under Tamerlane have become deserts.56 It is a marked choice to associate the garden not with a golden pre-Mongol age of Eurasia (before the Mongol invasions destroyed irrigation infrastructure) but rather with Tamerlane as an archetypal oriental despot. Poletika’s dreams of the flourishing gardens of Mesopotamia and Timurid Transoxania suggest that the arid lands of Asia require irrigation works and the mobilization of labor on a scale associated with oriental despotism—or Soviet power. Poletika conceives an ambitious plan to dam the Volga River and irrigate the sandy desert of the Aral-Caspian basin.57 The project will rationally redistribute the fertile silt at the bottom of the Volga. He thinks of “how much humus is carried down by the rivers to the sea each spring, washing out of the earth the salts and chemical substances that nourish plant life. Rivers have washed out the soil for ages, leaving sand and stones, wastefully giving up to the seas all that which is needed to nourish life.”58 His plan will redistribute this fertile sediment to allow the cultivation of cotton and rice in a former desert—“the desert will be transformed into an ancient Mesopotamia, with rains, lakes, subtropical vegetation.”59
Poletika fears that the desert is expanding into Russia, right up to the Volga, Nizhnyi Novgorod, and the Donets Basin.60 He associates the threat of desertification with an Asian invasion, paraphrasing Vladimir Solovev’s warnings of an advancing “enemy from the East.”61 Poletika recalls the droughts of 1891 and 1921 and their effects: famine, mass migration, and cannibalism. To hold back the desert, Soviet civilization depends upon irrigation, yet such monolithic constructions are a synecdoche for the immobilizing forces of an Asiatic restoration. It is not only the advancing sands and hot winds that are Asiatic; the waterworks designed to hold back this civilizational threat also resemble the monuments of oriental despots, associated with the sacrifice of human laborers. Pilniak makes hydroengineers the common operator between technological utopia and oriental despotism. In 1931, soon after the publication of The Volga Falls, Pilniak travelled to Tajikistan, the new autonomous Soviet republic that had been carved out of the Bukharan Emirate. The writing from this trip, the material for an unfinished novel, Seventh Soviet, was published later in the same year as The Volga Falls. In Seventh Soviet, Pilniak discusses Tajik irrigation canals: “The apparatus which is known as the canal head and which, in antiquity, was built over decades with thousands of people under the direction of half-divine mirabs, … now is done by engineers and workers with mathematical calculations.”62 The reader must decide whether Pilniak’s text is emphasizing the contrast more than inviting comparison; one might read Pilniak’s equivalencies between the “half-divine mirabs” (officials who manage water resources in Islamic societies) and Soviet engineers to mean that Soviet power only superficially differs from the political dispensations of premodern Asia. Engineers are the middlemen between the will of the despot and the labor force needed to realize these monumental projects. The engineers Sadykov and Laslo are described as “ordering the world about by will of the Moscow Kremlin, millers of its millstones.”63 The engineers in the novel are conscious of their role in holding back the natural force of water, symbolic of the spontaneity of the masses: “Engineers know of dozens of disasters when the element of water has destroyed cities and thousands of people, washing away everything in its path.”64 They fear that their own attempts at disciplining nature may fail at any moment, destroying the petrified structures of Soviet power.
Asia is not only an external threat: the Old Russia that the Soviets battle is also deeply Asian. Concern with this Asiatic past of Russia was central to Pilniak’s work. As Gary Browning observes of Pilniak’s novel The Naked Year, “The Russian people have violently and indiscriminately torn the European cultural overlay from a massive and durable ‘Asiatic’ substratum.”65 Pilniak’s representation of the reemergence of the primitive and Asiatic within Russian culture and psychology echoes fears of Asiatic restoration that had been live in the political sphere. In a subplot of the novel, the antique dealers Pavel and Stepan Bezdetov actually specialize in Asiatic restoration: in their workshop on “a typical Asiatic Moscow street,” the Bezdetovs collect and restore antique mahogany furniture. Each style reflects cultural tastes under a succession of Russian despots, and political epochs are laid down on the mahogany furniture like a veneer that never fundamentally alters the nature of the material.66 These restorers “construct nothing now. They merely restore antiques; but they have preserved the habits and traditions of their uncles.” The very name Bezdetov, “childless,” reflects their orientation to the past rather than the future; such men seek only to “restore dead things to full life.”67 The narrative speaks in judgment against the villainous Bezdetovs, of course, but their superficial refashioning of antiques raises the question of whether Soviet civilization, too, merely restores an old despotism with a new veneer.
