Introduction: cinemas of Soviet peripheries

As the proliferation of plurals in our title suggests, this cluster starts from the proposition that both ‘cinemas’ and ‘peripheries’ are multiple, unstable, and relational. To begin with peripheries: following Marta Petrusewicz, we understand the core/periphery dyad as a ‘relational concept’ that describes an unequal relation, but should not be associated with any ‘permanent list of traits’ (Petrusewicz 2019, 18). The history of Russian imperial expansion produced multiple and ‘heterogeneous peripheries’ (North 2019, 63), connecting the Russian Empire with global regions as disparate as the Baltics, the Caucasus, and North-East Asia. The Soviet state inherited these heterogeneous peripheries while seeking to modernise its territory through a complex, nested form of ‘institutionalized multinationality’ (Brubaker 1994, 49). Peripherality can also be traced at different scales. We can speak of Russia as an empire with peripheries, but we can also follow Boris Kagarlitskii (2009) in understanding Russia itself as a ‘peripheral empire’, one whose modern history has been shaped by its abiding economic role as provider of raw materials to the more technologically advanced core of the capitalist world-system. While the founding of the Soviet Union sought to disrupt the logic of this world-system, the Soviet state also aspired to become a counter-centre, the core of an expanding socialist world (Clark 2011).

Scholarship on Soviet cultural history, particular in its early period, has long highlighted the importance of spatial organisation and the spatial imaginary to the consolidation of the Soviet state and the formation of Soviet identities. Canonical readings of Soviet space identify a fluctuation between a ‘centripetal’ drive epitomised by the 1930s, when the subordination of centre to periphery is affirmed and sanctified, and a ‘centrifugal’ drive exemplified by the 1920s, when the ‘flight to the periphery’ pushes against the power of the centre and hints at alternative models of organising space (Paperny, Hill, and Barris 2002; Clark 2003; see also Oukaderova 2017). Equally well established is the central role of cinema in the mapping of Soviet space, mediating to spectators the spatial dynamics of the new Soviet state and affirming its distribution of territorially fixed national identities (Sandomirskaja 2008; Sarkisova 2017; Widdis 2003).

Our cluster builds on these insights by focusing on distinctive cinematic practices at multiple Soviet peripheries. Each periphery has a particular history of relations to the Russian/Soviet centre as well as, in many cases, complex imbrications in other historical core/periphery dynamics. To this end, the articles in this cluster proceed in accordance with the points of the compass: north, east, south, and west. Cinemas are also multiple here. Extending beyond the well-trodden early Soviet period, we trace the development of multiple cinematic practices at the peripheries from the 1920s to the 1970s, including circulation, coproduction, spectatorship, and ethnography. Each of these practices involves a distinct spatial logic in its handling of the centre-periphery relation.

Opening the cluster, Caroline Damiens draws our attention to the North and the question of film circulation. In ‘Screening Films on the Peripheries: “Cine-service” in “Red Chums” for Indigenous Audiences in the Rural Soviet North’, Damiens reconstructs the history of film screenings in the ‘red chums’: travelling culture tents that provided political-educational services to remote communities in the ‘pluriperiphery’ designated as the Far North. Tracing this history from the 1920s to the 1970s, Damiens finds a surprising inversion of the temporal hierarchy between centre and periphery. The institution of the red chums embodied the aspirations of the Soviet mission civilisatrice in the periphery deemed the most ‘backward’ of all by the state’s own taxonomy of modernity. Yet the form of spectatorship that developed in these facilities anticipated the post-modern domestication of cinema, as spectators were few in number and thus found themselves able to choose which films to watch and rewatch. Damiens’ intervention positions cinematic peripheries as sites where hegemonic accounts of space and history find themselves questioned, nuanced, and challenged.

Next, we move to the Sino-Soviet border and the territories on either side, spaces that have served historically as ‘inter-imperial’ peripheries between the various iterations of the Chinese and Russian-Soviet states. Edward Tyerman’s ‘The Adventures of Przhevalskii in Socialist China: Performing Friendship at the Inter-Imperial Periphery’ reconstructs the troubled history of Sino-Soviet collaboration on Sergei Iutkevich’s 1952 biopic of the nineteenth-century Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalskii. Made in the immediate aftermath of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and set in Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet and the Ussuri region, the Przhevalskii project became a site of contention over divergent understandings of two intertwined imperial pasts. Despite the film’s effusive performance of Sino-Soviet friendship, cinematic collaboration at the inter-imperial periphery activated Chinese anxieties over abiding centre-periphery dynamics within the post-war socialist world.

Our journey across the Soviet peripheries travels next to the South Caucasus, where Filip Sestan’s article, ‘Spectator as Worker: The Production Film of Soviet Georgia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot’ makes the case for viewing Kalatozov’s early films through the generic lens of the ‘production film’. Drawing on Sergei Tret’iakov’s theorisation of the ‘production screenplay’, which emerged from his work with the Georgian film studio Goskinprom Gruzii in 1927, Sestan reads Kalatozov’s early films as an idiosyncratic engagement with Tret’iakov’s ideas that seek to interpellate the spectator as a worker implicated in the totality of social production. In so doing, Kalatozov’s films challenge a static, hierarchical understanding of the relationship of periphery to centre by affirming the agency of the ‘peripheral’ position to grasp and engage the dynamics of the whole. Taken together, the transcendence of the ethnographic kulturfilm genre in Salt for Svaneti and the striking lack of local specificity in Nail in the Boot seek to overcome the ‘peripheral’ position of Georgian Soviet cinema itself, resisting the confinement of national film studios to nationally specific thematics.

Lastly, Stefan Lacny’s contribution, ‘(Re)discovering Ukrainianness: Hutsul Folk Culture and Ukrainian Identity in Soviet Film, 1939–1941’, draws attention to the multiple and nested nature of peripheries through a consideration of documentary cinema’s role in incorporating Western Ukraine into the Soviet Union. Reviving forms of close attention to traditional cultural practices typical of the ethnographic kulturfilm of the 1920s (the very genre Kalatozov sought to move beyond), documentaries by Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Iuliia Solntseva present the premodern cultural practices of the Hutsul highlanders of the Eastern Carpathians as both exceptional and quintessentially Ukrainian. In so doing, these films illuminate the complex politics of national affiliation in this historically contested periphery, while also reinforcing a peripheralisation of the Ukrainian SSR itself through its close association with rural folk culture. Here, as elsewhere, the cinematic periphery emerges as a site where the state project of fixing identities is both urgent and unstable.

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Edward Tyerman

Edward Tyerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on cultural connections and exchanges between Russia and China from the early 20th century to the present, within the broader historical contexts of socialist internationalism and postsocialism. His first book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (2021), rediscovers the intensive engagement with China in 1920s Soviet culture. His current project explores Sino-Soviet cultural collaborations and exchanges in the 1950s.