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9 To Explore or Conquer? MOBILE PERSPECTIVES ON THE SOVIET CULTURAL REVOLUTION EMMA WIDDIS Skore-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e! Skoreoskorei Ei, gubernii, snimaites’ s iakorei! Za Tul’skoi Astrakhanskaia, za makhinoi makhina, Stoiavshie nepodvizhimo dazhe pri Adame, dvinulis’ i na drugie prut, pogromykhivaia gorodami1 —Vladimir Maiakovsky, “150 000 000: Poema” In an unfinished article of the 1940s, Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that during the 1920s, Vladimir Maiakovsky had sought to reformulate the Soviet krugozor (horizon), recognizing that “the age and the masses demand a new range, very distant or very close, just not medium-range, not domestic.”2 In Maiakovsky, then, Bakhtin identi fied an urge to reposition the individual in a new spatial context, to discover a new viewing position from which to understand and experience the transformed world of postrevolutionary Russia. But his insight reaches far beyond the revolutionary young poet and into the broader spectrum of Soviet culture in the first decades after the revolution. Any revolutionary transformation of society is predicated upon the transformation of the world-picture of that society, on a reenvisaging of social and national space, and on the reshaping of the relationship between the individual and space. In Soviet Russia, with its 219 vast, amorphous territory, this task was particularly urgent. In this respect Maiakovsky’s verse, written in 1919 and placed at the head of this essay, provides a useful temporal and thematic point of introduction . In its command to “raise anchors” (snimaites’ s iakorei), it is a clear summons to mobility and exploration. It is a hymn to movement for its own sake—skore-e-e! (fa-a-a-ster)—and a call to energize the whole Soviet space. The horizon, the krugozor, assumed a new ideological significance during the early Soviet period. As the limit of visible space, the horizon was a point of focus, that toward which to strive. Just as the revolution had overcome history, so it would overcome space. The vast Soviet neob’’iatnyi prostor (boundless territory) was pictured as a rich terrain that must be discovered. In the imaginary map of the 1920s, the neob’’iatnyi prostor was not a hostile, resistant natural force to be tamed by heroes or by the expansion of might from a dominant center . It was a land ripe with possibility, the raw material from which a new world was to be shaped. Exploration, movement across the map, and the creation of new routes and networks of communication were clearly articulated and urgent tasks. The roots of this trope of exploration were as much pragmatic as ideological . There was an urgent need to map the space of the new regime, to create for it an imaginary geography. Throughout the 1920s, infrastructure projects such as electrification and the construction of new railroads were, in a sense, acts of surveying—the transformation of space (the unknown) into territory (the known and mapped). Toward the end of the decade, the beginning of collectivization and rapid industrialization in 1928 marked the start of a period of particularly intense spatial exploration, what Katerina Clark has called a “dash to the periphery.”3 Spatial and geographical mobility was a practical condition for the fulfillment of the targets of the first Five-Year Plan. Moshe Lewin’s description of Russia during this period as Rus’ brodiazhnaia, a country of vagrants or nomads, goes some way toward characterizing the chaotic mobility of the age.4 Looking principally at cinema, I examine in this essay the implications of the “mobile perspective” at two levels. First, I sketch the aesthetic and philosophical shift that reenvisaged space as decentered and mobile. Second, I explore the implications of this shift in the development of a new cinematic genre—the “film expedition.” Examining how film was enlisted in the geographic and ethnographic study of the Soviet Union, I trace the ways in which cinema was used both to reveal 220 EMMA WIDDIS and to create the new imaginary map. Identifying the exploratory momentum of the 1920s, I seek to challenge some commonly accepted ideas about Soviet attitudes toward the territory. The roots of the “landscape of Stalinism,” of the imaginary geography of the 1930s, are located in the preceding decade, and particularly in the period of spatial exploration that characterized the Great Leap Forward (velikii perelom) of 1928–32. Osvoenie, the conquest or mastery of space, is the term most frequently used to define both pre- and postrevolutionary attitudes toward the uncharted vastness of the...

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