The complex of meanings and associations between Soviet rule and the Asian past is reinforced in the subplot of Liubov Pimenova, an archeologist and the daughter of the chief engineer, who studies the antiquities excavated from the canal bed. The Soviet construction site and the archeological site occupy the same space, collapsing past and future ruins and suggesting the eventual deterioration and re-sedimentation of the monolith as the trace of a fallen Soviet civilization that future archeologists will someday unearth. Poletika notes that even the technological utopia of Atlantis has fallen without a trace, suggesting the hubris of Soviet attempts to halt dialectical and cyclical change and petrify socialist time.68
This attempt to halt dialectical change, to petrify natural and human history, intersects in the novel with multiple views of time, which are never synchronized. The recurring theme of human mortality and the individual human life cycle competes with the epochal geological time of Soviet construction. Liubov and her mother, Olga Aleksandrovna, for example, are said to be in “friendship with the earth,” rather than at war with it, as they dig in the fragrant soil of their garden, a space of feminine kinship with nature.69 This scene of otium is contrasted with the industrial assault on the earth taking place on the nearby construction site. The narrative explicitly connects this relationship to nature with a particular way of being in time: Olga Aleksandrovna digs in the garden in order “to patch, to mend, time.”70 Liubov’s archeological work is another kind of digging in the earth, with its own kind of time. She excavates in order to recuperate the material traces of the past, remarking that “it is necessary to look backward in order to see the future,” an opinion echoed elsewhere in the novel.71 Although she excavates the geological layers of history, it is not with the aim of negation and she does not appear to share a geological view of time. Her father, Poletika, also seems convinced of the “law of the recurrence of events.”72 Their historical vision suggests patterns of cyclical return: if the future will resemble the past, then Soviet power is not sui generis and may not differ substantively from other past civilizations that attempted to control nature and beat back the entropic, spontaneous forces of the desert and of water.
Ongoing processes of re-sedimentation also suggest cyclicality. In the course of bending the Moscow River to human will, some things will be excavated but others buried. Entire villages and lifeways will be subsumed as dams are built and rivers rechanneled. Burials in the novel are also juxtaposed with excavations, suggesting a natural equilibrium. As one burial is being prepared, machines “tear open the bowels of the earth” on the construction site.73 A second burial scene is juxtaposed with an interpolated story about a mine collapse, and the process of cremation and transformation of the human body to ash is graphically described.74 Even as the construction site is de-sedimented, the cemetery continues to grow, filled with human remains. Excavation and burial appear to be in a continuous equilibrium, with de-sedimentation balanced by re-sedimentation.
The Volga Falls is a notoriously unstable text, and Pilniak embeds metaliterary reflections on the psychology of writing and reading as processes of sedimentation and excavation. Books appear to be sedimented objects, the immobilized traces of human consciousness. From the perspective of the morbid engineer Laslo, books are dead bodies, and the library is a “morgue” and a “crematorium.”75 Each volume is also a sedimentary layer: reaching from Goethe, to Marx, to Plekhanov, they represent epochs of history and resemble the layers of rock under the construction. This sediment haunts the present: “All this has remained in former epochs, in the pre-October period, and by inertia creeps through the communities in boxes of books.” This sediment continues to accumulate: “Marx, Lasalle, Lenin, Plekhanov … became the epochs…. Lenin is dead but his books grow and grow.”76 Even the epoch of Marx, Lenin, and Plekhanov is weakly differentiated from that of Goethe and Heine; all are accumulated history, soon to be buried.
