Figures 26, 27 and 28. Aleksandr Medvedkin, Letter to a Chinese Friend, 1969, 35mm. [Central Studio for Documentary Film, stills courtesy Russian State Archive for Documentary Film and Photography]

The persistence of the personal letter within the new technologies of mass media hints that communist notions of new international community might also bare a more archaic, if not obsolescent, core. Several moments in the development of an internationalist aesthetic in the USSR and in the international Left lay bare the dialectic of absorption and affect, intimacy and mediation, communism and revolution.

visibility

Early Soviet artistic culture was defined by two contradictory impulses. One was the belief that revolution should be judged less by political or economic achievements than by the state of mind (of the soul, even) that it made possible for its agents. This would be communism. The communist revolution knew no bounds, meaning that not only should art be created with a global horizon, but it should also properly lead to the erasure of state borders in a permanent, worldwide revolution. Since the communist revolution could occur anywhere and anytime, its representation was not a matter of scale but of intensity. The revolution was to be immediate and, as far as possible, unmediated; it was, in essence, magical.

However, this invisible magic was also a source of power to be harnessed and directed toward political ends. Revolution needed to be represented, and these representations had to be transmitted over distance, preserved as history, viewed as models, enjoyed as sources of pleasure. But what does revolution look like, sound like, feel like? What media, what technologies, what pleasures would be capable of transmitting it? What relation do pleasure, beauty, profundity, and other traditional aesthetic concepts bear to the task of liberation? By capturing revolution within images, within existing regimes of the image, wouldn’t representation actually prevent the new from taking place, entrapping art within the logic of bourgeois capitalism and imperialism, which is only capable of rendering emotion in acts of social and sexual violence?

Figures 29 and 30 (following page). N.N. Evreinov, The Storming of the Winter Palace, 7 November 1920, archival DVD. [Film stills from Rysk Journal, ca. 1920]

The contradiction between the new intimate experience and the increasing reliance on technological media was evident in the discourse surrounding the mass festival, the first distinctly Soviet art form, where new identities emerged into visibility while escaping the logic of mediation and control. According to Anatoly Lunacharsky (the first Commissar for Enlightenment) in 1920, in mass festivals “the entire nation (narod) itself demonstrates its soul before itself.”¹ In this extreme surplus of intimacy, where everything is laid bare, representation is short-circuited and turned into a happening, a becoming, which fails ever to coalesce as image. ViktorShklovsky went even further, claiming that “the popular mass festival—the show of force and the joy of the crowd—. . . is only legitimate when no one is watching it from a window or from a special podium, otherwise it mutates into a parade, a serf ballet or an orchestra of horn instruments (orkestr rogovoi muzyki).”² The mass festival—and other, less immediate agitational forms of artistic practice—were sacramental mysteries celebrating an invisible transubstantiation that, far from satisfying the eye, founded the new community in an ascesis of vision.

At another extreme stood Nikolai Evreinov, director of the mass festival The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920, which presented itself as a cinematic spectacle and cultivated revolutionary subjects as spectators. The effects of this approach were not limited to the event itself; once it entered into the sphere of technological mediation, the representation ramified in unpredictable ways. Most notably, film of a daytime rehearsal (the festival itself was a nocturnal affair) has frequently been used as supposedly documentary footage of the October Revolution in progress. (Does any image forged of revolution immediately become its forgery?) Later in the decade Evreinov imagined a medium of the future called the “cinetophone,” which would accommodate individual viewing in domestic solitude:

The future cinetophone . . . will show the true wizardry of scenically selected colors of reality, will show the human voice aestheticized in its transfer by “mechanical means,” will show a clarity, charm and illusion of dramatic conception capable of winning over the most hostile prose writer.

This will be such a Kunstgesamtwerk [sic] the likes of which Richard Wagner did not dream in Bayreuth.... Truly there is something to envy, especially if one takes into consideration that there will be an inexhaustible choice of such evidently wizardly dreams in all tastes, in all inclinations, even the most strange, even the most painful inclinations . . . O, such sensual refinement is an inevitable fact of the future, without a doubt!³

The revolution would not only be televised; it would become co-extensive with home viewing. True, Evreinov’s embrace of the technological medium betrays an almost cynical skepticism regarding the possibility of social change; it envisions “a theatre of a spoiled and fickle man, a perverted brain, a theatre of great cruelty, perhaps even a theatre of an individually demanding spectator who is never satisfied, who always needs something more, a spectator who is nobly elevated and criminally base in his hysterical dissatisfaction.”⁴ Revolution becomes a commodified spectacle marketed to fickle, oversensitized consumers armed with remote controls. Evreinov bristles at the thought of sharing physical space with them.

