A Union ReframedSovinformbiuro, Postwar Soviet Photography, and Visual Orders in Soviet Central Asia
When Soviet photographer Evgenii Khaldei photographed Red Army soldiers raising the USSR’s flag over the Reichstag on 2 May 1945, he captured not only the arrival of Moscow as a global superpower but also the importance that photojournalism would assume in fashioning the image of the Soviet Union in the world. No longer a pariah but rather the liberator of Europe and a superpower, Moscow faced new challenges in how to present itself. Fashioning the image of a Soviet homeland demanded choices at once aesthetic and political. Presenting an image of the Soviet Union that accented its anti-capitalism and opposition to European imperialism was crucial. Yet other countries were busily remaking their institutions and visual self-presentation too. Journalistic outlets in the United States presented an “American century,” while European empires busily reinvented themselves as commonwealths or federations.1 As the terms of comparison with the West were shifting, Moscow needed to reinvent its own visual brand. It had to remind the world what relevance its own policies of ethnofederal republics and citizenship for all—rather than a distinction between metropolitan citizens and colonial subjects—held for the rest of the world. Nor was this merely a repackaging race for its own sake. With communist parties in Eastern Europe struggling for power, communist parties in Western Europe on the upswing, and all of Europe mired in economic depression, Moscow faced both challenges and opportunities. Soviet photographers and journalists had to supply audiences [End Page 553] with visual documents not only of socialist prosperity but also of the Soviet alternative to racial democracy and colonial empire.
As Soviet embassies around the world dispatched negatives to communist, socialist, and trade-union papers, the Soviet Union seized on Central Asia to show the enlightened side of Soviet policy. Here former tsarist colonies and protectorates had been transformed into nominally autonomous ethnofederal republics. Already during the interwar period, the five republics carved out of Central Asia had attracted sympathy from European or American socialists, who contrasted them, naïvely, to American cotton plantations and to British or French aerial bombardments in Mandate Iraq or Syria. Soviet Central Asia, it would seem, gave the lie to Western imperialists’ claims to represent “civilization.”2 And during a brief postwar moment, the Soviet federal model gained admirers among not just the anti-imperialist Left but also European imperial administrators as well as colonial intellectuals seeking a nonimperial formula for federative polities.3 The Soviet vision of politics was, in short, attractive in the postwar years. It needed only photographers to shoot it, state outlets and Soviet embassies to package it, and newspapers to print and sell it to European and colonial observers.
While the study of imperial visual culture has long occupied the attention of scholars of the British and French empires, studies of the visual ordering of the Soviet periphery remain limited.4 Scholarship on Soviet photography focuses primarily on Russia and the prewar period.5 Some studies of tsarist colonial photography have shifted the focus toward Eurasia, but the Soviet period in [End Page 554] general, and the postwar period in particular, remains poorly understood.6 Studying the visual culture of the Soviet peripheries would not only contribute to an emerging “visual turn” in the study of the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but also—at least as specifically concerns Central Asia—offer a new entry point to debates about the relationship of the Soviet experience to empire.7 As Adeeb Khalid has urged, we need to move beyond comparisons of the Soviet experience to an ideal type of what empire—or its visual culture—looks like.8 As noted above, any use of empire as an analytical concept must be grounded in the postwar reality of empires seeking to reform themselves through federative solutions—indeed, often with the Soviet Union as a reference point in mind. But what if, in addition to thinking about the Soviet relationship to empire less through juridical or political categories of subject or citizen, or through economics, we did so by thinking about how Soviet media depicted the differences between and relationships among the multiethnic population of the USSR?9 How, in short, did the Soviet Union depict the territories it had transformed from tsarist colonies into Soviet republics, especially as European [End Page 555] decolonization and the Cold War changed the terms on which Soviet rule in Central Asia would be judged?