The psychological excavation and construction of the new Soviet subject is another theme of the book. Moscow, the so-called Asiatic center, from which all planning activity emanates, is punned as being “perekovany i perekopany” (reforged and re-dug).77 The term “perekovany” evokes the “reforging” (perekovka) that takes place among political criminals through the process of labor in camps run by the GPU, and a GPU police agent appears in the story to investigate saboteurs. The engineer Edgar Laslo is said to be writing an article on the psychological transformation of workers. He observes how seasonal workers develop the mental habits of the proletariat over several years of labor on projects like theirs, “seeing the laws of the formation of the psyche of the working class.”78 As these itinerant workers develop consciousness, visiting libraries and reading rooms, the sedimented consciousness of the bourgeoisie is simultaneously being excavated. Some of this psychoanalytic de-sedimentation takes place in evening conversations between Laslo and his fellow engineer Sadykov. Laslo remarks that they are not ready for the new life: those who are “familiar with Sodom cannot dwell in Israel—they are not fit for the Promised Land, because they remember what a gorodovoi is.”79 It is psychological habit and memory of the past that prevents Laslo, the engineer Poltorak, and the Bezdetovs—who “preserve the habits of their uncles”—from entering socialism.
Laslo and Poltorak are shot, but Sadykov, a proletarian by birth, survives to carry on Poletika’s grand dreams of irrigating the desert of Central Asia. Numerous deaths aside from those of Laslo and Poltorak occur in the novel, including multiple suicides and the drowning of an old Bolshevik when his underground cave is flooded after the opening of the monolith. While we may interpret this as the justifiable death of the old (a fitting end for those described as “living corpses”), it is a reminder that all human lives—and perhaps all civilizations—will end. The engineer Poltorak introduces a discussion of violence and human sacrifice for the sake of construction. He argues that “all constructions are bloody…. When a canal is dug, the dam bursts through and workers are drowned … blood is everywhere. And the red bloody standard of the Revolution is a symbol of bloody births. When the blood disappears, then the Donets Basin will be overwhelmed by arid sands.”80 The narrator contradicts Poltorak and asserts that there are “bloodless” births and deaths. In the idiom of the novel, the deaths that take place are bloodless in the sense that they are the “natural” end of those who have outlived their historical epoch. This includes the fervent Bolshevik Ozhogov who drowns in his underground cave. Ozhogov is described as a man stuck in the era of war communism—a zealous revolutionary left behind by the new epoch. Ozhogov tells his comrades that “a bloodless revolution has now begun, a period of building, when we must fear and be ashamed of blood.”81 He calls for a third revolution, after the social and cultural revolutions—a revolution of “conscience.”82 Ozhogov’s brother, the madman Skudrin, voices an unambiguous critique of Soviet hydroengineering as a restoration of oriental despotism: “Not only are the Bolsheviks letting the Moscow River run backward, but also Russia…. It is permissible to kill; human life is cheap…. We have no men; we have organizations.”83 Poltorak further echoes this when he refers to murder without blood as “statistical, numerical” murder.84
In the midst of this politically sensitive content, Lev Trotsky’s name appears in a vague conversation about the river turning backwards, and Laslo remarks to Sadykov that Moses “lost his way in the deserts just as we do in Trotskyism.”85 Trotsky, then, is associated with the entropic forces of the desert, opposed to the petrifying forces of the hydraulic state that the Soviet Union has become and that engineers like Laslo and Sadykov administer (“millers of its millstones”). Is the reversal of the Moscow River a triumph of engineering or a forcible return of the river of history back to the sociopolitical order of oriental despotism? Irene Masing-Delic argues that although the novel “conforms to the demands of the political climate,” Trotsky remains an ideological touchstone of the text. Masing-Delic identifies Trotsky’s influence on the text’s ethos of controlling nature, yet as we have seen, an Aesopian reading of his place in the text might also rest on the identification of Trotsky with the spontaneous forces of revolution that cannot be controlled.86 Pilniak’s novel is layered and slippery, and it must have supported, even in Pilniak’s mind, multiple, even competing, interpretations. How otherwise can we make sense of Pilniak offering The Volga Falls to Stalin as one of “my bricks that are in our construction”?87