Oscillating between these two extreme models—of unmediated corporeal intimacy and total mediation-Soviet artists sought aesthetic strategies for fostering revolutionary intimacy over distances and across national borders, amid a constantly shifting political and media system. In fact, over time, the most distant effects of revolution, such as the liberation of Third World nations, became most closely identified with its purest, most noble origins and intentions. As affirmed by Viktor Koretsky’s 1968 poster Chains Breaking—The Echo of Our Revolution!, each local revolutionary event restores the resonance of its predecessors. Revolution becomes global not through its amplification, but through its repetition in countless intimate gestures, not as a totality, but as a series.

Figure 31. Viktor Koretsky, Chains Breaking—The Echo of Our Revolution! (Tsepi rvutsia—Eto otzvuk nashei revoliutsii!), 1968, poster. [Ne boltai! Collection]

scales

In March 1919 the Soviet authorities hurriedly convened a conference in Moscow to found the Third International, which, Lenin stressed, would be a truly communist organization, unlike the previous two Internationals, which had been undone by nationalist tensions. The Third International immediately became a trope for the new artistic forms sought by revolution, which likewise would be immune to the forces of a capitalist image regime and could serve as antidotes for vestiges of capitalism in society. In response to Viktor Shklovsky’s point that revolutionary themes did not yet exist, art critic Nikolai Punin remarked: “These themes are homeless, but then isn’t the proletariat also homeless? Isn’t the Communist, Third International that very form that will create its own content?” ⁵ The first task, in response to a government competition, was to come up with a suitable monument to the Third International. Figural monuments were out of the question: “They are too particular in form for the ten-mile ranks of the proletariat,” Punin remarked. “In the best case they express the character, feelings and thoughts of a hero, but who will express the tension of feeling and thought of the collective thousands?”⁶ Revolution required its own style.

Punin found the most direct response to his plea in Vladimir Tatlin’s model for a gigantic Monument to the Third International. The tower was to be situated in Petrograd, the historical “cradle” of the revolution, which had quickly turned into its furthermost geographical outcropping. Two rotating structures were to contain assembly halls for the Third International and its executive organs, while a third would house the headquarters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA); this Punin called an “agitation office” (agitpunkt) and described it as follows:

It is projected to contain a hall for demonstrations; on the side of this space a giant screen will be built, on which searchlights project letter-based slogans and telegrams of current news; a radio telegraph receives news from the entire world; here broadsheets and newspapers are published, which then will be distributed throughout the city by automobile. In a word, the project means to mobilize all technologies for all types of agitation.⁷

The entire edifice was to be surmounted by a transmission tower that would, in Shklovsky’s words, “perpetuate the monument in the air.”⁸ This was not to be a monument (the Russian word pamiatnik makes explicit the link to memory), but something more akin to a trademark that could be imprinted in various media and on various scales, growing in its dimensions without ever exhausting its expressive potential.

In Punin’s words, “The spiral is the ideal expression of liberation; resting with its heel on the earth, it escapes the earth and becomes a kind of sign of detachment from all animal, earthly and reptilian interests.”⁹ Still, how would it be possible for this form to be integrated “with the social-political life of the city and, at the same time, to be transmitted as “an international event in the world of the arts”?¹⁰ This was a question of scale. Punin wrote that “the size and grandiosity of the conception” (400 meters in height) were “commensurate to the size and depth of the revolutionary movement.” ¹¹ But it is highly dubious whether Tatlin ever intended the Tower to be constructed, unlike the 160-meter radio tower that architect Vladimir Shukhov constructed in 1922 for the radio station of the Comintern. What he did build, repeatedly, were scale models, next to which he gladly posed for documentary photographs, as if to demonstrate that despite the radical difference in scale, his body was commensurable with universal revolution. Ilya Ehrenburg found that Tatlin’s model “inspired fear and ridicule” precisely because, as a model, it figures the disjuncture between communism as project and communism as achievement.¹² Between, one might say, revolution and communism. One could view this disjuncture as an internal critique: “The years of revolution in Russia have seen the creation of the ideology of new art. Close consideration has been given not only to the models of locomotives, but even to the schedule of trains on branch routes. But neither locomotives nor routes have been built. This is the tragedy of new Russian art.”¹³

Figure 32. Vladimir Tatlin, Model of the Tower for the Third International, ca. 1920, black-and-white photograph. [Estate of Vladimir Tatlin, courtesy of VAGA].