This article explores these questions by examining how Soviet institutional photography of Central Asia for the outside world was transformed as a result of the early Cold War and the Stalinist anticosmopolitan campaigns of the late 1940s. It argues that the postwar years were critical for the establishment of a stable visual language for representing Soviet ethnofederalism, and yet the politics of what this stabilized visual order could be used against were quite fluid. More specifically, while the postwar years of 1946–48 established consistent and durable guidelines for locating “the national” and “the Soviet” in photographs of Central Asia, in just these two years Soviet Central Asia went from playing the role of democratic foil to British and American liberalism to a subject acceptably free of “cosmopolitan” associations. Depending on the ideological context, in short, Central Asia could be redefined against different enemies internal and external. Soviet photographers’ mandate for covering Central Asia initially expanded after the Great Patriotic War to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet federative, “democratic” model to that of the United States or the British Commonwealth. Very quickly, however, political mandates forced depictions of the region into an effort to combat “cosmopolitanism” and to promote the Soviet Union’s geopolitical position in Eastern Europe. Ironically, moreover, it was often Soviet organizations staffed predominantly by Jews that were tasked with this assignment. Yet soon the campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “formalism” that had driven Soviet photographers to the Eurasian periphery away from photographic subjects in Moscow and Leningrad became weapons wielded against “Jewish” photographic organizations. The institutions of Soviet photography would later be reconstituted from the ashes, but only after two very different ideological mandates—the Soviet Union as a different kind of empire or as an anti-Western polity—had forged a durable visual order for Soviet Central Asia.10
This article develops this argument through a close study of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro, SIB), the press agency of the USSR. SIB was founded on 24 June 1941, three days after the Nazi invasion, to provide [End Page 556] “enlightenment on international events, the internal life of the country, as well as the enlightenment of wartime events.”11 Its work began with daily radio broadcasts, and SIB soon became a small media empire that produced original war reporting and articles for domestic and foreign newspapers.12 Its ranks included some of the most prominent figures in Soviet letters, such as Aleksei Tolstoi, Vasilii Grossman, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Ilya Ehrenburg (Il’ia Erenburg), to name only a few.13 During the Great Patriotic War, SIB’s links with Soviet press distribution offices abroad, such as Sovfoto in New York, made it the crucial distribution point for depictions of Soviet partisan warfare and the Nazis’ mass murder of Soviet Jews.14 Indeed, during the early 1940s, SIB was the first photographic agency in the world to document the crimes that we now know as the Holocaust, even as the Soviet state did not portray the events as a Jewish catastrophe per se.
As a result, SIB performed rather disparate tasks, becoming intertwined with Stalinist policies toward Soviet Jewry while simultaneously propagandizing the war effort and capturing life in peripheries. As [End Page 557] historian David Shneer has noted, Soviet Jews dominated the ranks of the photojournalistic profession, and SIB housed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. As such, it formed the institutional home for the only serious treatment of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, whether through The Black Book (a commissioned book project on Nazi crimes specifically committed against the Jews) or photographs of Nazi extermination camps.15 Primarily, however, Sovinformbiuro coordinated the information offensive against the Nazis and, later, Moscow’s Cold War rivals. SIB was led by Solomon Lozovskii, who had substantial experience in foreign affairs as head of the ill-starred Profintern from 1921 to 1937 and deputy foreign minister to Viacheslav Molotov from 1939 to 1946.16 These experiences left him well educated about the worldwide press and about geopolitics more generally. This mattered greatly after the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, when SIB acquired several foreign press offices and book printing operations and became responsible for the distribution of stock photos to Soviet embassies abroad and to international news agencies.
SIB’s intertwined history with Western news outlets explains how several thousand SIB photographs arrived at the Fung Library of Harvard University—the sources that, along with archival holdings from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), form the basis of this article.17 The key figure in the photographs’ peripatetic history was Andrew Steiger, a Harvard alumnus who worked for McGraw-Hill’s Moscow office in the 1930s and 1940s.18 In 1947, Steiger became the Moscow bureau chief for McGraw- [End Page 558] Hill after his boss, Robert Magidoff, was deported on charges of espionage.19 Steiger inherited McGraw-Hill’s working collection of SIB photographs and worked in Moscow for two more years, during which time he also received SIB photos of Eastern Europe from the bureau chief for World News Service in Prague. Upon his return to the United States in 1949, Steiger approached Harvard with the collection, which includes work from Evgenii Khaldei, Georgii Zelma, Arkadii Shaiket, Iakov Khalip, and Max Penson, among others.20 Consisting of 5,780 photographs dating from 1946 to 1948, the collection stands out less for its size than for its wide geographic and thematic coverage—a breadth that allows us to use it to inform discussions about the history of visual culture in Soviet Central Asia.21
To do so, we need first to understand the context of immediate postwar discussions within the offices of SIB. We can then turn to the photographs that emerged from the organization’s early endeavors in Central Asia. At that point, anti-imperialism, not anticosmopolitanism, still informed SIB’s mission. Last I examine how the turn toward anticosmopolitanism in the Soviet Union reinforced SIB’s mission to capture the Soviet periphery on film, though for different reasons from those a mere two years prior. By the late 1940s, the mandate of producing photography that was at once “antiformalistic” and suitable to win the hearts and minds of East European [End Page 559] audiences had displaced SIB’s earlier concerns with portraying the Soviet Union as a different kind of federation.
