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ABSTRACT
The Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalskii (1839–1888) conducted extensive expeditions in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and northern Manchuria: contested inter-imperial peripheries between the Russian and Chinese empires of the nineteenth century. In 1950, the biopic Przhevalskii, directed by Sergei Iutkevich, became the first collaboration on a fiction film between the Soviet Union and the recently founded People’s Republic of China. Intended as a performative affirmation of Sino-Soviet friendship, Przhevalskii was ultimately rejected by the Chinese government, which insisted the film’s positive portrayal of the explorer did not align with his historical status as an agent of Russian empire. Building on recent scholarship on Soviet cultural and cinematic internationalism, this article reads Przhevalskii as an allegorical vision of late-Stalinist Soviet internationalism, shaped by the simultaneous expansion of the socialist world into East Asia and the Russian-nationalist triumphalism that drove the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns. This hierarchical, centripetal mode of internationalism clashed with the priorities of a newly socialist Chinese state wary of any reduction to a periphery of a socialist world dominated by Moscow. These tensions find expression in the film’s complex treatment of performance as the mode through which both collaborative authorship and Soviet primacy are affirmed.
Acknowledgements
This article and the cluster emerged from a panel at the 2022 annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Special thanks are due to Stefan Lacny for inviting me to participate in that panel, and to Birgit Beumers for giving the cluster a home at SRSC. Versions of this material have also been presented at the Jordan Center, New York University; in the New Work in Slavonic Studies series at the University of Cambridge; and for the Russian Cinema Research Group at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. I am indebted to the participants in those forums for their feedback and suggestions. Last but not least, I am profoundly grateful to Jeehyun Choi, Steven Lee, Young Lee, and Sophie Lockey for their assistance with the Korean dialogue in Przhevalskii.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Just before the meeting at Dom Kino, Nikolai Ivanovich Sakontikov, the deputy Minister for Cinematography, reportedly told Iutkevich: ‘The Central Committee of the Party has instructed me to destroy you. We need a major figure, and you are the only Doctor of Science, since your colleague [i.e. Sergei Eisenstein] died last year. Besides, I know that you are not Jewish, but you have a very convenient surname: it ends in “ich”’ (Iutkevich Citation1991, 309). All translations are mine unless otherwise specified.
2. The editor of the post-war editions, the geographer Eduard Murzaev, consulted on Przhevalskii and published a biography of the explorer in 1952, the year of the film’s release: N. M. Przheval’skii (Мoscow: Geografgiz, 1952).
3. According to one of the film’s two cameramen, Evgenii Andrikanis, the discovery of Lake Lob-Nor was shot in Kyrgyzstan, and the mountains of southern Kazakhstan stood in for Tibet (Andrikanis Citation1950, 76–77). The film’s producer, M. V. Korchagin, reports that the crossing of the Taklamakan desert was filmed outside Frunze (today’s Bishkek), in an area with no sand dunes; these had to be ‘organised’ with the help of a tractor (Andrikanis Citation1950, 62).
4. For Fadeev’s account see ‘V svobodnom Kitae’, Pravda, 15 December 1949. Simonov’s time in China resulted in the book Srazhaiushchiisia Kitai (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1950).
5. Iutkevich cites such examples from the 1920s as Vladimir Maiakovskii’s poetry on China and Iakov Bliokh’s 1928 documentary Shanghai Document. For more on early Soviet engagements with China, see Tyerman (Citation2021).
6. Iutkevich rejects the term ‘opera’ on the grounds that the music in Chinese theatre primarily serves as rhythmic accompaniment, rather than expressing the ‘conceptual and artistic essence’ of the performance – arguably a claim that preserves a certain Eurocentrism in its positioning of the European art form as conceptually more sophisticated (Iutkevich Citation1953, 41).
7. Przhevalskii’s own account of the governor of Hami is far more positive: he describes him as ‘the best of all the Chinese generals I have ever seen’, and even asks him to sign the expedition diary when his party leaves Hami (Przheval’skii Citation1948a, 74, 79).
8. The film enacts some historical compression here to limit its cast. The expedition’s translator for both Turkic and Chinese was a man from Kuldja named Abdul Basid Yusupov, and Przhevalskii expresses periodic frustration at his abilities (Przheval’skii Citation1948a, 20, 55).
9. Amban is a Manchu term designating a senior official under the Qing dynasty (Chinese dachen 大臣). Here the agitator uses a more specific Chinese term for a provincial governor, futai 撫臺.
10. Iutkevich’s omission of the film’s Mongolian actors speaks to the lesser political (and indeed theatrical) importance of the single scene conducted partially in Mongolian. Inside a yurt, Przhevalskii interviews his host about local mythology and topography, with Irinchinov serving as translator. Strikingly, Mongolian is the only Asian language in which Przhevalskii proves capable of saying a few words – perhaps an intimation of Mongolia’s greater closeness to the USSR.
11. Iutkevich mentions seeing Iron Cage Mountain in Beijing, but misdescribes it as a play in which ‘four Chinese generals … did vigorous battle with foreign warriors who represented the Mongol invaders’ (Iutkevich Citation1953, 96). There are in fact six Chinese generals in the play, and they are doing battle with each other, while the Three Kingdoms period (third century AD) long predates the Mongol invasions of the early thirteenth century. Iutkevich also mistranslates the play’s title as Iron Dragon Mountain (Gora zheleznogo drakona), a mistake seemingly produced by the fact that the Mandarin Chinese words for dragon (long 龍) and cage (long 籠) are homophones.
12. ‘Po stepnym dorogam, vetry obgoniaia,/Vperedi otriada povedu konia./Znaiu – u kryl’tsa kazachka molodaia/Budet vzgliadom provozhat’ menia … ’ (By steppe roads, outpacing the wind,/I will lead my horse ahead of my detachment./I know that a young Cossack woman on her porch/Will accompany me with her gaze). This song is attested in memoir literature of the Second World War (e.g., Sevriugov Citation1957).
13. Significantly, the peasants in Xinjiang are presented as Han Chinese: there is no trace of the Uyghur and Hui populations that Przhevalskii recounts encountering in Hami. Partly this is a practical consequence of the fact that all these scenes were shot in and around Beijing. But it also enables this Sino-Soviet collaboration to sidestep some of the thorny history of Xinjiang as an inter-imperial periphery, including the region’s close demographic and cultural connections to Soviet Central Asia.
14. Guo had recently toured Moscow in the lead role of The White-Haired Girl (Vaganova Citation1952, 38).
15. I draw here and below on the Russian translations of these reports, preserved in Iutkevich’s file in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). I have not been able to access the originals, nor have I been able to identify the Academy of Sciences historian designated in Cyrillic as ‘Ten Min-dzhen’ (most likely Tian Mingjian in Pinyin).
16. I am profoundly grateful to Jeehyun Choi, Steven Lee, Young Lee, and Sophie Lockey for their kind assistance with the Korean dialogue in this scene.
17. According to Iutkevich, these Chinese objections also closed down the film’s distribution across the socialist world. Przhevalskii was due to be shown at the Karlovy Vary film festival in Czechoslovakia, but after the Chinese response it was pulled, and foreign screenings remained limited (Iutkevich Citation1991, 334).
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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 post-socialism. His first book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (2021), rediscovers the intensive engagement with China in 1920s Soviet culture. Current research projects explore Sino-Soviet cultural collaboration in the 1950s and the social imaginary of the Russia-China relationship in the post-socialist period.