Just a year after Pilniak’s novel, the Polish-born Soviet writer Bruno Jasien´ski published the novel Man Changes His Skin, which depicts the shock work to construct a canal along the Vakhsh River in Tajikistan, in order to irrigate 80,000 hectares of land that have already been plowed and sown with cotton. The gripping novel is both a “Red Pinkerton”—a genre of Soviet detective thriller—and a production novel. Man Changes His Skin was published serially in the journal Novyi mir between 1932 and 1933 to immense popular and critical acclaim; between 1934 and 1935, it went through nine full print editions in Russian and at least two in English.88
As in Pilniak’s novel, sediment may be mobile or fixed. It takes the form of silt, grave ash, loess dust, and sand; it constitutes the rock layers that must be excavated from the canal bed that winds through the holy Kata-Tag mountain on its way to the Vakhsh plain. The qualities of soil and rock—alternately unstable and implacable—present the main technical challenges for the engineers on the site, and Jasien´ski introduces the reader to a number of soil terms, including loess (lyoss), loam (supes’), and gray soil (serozem). Sediment threatens development in so many forms: soil is washed away by rivers as silt or blown away as dust, leaving farmers to starve; shifting sands “swallowed up whole caravans and settlements.”89 The fine loess dust ruins the excavation machines, and the local earth makes for unstable building material, subject to landslides and washouts.
The chief question confronting Soviet power in Tajikistan is whether this earth that “had lain untouched for centuries” can be reformed.90 The Europeans see Central Asia as an empty “primeval landscape,” a monotonously drab panorama where even the buildings—made of clay—seem to have arisen directly from the earthen landscape.91 The people, too, appear to be earthen, and the “legend about god fashioning the image of man out of clay” is attributed to them.92 Sedimentation appears to be the process that has produced the landscape, constructions, and people of the Vakhsh plain.
These forms of sediment correspond to the human material that Soviet power must rework: those who are politically inert, associated with sedimentary rock, and those who are unsteady and require reinforcement, associated with mobile sediment. The construction work accomplishes a unified transformation on these geological and political planes: the excavation and mobilization of inert sediment and the fixing in place of mobile sediment through construction, irrigation, and cultivation on the Vakhsh plain. The conflation of the material and the political is illustrated by Kata-Tag mountain, whose loose gray soil poses particular technical challenges to the engineers and workers. It is soft and unstable, threatening to wash out and collapse the canal embankment at any moment. It is suggested that this unstable “gray soil” is the remains of the dead, a gothic animation of the deposits of history, acting from the graveyard to sabotage Soviet construction. Morozov, the chief engineer, explains: “The problem of Kata-Tag is really a question of the soil. In order that the water may not seep through and wash away the dike, we want a firm soil. But just at this point we encounter a sort of gray soil. The local inhabitants call it ‘grave ash.’ In its color and its shifting character it really does resemble ashes…. On its summit there is a small graveyard, or mazar, where the ashes of certain Mohammedan saints have been resting from ancient times…. The geological structure of the mountain is highly unreliable.” Morozov transmits the local myth that the gray soil is “grave ash” that must not be disturbed. But the Tajik engineer, Urtabaev, argues that the gray soil is actually the “ancient deposits [il] which covered the bed and strengthened the banks of the old canal.”93 Whether its source is “grave ash” or “silt” from the ancient canal, this gray soil is the unstable sediment of the ancient Asian past, a precarious foundation for construction.94 The engineers decide to line the dikes with clay and reinforce the gray soil by mixing it with “more reliable soil.”95