However, Ehrenburg suggests that the terror inspired by Tatlin’s model is not that spoken of by Peter Eisenman, for whom the architectural model is most expressive of our impotence to build it.¹⁴ Ehrenburg continues: “These are still projects. Tatlin’s model in a backyard. Sullen festivals. Instead of new things—patched-up workaday old Russia. Even the marvelous café ‘Pittoresque,’ made in 1917 by Iakulov and Tatlin (and then renamed ‘The Red Cockerel’)—stands abandoned, a wonderful toy in the hands of too grown-up people. But the children will come.“¹⁵ By making us enormous and threatening us with miniaturization, Tatlin’s model marshals the terror of scale as a socially productive force.

Figure 33. Vladimir Grigor’evich Shukhov, Comintern Radio Tower in Moscow, built in 1920, color photograph.

Tatlin’s risk was not that his model might fail to be built, but rather that it might be localized and domesticated as an image. Nikolai Punin stresses the ways in which the model, though in miniature, ramifies out to a citywide and even continental significance: “We assert that the present project is the first revolutionary object we can send and do send to Europe.”¹⁶ It was sent, in fact, in the form of numerous photographs and drawings, which were heavily commented upon in the art press of the day. Gradually it became the logotype of revolution, the only possible illustration on the cover of a book called The Idea of Communism. But didn’t this (like much of the Soviet avant-garde) really mark the fatal commodification of revolution, the transformation of the revolutionary subject into a spectator?

Figure 34. The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 2010). Cover design by &&& Creative.

the global village

Ehrenburg imagined revolution as addressed to all the “branch routes” of the country, but Tatlin’s model remains lashed to the modern city as the locus of revolution. Both at home and abroad communism was also addressed to rural populations. If it promised backward societies liberation through modernization, electrification, and industrialization, some Soviet artists also celebrated rural communities as models for communism. In works from Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) to Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Happiness (1935), from Andrei Platonov’s early prose works to Malevich’s peasant heads, the countryside demonstrates peculiar potential and, at the same time, unique sources of resistance for communist social modeling.

Working out what revolution might mean for non-urban spaces, writer Mikhail Prishvin set off in 1926 for a peat bog between the Greater and Lesser Nerl’ Rivers. He found a community divided by its own landscape into subcultures and dialects, united only by the Comintern radio station broadcast from Shukhov’s tower in Moscow “without regard for space.”¹⁷ He worries that this potentially liberating new medium might be misappropriated for military ends, like the airplane, and that it will merely cultivate passivity among the locals, dazzled by the distant wonders. Prishvin recalls a radio engineer of his acquaintance who spun the radio dial in wonder at the variety of offerings for “radio consumers,” without stopping to hear what was actually being said. For Prishvin the medium of radio compares unfavorably to writing, “which allows writers to give us on paper the clear visibility of life: the secret is in the calmness, in the homeowner’s [khoziaina] resilience of attention” (209). Thinking of how radio can be appropriated for constructive ends, Prishvin explicitly rejects the avant-garde:

One must figure it out through one’s own experience, entrusting oneself as it were to unknown forces, because we do not know the ether [efir] or the waves by which the feeling of the life of the world is transmitted. I do not believe in writers who lack this feeling; you can’t get by with reason alone, by style, theme [siuzhet], construction and all sorts of architectonics; for all your cleverness you can’t become a village homeowner [khoziain] without earth. (209)

In radio, then, “the technical wave is not always accompanied by a wave of the soul [volna dushevnaia]” (210). And yet:

Sometimes you seem to sense within yourself some kind of inner International, when you walk for a long time on the earth with the horizon hidden by woods, and suddenly an expanse of water somewhere below opens up. I felt something very close to this when I first heard a wave that transmitted to me sounds from a distant land. . . . My hesitations ended. I bought myself an apparatus, paid by post the tax for a radio transmitter, got the issue of Izvestiia with the decree about the freedom of the airwaves, and became a real radio buff. (211)

Surprisingly, then, despite the homey rhetoric, Prishvin echoes Tatlin in seeing the “inner International” in a dramatic disjuncture of scale played out in aesthetic representation. Communism is glimpsed in the ways mass media provide homey figurations of a global horizon. But how, to use Prishvin’s language, can one ever build a home on this horizon?