Immediate Postwar Discussions in Sovinformbiuro
Well before the war’s end, SIB’s head, Solomon Lozovskii, reflected on the importance of Central Asia to the Soviet Union’s international engagement. In a 9 January 1945 presentation to SIB writers, Lozovskii discussed a recent visit to the Central Asian SSRs by Iranian Communists, who “said that they had never thought that in 28 years—indeed, Uzbekistan was late in arriving to the revolution, so, more precisely, 25 years—one of the former colonies could change so dramatically. Take Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. These were all tortured colonial nations.”22
As Lozovskii believed, Soviet socialism in Uzbekistan could provide a model for Middle Eastern or Asian Communists. Yet his point was not one of premature Third World solidarity or racial or religious affinity. Rather, he stressed that Central Asia mattered primarily because it demonstrated the superiority of “Soviet democracy.” SIB had to showcase how “these colonial slaves of yesterday”—Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and so on—participated in the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities. In doing so, it could show how “our representatives are baked from a different dough than the overwhelming majority of representatives of the bourgeoisie of capitalist countries, besides a small group of Communists who represent the future of each of these capitalist countries.”23 Lozovskii pointed out that efforts by the US Senate or the British House of Lords (themselves expressly undemocratic institutions in capitalist countries) to appease their colonial populations were doomed to failure. Only “our Soviet democracy” had forged representative [End Page 560] institutions that reconciled difference, even backwardness, with representative democracy.24
This opinion was not idiosyncratic within the Sovinformbiuro ranks. In a 25 May 1945 meeting of SIB’s Far Eastern Division, journalists and photographers responsible for dispatches to China, Korea, and Japan encouraged more comparisons between the former colonies of imperial Russia and those of the British Empire to show how the USSR had reformed its former colonies into a democratic federation. As one photographer noted, “when we speak and draw a map that depicts Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan now, that has more effect than thousands of proclamations—not just on the normal reader but even a member of the intelligentsia in the Near or Far Eastern countries. That is the incarnation into life of our nationalities policy, the development of backward peoples [narodnosti], which is precisely what the English empire is suffering from. The question of the relationship of nationalities was solved by us, indeed only by us and in the form that only we could have solved it.”25
Photography thus needed to be directed against British imperialism abroad rather than internal enemies. If SIB presented what it called “Muslim republics” properly, the moral bankruptcy of British imperialism would become clear by demonstrating the inability of British institutions to manage backwardness.
The photographer cited above made this clear when he corrected his use of the term “Muslim republic,” adding: “I mean, ‘Muslim’ according to the previous composition of the population—our republics are not characterized by their religious composition.”26 The future of the colonial world was not decolonization on the basis of national or confessional self-determination, but rather incorporation into larger—and, crucially, noncapitalist—federative polities. SIB propaganda therefore avoided promoting national independence movements directly, even while seeking to delegitimize existing empires [End Page 561] as doubly illegitimate (because hierarchical and capitalist). Accordingly, they would treat only those independent states that already existed. Hence Lozovskii stressed that it would be inappropriate to produce a brochure on Soviet-Indian relations, “since we never had relations [with India], we can only wish them the speediest possible liberation from England.” More appropriate, argued Lozovskii, would be brochures on relations with Iran or Turkey, both independent states.27 Lozovskii’s frame of reference, like that of the journalist cited above, remained a world in which the Soviet Union would compete against Western empires and a small number of independent, peripheral states (Iran, Turkey, China, Egypt). Moscow offered not a road toward sovereign independence but rather an alternative to Western forms of federation.
However internationally minded these debates may sound, it bears stressing that they coincided with an emergent Soviet campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Stalin hinted at the direction of things to come in his 24 May 1945 toast at a reception for the Red Army, describing the Russian people as “the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union” and “the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country.”28 Historical or artistic references that besmirched Russian nationalism soon became politically suspect. In August and September 1946, Central Committee decrees criticized the Soviet magazines Zvezda and Leningrad for fostering pro-Western, pro-bourgeois sentiments, demanded a ban on the performance of Western pieces in Soviet opera houses, and led to a purge of several leading figures in the Soviet opera scene for their alleged historical falsifications of Russian-Caucasian relations.