Excavation and reinforcement are the tools the team uses to Bolshevize this Asian land. To open the canal bed the brigade must excavate two million cubic meters of earth per month, using a limited number of mechanical excavators and a ragtag workforce equipped with mattocks and shovels.96 All of this labor is “but a drop in the ocean of unturned earth.”97 The narrative dwells on the drama of this excavation. Once the upper stratum of smaller rocks has been removed, “the teeth of the excavators clanked helplessly as they scraped its surface. At this point workers would leap down into the canal bed and commence blasting the rock with ammonal.” There follows a “brief artillery bombardment before the attack, and when the sixteenth explosion had thundered out, men would rush headlong down the slope with mattocks held like bayonets to break up the loosened earth.”98 Excavation and reinforcement also take place in the human psyche, as the OGPU police agent Komarenko works to expose and shore up the old “human material” on the construction site. Jasien´ski’s plot contains many of the standard tropes of the production novel, including sabotage plots by Basmachi rebels, superstitious Muslim elders, and wreckers in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). But in addition to deliberate wrecking, the authorities also confront the underdeveloped consciousness of workers on the site, a motley workforce of national minorities who must be reformed through labor. One engineer explains that “imperfections are inevitable in all Asian development. If I started letting workers go for that, we’d soon have nobody left. You have to be satisfied with the labor power you have. No good worker would come to work in these conditions.”99 A young Party official further explains to the visiting American engineer, Clark, that given the primitive “human material” (chelovecheskii material) with which they have started to build, the Party must train (vospityvat’) the workers, or they will “probably not be able to complete even one construction work.”100 This reform is accomplished through labor and ideological reinforcement by more stable elements, represented by the Party. Those who cannot be reinforced through labor must be exposed and excavated.
Jasien´ski also links the excavation of sedimentary layers of earth to the shedding of human skin, as alluded to in the book’s title. The Chekist Komarenko explains to an American engineer that his generation has destroyed the capitalist order but not yet attained communism, when “man will finally cast off, like a husk, his whole skin.”101 This process of change is painful and violent, as the surface cannot be so easily removed from the layers beneath: “The old skin has grown on him so that sometimes it has to be ripped off together with the flesh…. Many of those who in 1917, in 1920, in 1923 were sauntering about in the new skin with enviable ease and facility, are beginning to ail and lag behind. This is not a sign of fatigue; it means that fragments of the old skin that have not been torn off are beginning to rot, thereby infecting the whole organism.”102 The primitive psychology and habitus of Komarenko’s generation is connected to deeper strata. Jasien´ski closes the circle of these metaphors by comparing the skin that must be torn off to the surface of the earth that must be penetrated. In an apocryphal folktale interpolated into the novel, a thirsty camel perishes and its dry skin expands to cover the Vakhsh plain, transforming it into an arid desert: “the earth covered by this skin has withered.”103
As in Pilniak’s novel, water is the dynamic force that shapes geological structures and mobilizes sediment. The Vakhsh River cuts “like a heavy sabre blow hacking at the foot of the mountain.”104 But the river, uncontrolled, washes the people downriver like sediment: “Every year the river Vakhsh coming down with all the force of a glacial mountain river carried away part of the land on its left bank and washed away the main aryk [canal] system of the population. The latter were compelled gradually to move downstream, continually choosing fresh sites for their irrigation works.”105 The poor Vakhsh farmers who eke out a living on the steep mountain banks must carry bags of soil on their own backs uphill to their plots, where they “ram it down in a thick layer on the bare rock.”106 This is all in vain, as water continually washes the soil back downhill. Uncontrolled water is a dispersive force that carries away the black treasure of the soil, its fertility inaccessible as long as it is suspended as silt.