The melancholy that pervades such representations is caused by the resistance of the rural places—of space, perhaps—to the spread of communism. But these artists use this spatial drag to represent a more fundamental, temporal lag within the history of communism. As the countryside comes to represent for them human nature, so even their urban characters resemble country bumpkins, lost amidst the novelty of socialist construction.

The characters of Andrei Platonov’s novel Happy Moscow, written in the mid-1930s but published only in 1991, are painfully conscious of being at the geographical center of world communism, and yet despair of achieving communism within their own souls. One of the characters is the thirty-year-old “geometrician and town planner” Viktor Bozhko, typical of “the very best engineers [who] had begun to think about remodeling the soul.”¹⁸ In fact, town planning proves easier than soul planning: “Bozhko . . . had that day completed a meticulous plan for a new residential street, allocating space for greenery, children’s playgrounds and a district stadium. Anticipating a future that was close at hand, he felt the heartbeat of happiness as he worked, though he looked on himself with indifference, since he was a man who had been born under capitalism” (9).

Bozhko’s indifference is a function of his geographical position, which allows him to gauge both his desire for world revolution and his own individual insignificance on this scale. Among many extracurricular activities, Bozhko is an activist for the International Organization of Aid for the Fighters of the Revolution. On the wall above his desk, alongside portraits of Lenin and Stalin and above a gallery of “small photographs of nameless people . . . of every country,” Bozhko has hung a picture of Doctor Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto (a constructed language), which has “conquered the silence between peoples; exhausted by labour, too poor to travel, they communicated with one another through thought” (8-9). Their very communication underscores the impossibility of their community.

Figures 35 and 36. Aleksandr Medvedkin, Youth in Bloom, 1938, 35mm (stills from archival DVD). [Courtesy of Russian State Archive for Documentary Film and Photography]

The ambiguity in the title —Happy Moscow refers both to the city and to the eponymous heroine—registers a crucial link between the geography of global communist power and its inscription within individual bodies. The reconstruction of the city throughout the 1930s was intended to make it both a recognizable logotype for world communism and a giant parade ground where the socialist body could be presented in its martial and athletic guises. Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Youth in Bloom (1938) depicts Moscow as a stage for the pageant of Soviet nationalities and institutions (including the secret police), who demonstrate not “their souls before themselves” (to recall Lunacharsky’s formulation), but their lithe, tanned, shimmering bodies before the movie audience. The effect is made possible by an experimental color technology, and it is equated with this technology: communism = athletic body + color cinema. The resulting vision of communism might be called “Sov-porn.” The problem is not that the audiences of this display—both the crowds lining the streets and the leaders on the observation deck atop Lenin’s mausoleum—respond with insufficient enthusiasm; within the bounds of Soviet decorum they are quite ecstatic. It is that the spectators inhabit completely heterogeneous spaces and therefore lack any true contact with the display.

A similar contradiction marks Viktor Koretsky’s collaborative 1936 poster This Is Our Final and Decisive Battle! In a gesture that Koretsky would repeat thirty years later, four workers of different nationalities are shown marching to the left, each clutching the same standard with his right hand. Beneath them lies a battleground, where what appear to be armed Chinese peasants advance on an unseen enemy. To the left stand American skyscrapers, around which protesters skirmish with mounted police. The resolution of this bifurcated global struggle, it would seem, lies in the physical unity, coordination, and display of the male workers’ muscular arms, which dwarf the capitalist world in scale. Yet this physical display, impressive as it is, remains a visual puzzle. There is no way for us as viewers to join in-even in our imaginations—either the display or the battles. We do not know what the workers’ sights are trained on or what animates their motion. We vainly strain our ears to hear the songs they sing as they march. We are liable, like Platonov’s Bozhko, to read the promise of international solidarity as a reminder of our isolation from it.

Socialism, Esperanto, aviation, color cinema, the poster: these products of modern technological society enable a global horizon while betraying the cause of intimacy, which requires a return to obsolete media like the exchange of letters and personal portraits. Bozhko’s correspondents write to him for encouragement and contribute small sums to the Soviet state as investments in the “workers’ motherland,” in the hope that “they would have somewhere to shelter in their old age, and so their children could eventually escape and find refuge in a cold country warmed by friendship and labour” (9). Bozhko invests the funds in state bonds, which he sends to his correspondents along with compassionate letters filled with advice: “The African, Arratau, had told Bozhko that his wife had died; Bozhko responded with sympathy but advised him not to despair—we must save ourselves for the future, since there is no one to live on the earth but us. Better still, why didn’t Arratau come straight to the U.S.S.R.? Here, among comrades, he could live more happily than with a family”(10).