Soviet power must control and socialize this hydropower; the Vakhsh itself, if channeled appropriately, can liquidate the age-old geological structures of Asia. The rock excavated from the canal bed is dumped into the silty river [v mut’ reki], which carries it downstream, instead of taxing workers or precious machines. When the Menk excavator stops working on the construction site, the team replaces it with a high-pressure jet of water that literally liquidates rock, carrying its minerals away as a slurry.107 It is a technologically mediated acceleration of the natural erosive processes by which the river washes away rock as silt. The ultimate goal of harnessing this hydropower is the cultivation of the plain. Like the thin layer of soil laid down on bare rock, agriculture does not go deeply enough in Central Asia. It is the goal of Soviet power to deepen Soviet culture and agriculture, changing the structure of life by irrigating and sowing cotton on a scale that only a strong central authority could manage. Once the plain is irrigated, the people of Central Asia will settle as cotton farmers and transition to a higher stage of development. Tajik, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz settlers are moving to the valley in droves to farm this “virgin land” (tselina), and the tractor drivers and construction workers form a “million-strong army that was besieging the infinite shifting sands.”108 This mass mobilization of Asian labor—described as a “Tower of Babel”—raises questions about the politics of this monumental irrigation project. The ruins of past irrigation works haunt the landscape, suggesting comparisons with the Vakhsh project. Clark’s Russian translator says: “You may have noted that the plain bears traces of ancient irrigation. According to legend, this whole valley was irrigated and thickly populated in the time of Alexander the Great.”109 The new canal is weakened at its point of intersection with the old canal, where the sediment of these ancient constructions—the gray soil—is deposited. Is Soviet power a new oriental despotism whose works are likewise destined to fall into ruin? The newly appointed chief engineer, Kirsh, gives space in the text to fears of the return of oriental despotism under Bolshevik power. He is a reformed criminal, guilty of sabotage and ideological deviation. He explains his former beliefs: “I was outraged by the wasteful inefficiency of the Revolution: I saw how today they would meaninglessly destroy what tomorrow would have to be rebuilt. I saw how valid and good ideas turned in practice into a caricature due to the clumsiness of the hands that implemented them. I was repelled by this Asiatic version of socialism. I told myself that this country must first get ordinary Western culture and then we could venture a conversation about socialism.”110 Kirsh’s dangerous doubts were corrected by the OGPU, and he is a successful example of political reforging. But the attempt to also instruct and discipline the reader, to redirect any doubts, may produce ambivalence. The process of educating new Soviet citizens, of reshaping “human material,” is a violent one, as Jasien´ski notes.
The tragic fate of several workers in the canal bed underscores this violence. Has Soviet power established the “Asiatic version of Socialism” that Kirsh suspected, as it reshapes the “human material” of the Asian workforce? In the process of excavating Kata-Tag, the ashes of the dead “Mohammedan saints” are effectively replaced with those of Soviet workers. The excavation dislodges a large block of stone, which falls and crushes several Persian workers. A “bloody flattened mass” is carried upwards on the conveyor belt designed to lift soil and rock from the canal bed. The Persian worker belongs to a “backwards nationality,” coded as Asian and historically inert like the sediment and rock he is excavating. He is “old material,” doomed to be repurposed into building material. The monolith of Soviet construction consumes bodies, which must be re-excavated from the site.
The texts at the center of this chapter, related to canal projects of the early 1930s, express the fear that the sedimentation of a despotic Asiatic past threatens the socialist future. I will close with another work, attempted after the height of the Ezhov purges, that combines the myths and motifs repeated throughout this chapter, but with a meaning that was unambiguous and that made the work’s completion impossible.
In June 1939 Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman Eduard Tisse scouted locations in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara for a new film devoted to the Fergana Canal, a 240-mile long canal to irrigate the Fergana Valley in Central Asia. The canal was completed with 20,000 Central Asian workers in just forty-five days;111 that summer Eisenstein, together with Petr Pavlenko, the author of several fictional works and sketches on Turkmenistan, wrote the script for The Great Fergana Canal in three days.112 Eisenstein had plans for depicting the “kingdom of sand” as a nomadic force advancing upon the ancient civilization of Urgench—threatening both its architecture and its fertile fields.113 Eisenstein uses a readily available trope: the oriental despots of Central Asia are represented by hostile natural forces. Sand is the historical sediment that threatens the architecture and infrastructure of civilization in Asia.
While the goal of the project was to contrast the despotic past of Central Asia with the Soviet “people’s construction project,” Eisenstein was fully aware of the meanings that his comparison might unleash. In an article he wrote on the film project for Pravda, Eisenstein wonders “how the real future will grow out of the depths of what is past.”114 Elsewhere in the article Eisenstein refers to the canal itself as a “creative reconstruction.”115 Is the canal a restoration of a previous golden age before the tyrants of Asia destroyed the irrigation works, or is the Great Fergana Canal the work of a new tyrant—namely, Stalin?
Naum Kleiman argues that Eisenstein found the project itself coercive. Two of Eisenstein’s sketches from the period suggest this: a human figure bashing its head against a minaret, and another with a revolver to its head with the English caption “That’s how I do feel.” In the original script for the film, the emir of Khiva orders that the blood of enemy captives be mixed into the clay of the city walls instead of water. In revenge, Tamerlane builds a tower encasing the Khivans in clay while they are still alive. In his diary Viktor Shklovsky confirms that Eisenstein told him that “the cement for buildings in Central Asia was sometimes mixed with blood.”116 Kleiman argues that these scenes were suppressed in the approved script because the association with the political events of 1939 was unmistakable.117 Although The Great Fergana Canal was never completed, Kleiman argues that Eisenstein repurposed his sketch of Tamerlane for the eponymous despot of his next film, Ivan the Terrible. Ivan’s list of victims is described in Eisenstein’s notes as “Tamburlaine’s Tower.”118 In Eisenstein’s vision there is a clear line of succession from Tamerlane to Ivan, from the oriental despot to the Russian despot, reviving fears of Asiatic restoration, as Soviet civilization is re-sedimented with bodies.
The consecration of national soil with the bodies of the dead is a standard convention of modern nation-building. As Katherine Verdery notes, “Gravesites, ancestors, and nation-state formation are interconnected.”119 In keeping with Herder’s myth of the transformation of the ancestral burial ground into the homeland, only bodies could sacralize the Soviet construction site and cement a new Soviet nation. But it was the willful human sacrifice involved in monumental state efforts to excavate historical ground and build a new Soviet land through canals, dams, and other hydraulic infrastructure that led some observers to suggest that the Soviet state was thereby returning to its despotic “Asiatic” origins. This chapter has attempted an archaeology of the layers of meanings and associations that accumulated in early Soviet cultural production and were then figured as the sediment, silt, ash, and quicksand under the Soviet construction site. Soil is the symbol of historical accumulation and the primitive foundation—usually coded as “Asiatic”—beneath the surface of Soviet modernity. Whether it is in the artifacts excavated from the Moscow canal bed, the ashes of dead “Mohammedan saints,” the sands threatening civilization, or the cement mixed with blood, a primitive Asian foundation was feared to undermine Soviet construction. In the works discussed here, the very attempt to excavate and reform this deep geological structure, to de-sediment “tsarist territory” and re-sediment it into “true Bolshevik soil,” results in a further hardening of the Asiatic despotism of the state. Russia and its former imperial possessions in Asia are understood to be locked in the stagnancy of oriental despotism, unable to excavate this age-old historical sedimentation and build anew. As Mandelstam wrote, the Soviet subject is a “brick or cement” that is to be built with, not for—indeed, these bodies are buried in the construction site, cemented into the historical foundation of Soviet civilization.