Figure 37. Viktor Koretsky, Vera Gitseyich, and Boris Knoblok, This Is Our Final and Decisive Battle (Eto est’ nash poslednii i reshitel’nyi boi), 1936, poster. [Ne boltai! Collection]

Figure 38. Viktor Koretsky, A Solid Peace for the World! (Zemleprochnyi mir!), 1965, poster. [Ne boltai! Collection]

In this mature Stalinist internationalism, the Soviet Union is a kind of Eden in its own space-time continuum. Helpless to redeem the rest of the world, it is a safe where victims of capitalism can deposit their homeless desires. To one “dear, distant friend” Bozhko writes: “The workers from the other five-sixths of the earth, a whole billion of them, can come and live with us for ever, along with their families—and as for capitalism, let it remain empty, unless a revolution begins there” (10).

Figure 39. Viktor Koretsky, Greetings to the Fighters Against Fascism (Privet bortsam protiv fashizma), 1937, poster. [Ne boltai! Collection]

Similarly, in his poster Greetings to the Fighters Against Fascism! Koretsky depicts the Soviet Union’s participation in the global anti-fascist struggle by placing a photograph of Vera Mukhina’s statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman above and behind the multinational corps of fighters in an indeterminate, blank space. The text clarifies that by adopting its new constitution, the USSR is providing “moral aid and a real support” for the struggle. The mass of miniaturized Soviet heads between the giant statue and fighters suggests that the USSR also provides the audience for the international struggle, even though they can see neither its development nor the vision that directs it.

Perhaps Koretsky, like Platonov’s Bozhko (his name is derived from the word for god [bog]), feels like an impotent little deity at the center of a universe emptied out by the forces of capitalism and fascism. Instead of fostering revolution elsewhere, Bozhko can only invite oppressed peoples to “the workers’ homeland,” which though cold, is “warmed by friendship and labour” (9). This disjuncture between the spatial and temporal axes of socialism shows that it overcomes distance much more easily than time, where it encounters incomprehensible sources of resistance. As Platonov wrote in his notebook: ”The new world really exists insofar as there is a generation of people who sincerely think and act in the plane of orthodoxy, in the plane of an animated ‘poster’—but it is local, this world, it is parochial, like a geographic country alongside other countries, other worlds. This new world will never be general, universal-historical—and it cannot be.“¹⁹

Figure 40. Viktor Koretsky, Communist and Workers’ Parties Will Develop Internationalist Cooperation and Solidarity on the Basis of the Great Ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (Kommunisticheskie i rabochie partii budut razvivat’ internatsionalistskie sotrudnichestvo i solidarnost’ na osnove velikikh idei Marksa, Engel’sa, Lenina), 1976, poster. [Ne boltai! Collection]

Distance can be mediated, but history must be lived. And Bozhko is already living too late, excluded from communism because [I] “was born long ago and have not been able to lose the habit of being myself” (10). His very invitations are undercut by the obsolescence of their form: when the novel was written Esperanto was well on its way to being outlawed in the USSR. Like Medvedkin, Platonov belongs to the first generation of Soviet artists who could treat revolution with nostalgia, as a lost future. The redemption of the promise lies in the repetition of its betrayal.

Bozhko’s international correspondence is therefore the only way for him to justify his unrequited love for Moscow (the girl, but also the city and, ultimately, communism):

After her visits Bozhko usually lay face down on the bed and yearned from sorrow, even though his only reason for living was universal joy. After moping for a while, he would sit down and write letters to India, Madagascar and Portugal, calling people to participate in socialism and to show solidarity with the workers on the whole of this tormented earth, and the lamp would shine on his balding pate that was filled with dream and patience (11).

International communism arises precisely out of the universality of this frustrated intimacy, out of the continual intensification of longing and loss. Like one of Bozhko’s letters, Happy Moscow fails to reach a conclusion, meandering off into its own uncertain future. Finding himself unable to point through narrative to the future community, Platonov relies on language as a material medium that models not the forms, but the very soul of world communism.

distances

Chris Marker’s 1957 film Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie) begins with the line: “I write to you from a distant land” (Je vous écris d’un pays lointain); but which land is he writing from? Marker’s film about Siberia features an animation of a woolly mammoth but no mention of the elephant in the room, the Gulag, the totem for Stalinist repression. Max Egly views Letter from Siberia as “a real voyage to an imaginary land”²⁰—not communism as it is in the USSR or could be in some other hypothetical country, but rather the territory of the image as the only possible site of communism, especially after the traumas of Stalinism and world war. Though this appears to entail an unconditional embrace of mediation, as did Evreinov, Marker couches his radical wager on the image as a nostalgic, almost wistful gesture toward the obsolete epistolary genre. Indeed, Marker and Medvedkin’s own postal correspondence opens up a new dimension in our exploration of mediated communist intimacy.

Priding himself on avoiding the banal or hackneyed, Marker studiously avoids cliché, bristling at the notion that “the only way to talk about the USSR is in terms of hell or paradise.” He intended Letter from Siberia as a blow against the rigid dichotomies of Cold War Europe and a plea for a new visual intelligence that would see beyond the platitudes of establishment media. Like much of Marker’s work, the film suggests that the path to a more just society lies through a thoroughgoing critique of the mediated image. Like Medvedkin in Letter to a Chinese Friend, Marker combines documentary footage, still photographs, and animation in a display of acute visual intelligence. Marker’s use of the epistolary genre is quite distinct from Godard’s Letter to Jane (1972), in which the filmmaker—declaring an allegiance to the militant Dziga Vertov instead of the soulful Medvedkin—walks the viewer through a dialectical deconstruction of the modern film image. Marker’s analysis is no less rigorous than Godard’s, but it is imbued with an abiding belief in the possibility for intimacy, even within the technological situation of late capitalism.

Figures 41 and 42 (following page). Chris Marker, Letter from Siberia, 1957, 16mm. [New Yorker Films, stills from VHS copy]

Though neither Marker nor Medvedkin saw the other’s epistolary film, their meeting at an international film festival in Leipzig in 1967 led to a long and deep friendship that mostly played itself out in an extensive postal correspondence, punctuated by rare personal meetings. Marker’s fascination has centered on two distinct aspects of Medvedkin’s work. The first is a short-lived project of 1931—1932, when Medvedkin led a group of cinematographers who commandeered a train, equipped it with a cinema lab, projectors, and living quarters, and undertook several journeys to hot spots of Stalinist reconstruction. Gesturing back to the agitational projects of the Civil War period, Medvedkin’s film-train (kinopoezd) was an attempt to inject the martial commitment of the Civil War into the political battle for the First Five-Year Plan. In his memoirs on this period, Medvedkin adopts conventional language about “arming the Soviet screen” and “throwing the still unwieldy ‘illusion’ into this furious fight” (i.e., for collectivization and industrialization).²¹ It all seems a bit belated, this effort to restore Bolshevist futurism under Stalin. How much more unrealistic was it in 1967 when Marker adopted Medvedkin as the figurehead for his own experiment in direct cinema called SLON (Société de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles), which supported itself, in part, by showing Medvedkin’s Happiness.²²

From Marker’s vantage point, Medvedkin represented a time “when science fiction rhymed with revolution,” the time of Tatlin and mass festivals and agitational forays into the backward provinces. Born in 1900, Medvedkin personifies for Marker the childlike dreams of the entire century: “He belonged to that rarest breed who had kept unspoiled the faith of his youth: the tragedy of all those bloodstained years was just the sort of trick History plays . . . In a sense, he was the last Bolshevik. He played Mayakovsky’s Klop [The Bedbug] in reverse: a genuine revolutionary artificially preserved to be shown ‘as it was’ to an incredulous audience.” ²³ In short, Marker recognizes in Medvedkin a fellow citizen of the image, which allows for the noncoercive overlay of temporalities, the free interweave of memory, activity, and fantasy, free of the violence both of capitalism and of Stalinism.

Marker’s rosy image of Medvedkin as a revolutionary dreamer willfully ignores the latter’s complicity in the totalizing media system of High Stalinism, which frequently acted as an enforcement mechanism for repressive social policies. In his own texts about the film-train, Medvedkin describes his engagement in industrial production in terms of the unmasking of defects and the shaming of those responsible, through what is known in Russian by the ugly word donos. In his memoir “294 Days on Wheels” (published as a book in several languages, though not yet in Russian or English), Medvedkin depicted his team as latter-day government inspectors, working tirelessly “until the shortcomings are liquidated and the guilty punished”: “The enemy, hiding amongst our ranks, resisted desperately,” he writes.²⁴ Even forty years later Medvedkin could not rid himself of the prosecutorial urge; when he saw Marker’s short documentary about him he remarked: “Only today have I understood fully that the power of the film-train was in this very effect—to see oneself on the screen as an accused or a hero and to hear society’s verdict on your life.”²⁵ Thus Lunacharsky’s 1920 plea for the nation to demonstrate its soul to itself was turned inside out as a merciless search for disguised enemies.²⁶

In The Last Bolshevik (1993) Marker steps lightly over Medvedkin’s Stalinism, though he does feature the shot from Youth in Bloom in which small children dressed as border guards lead cartoonish enemies of the people at gunpoint through the streets. He does not mention that Medvedkin was secretary of the Party organization at Mosfilm in the worst years of Stalin’s rule.²⁷ Marker attributes the name he adopted for his group of guerilla cinematographers to the Russian word for elephant and the nickname of Viktor Slonimsky, one of Medvedkin’s collaborators on the film-train. For Soviets, however, the primary denotation of the acronym SLON was Solovetskii lager’ osobogo naznacheniia, the first forced-labor prison camp in the USSR, established in 1926. Marker assured Medvedkin that he was immune to any orthodoxy, “this or that”; these labels were based on “the absence of a real disagreement within the socialist world, on what was somewhat simplistically called ‘Stalinism,’ which I would rather try to understand than judge.”²⁸

Figures 43 and 44. Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre), 1993, video. [Stills from Alexandre Medvedkine, Nikolai Izvolov, Chris Marker, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre/Le Bonheur (Arte Video, 2005, DVD]

More puzzling is Marker’s silence about the documentary (i.e., propaganda) films Medvedkin was making during the period of their correspondence, from Attention! Missiles on the Rhine! (1959) and Letter to a Chinese Friend (1969) to Beware, Maoism! (1979) and Alarm (1984). In the early 1960s Medvedkin made two films on the ways Africa was undergoing de-colonization under the watchful eyes of the Western powers. In The Law of Baseness (1962) he surveyed structures of repression in countries from Algeria to Somalia and South Africa, concluding with a section on Wall Street and the United Nations, the entities from which repression continues to flow. The Dawn of the Republic of Ghana (1963) focused on an exchange of visits by Kenneth Nkruma and Nikita Khrushchev. The sharpness of Medvedkin’s analysis is severely blunted by his unwillingness to go beyond the Cold War dichotomies that Marker has always attempted to confound.

In his written correspondence with Marker, Medvedkin constantly seems to suspect that their friendship is founded on a fundamental misapprehension. He might have feared that Marker read Medvedkin’s withering critique of Maoism as a veiled, belated critique of Stalinism. When Medvedkin expressed alarm at the use of his name by a Maoist group in Berlin, “with an aggressive anti-Soviet program that precisely copies the foreign policies of Peking,”²⁹ Marker assured his friend that he would never associate Medvedkin’s name with anything Medvedkin did not approve of.³⁰ Still, unable to extend his trust, in 1983 Medvedkin expressed concern that Marker’s latest film Sans Soleil “will in some way contradict the tireless battle of the Soviet Union against forces that are pushing the world toward nuclear catastrophe . . . I must feel the shoulder of an ally, though from the first days of our friendship and to this day I have never been frightened by our political differences and disagreements.”³¹ Their relationship serves at times as a synecdoche for the larger relationship between the naive, gullible European Left and the tired, cruel Soviet behemoth, with each side aghast at recognizing its own reflection in the other, but refusing to see the other—and therefore itself—for what it actually is. Their friendship survived the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 only, perhaps, because they never discussed it.

One sees the difference between the weathered former Stalinist and the idealistic soixante-huitard when Medvedkin cautions Marker against abandoning the workers of SLON “when at the start they need your strict, precise, sometimes dictatorial guidance.”³² In response Marker appeals to memories and dreams, that is, to images, which is where he seeks the character of the present moment. Marker is unflappable; after all, he knows that the gesture of revolution is always inscribed with failure. That inscription, for him, was a key opening communism up as a distant land of the image.

The secret to Marker and Medvedkin’s correspondence lies not in its content, but in its very fact; it continued throughout all the misunderstandings and divisions, maintaining sincerity without falling into irony, which for Marker is “perhaps more naive than [the] enthusiasm” of the believers (Letter from Siberia). Medvedkin’s last letter to Marker was recorded on a videotape that Marker includes at the beginning of the first of the six letters that comprise Le tombeau d’Alexandre, and in retrospect one recognizes this film as the last missive in an extensive cinematic correspondence that reaches far back, before they even knew of each other’s existence. From N. Karmazinsky’s Film-Letter, a product of the film-train, through Marker’s 1957 Letter from Siberia and Medvedkin’s 1969 Letter to a Chinese Friend, the letter served as a means of deploying the unfulfilled promise of cinema as a revolutionary force.

medium intimacy

Twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the revolutionary desire would appear to have been completely displaced into the realm of the image. Instead of empowering the worker, the task of the artist has become, for many, the empowerment of the spectator, who can dwell in the pure imaginary. Freedom has become the liberation from having to measure the image against any notion of reality. Would this notion of a just society (let’s continue to call it communism) denote the triumph of Evreinov’s network of self-satisfied media consumers? Or is this, in its way, the triumph of the Rousseauist-Lunacharskian hope for the emergence of human community into visibility on its own terms?

If revolution has turned out to be co-extensive with the spread of mass mediation, then now more than ever it has become tied up with an opposition to—perhaps even a dissidence from—the dominant aesthetic regime of late capitalism. The detachment mentioned by Nikolai Punin and Adrian Piotrovsky, the resilient attention of Prishvin and Platonov’s dreamy patience: all of this echoes in the “pensive spectator” encouraged by Raymond Bellour, Jacques Rancière, and Laura Mulvey.³³

Thus we turn to the work of Aleksandr Sokurov, which might otherwise seem an unlikely place to look for answers to the questions raised here. Despite his prolific and sometimes bold experiments as a director, he has professed little regard for cinema as a medium, which irritates him as an imitation of painting and an approximation of literature.³⁴ An even greater obscurantism (as Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson might call it) is evident in his comments on digital media, which he has called “a space of global irresponsibility, both moral and professional . . . a world of inertia and aggression.”³⁵ As both the most public face of experimental filmmaking in Russia and a tireless spokesman for aesthetic antiquarianism, Sokurov typifies an arrière-garde that would include many of the figures discussed above, from Prishvin and Platonov to Medvedkin, Marker, and, to add another poignant name, Andrei Tarkovsky. But Sokurov can only locate intimacy in a past that is to be mourned, in an incessant elegiac monologue that wholly lacks address. This is communist internationalism as the international festival circuit. By linking his self-conscious aesthetic anachronism to a lament for Empire (especially in Russian Ark), Sokurov hazards being regarded as a retrograde plain and simple, who resorts to the cinema only for reasons of expediency. Sokurov’s recent forays into theater, public festival, and the opera suggest that he is increasingly seeing performance as a medium more suited to his nostalgic utopia, though here, too, his style has more to do with academic archaism than with any kind of experimentation.

Figures 45 and 46. Aleksandr Sokurov, Evening Sacrifice, 1987, video. [Leningrad Documentary Film Studio, stills from VHS copy]

And yet Sokurov continues to ask the questions that have stimulated this investigation, and his documentary Evening Sacrifice (1987) provides a provisional way to conclude it. The film begins with a panorama of the confluence of rivers at the heart of Leningrad, the site of public celebrations since the early mass festivals. A battery of young gunners is then shown firing off a festive salute over the river, as a large crowd stands on the bridges. The scene then shifts to a series of shots on Nevsky Prospekt, at the Griboedov Canal, showing celebrants streaming from the celebration, evidently May Day, in the early days of Perestroika. Some of the celebrants are in uniform; most are dressed plainly. Some shots are at eye level, but many are from a point above the crowd. Individual shots recall photographs of skirmishes on Nevsky Prospekt in 1917. The cacophonic soundtrack features crowd noise, sirens, and snippets of popular music, from folk songs recorded in the 1950s to the Beatles and some hard rock. Gradually one discerns strains of Chesnokov’s Orthodox liturgy, including the hymn that gives the film its title. The images exemplify what Jacques Rancière has called Sokurov’s “figures of the interface, known by their passage from one space to another, from the space of the page to the grain of the photograph or the cinematic apparition.”³⁶

Despite these hints of nostalgia, the camera hovers threateningly over the crowd and appears also to elicit a mix of aggression and self-absorption. One boy in particular, armed with an acoustic guitar, presents himself self-consciously as a rock idol; his image cedes to that of a pile of smoking shells shot by the gunners. One man approaches the camera with a still camera of his own. It is at this point that we see how the film’s indeterminate space, where nostalgia and violence lay equal claims, is becoming a focus around which a new community can array itself and come to self-evidence. The impenetrability of this intimate moment of birth turns the camera’s immobility from a posture of surveillance into one of ascetic detachment, of sacrifice even. The promise of communism today lies in the ability of images still, despite it all, to negate themselves before the truth they render.