The “struggle against cosmopolitanism” held consequences for SIB. In October 1946, directives arrived at SIB’s offices demanding less coverage of “cosmopolitan” topics in Moscow, and more coverage of the country outside of the capital. At a 29 October 1946 meeting, SIB journalists, including a certain Turetskii, stressed the need to focus more on the peripheral areas of the Soviet Union in order to “propagandize without seeming to do so in the realm of Soviet nationalities policy in the economy.”29 Another contributor, [End Page 562] however, pointed out how difficult these directives would be to fulfill. Peripheral regions such as Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Volga watershed, the Urals, and Siberia were wholly unknown to Soviet citizens, much less to foreigners. The SIB photographer himself struggled to explain how to make Soviet Eurasia comprehensible to a foreign audience. Americans, he stressed,
do not know about the Urals, but the Appalachians they do know about—and the Appalachians are more or less the same as our Urals in terms of configuration and so on. We have to show, “Here, here are the Soviet Appalachians,” so that he can begin to imagine them for himself more realistically and begin to digest things for himself better. Our Siberia with their highlands and so on. [Soviet geography] reminds one of the entire system of the Cordillera, the Rocky Mountains, and so on. You can look for analogues to Central Asia in Florida. From this viewpoint, you’ll catch on to a certain imagination, since the viewer knows his own country, and you can then expand something on that existing canvas.30
While the photographer’s comparison of Central Asia to Florida might seem fanciful, it is telling of the associative geographies at work in the SIB collective. The “national republics” of Central Asia were, their exoticism or backwardness notwithstanding, as much a part of the Soviet nation-space as Florida or Colorado were of the American. The point was not to delegitimize overseas colonies—which were not mentioned here—but rather to champion the USSR as offering a form of democratic federalism superior to that of the United States.31
Despite the crucial geopolitical role such regions—both nationally federated and industrialized—could play in distinguishing the Soviet Union from the British Empire or the United States, much of the USSR remained visually unintelligible. One SIB member conceded this fact in a 2 December 1946 meeting, noting that “we mainly write about Moscow, maybe Leningrad, but as far as the periphery and the national republics go, one can say that we do not do anything, that the articles on this theme are of an episodic, random [End Page 563] character. Some comrade arrives from Tashkent or Alma-Ata, [he] writes up an article on it—it is very interesting, but not enough.”32
The belief that viewers lacked paradigms through which to approach Central Asia was odd, for the region actually had a well-developed legacy of photographic interventions and reframings. That legacy included such works as the tsarist-era Turkestanskii al´bom and avant-garde interwar endeavors, and national almanacs. Even certain issues of SSSR na stroike focused on the new national republics.33 Perhaps the SIB collective’s sense of disorientation merely reflected the relative dearth of representations of Central Asia, as compared to a rich tradition of literary, poetic, and photographic works dedicated to the Caucasus or, more recently still, the subtropics.34
By early 1947, Sovinformbiuro was dispatching photographers into the field, yet old faults quickly seemed to repeat themselves. SIB photographers fanned out across the country, but coverage of the union republics (the term the SIB collective now used in lieu of “national republics”) paled in comparison to that of the RSFSR or, worse, Moscow itself. In the first half of 1947, photographs of the Soviet capital accounted for two-thirds of SIB’s photographic output, while the Central Asian SSRs together garnered less than 5 percent of total coverage. Even by the end of that calendar year, Moscow still accounted for half of the organization’s photography, while several union republics went undocumented altogether.35 Worse still, few of the photographs of the periphery were thematically coherent enough to send abroad.
SIB’s editorial team made its dissatisfaction clear. One mid-1947 internal report flagellated photographers for failing to conform to the October 1946 decrees, noting:
1. The division’s work is drifting. No thematic planning has been carried out in the division. As a result … the most common themes were questions of art—more precisely, ballet—which accounted for 16 percent of all themes, while questions of industry and agriculture combined accounted for only 12 percent of all works.
2. Geographic photo information has been limited to Moscow and Leningrad. The life of most union republics is either not illuminated at [End Page 564] all (Estonian, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Turkmen) or in such a quantity that testifies only to the most superficial illumination of the great achievements of the union republics in all areas of socialist construction. If we look at the total quantity of photo information sent overseas in the first period, union republics were represented in only 13 percent of photographs.
According to the report, 17 percent of all photographs covered “art,” nearly double the coverage that any other theme received. While coverage of industry was not trivial (8.3 percent), the disproportionate coverage of culture may be attributed to photographers’ failure to leave the Soviet capital.36 Even a year after this late 1946 criticism of too much focus on Moscow and Leningrad was issued, the “two capitals” still accounted for two-thirds of all SIB photographs.37
Granted, the photographs that SIB exported were effective on their own terms. Soviet ambassadors and embassy staff from Argentina, Denmark, and South Africa wrote to SIB to thank them for the material, which found its way to the Argentine Communist Party journal Selecciones soviéticas, unidentified Buenos Aires-based “Slavic newspapers,” and traveling displays used in Copenhagen-area schools. The Soviet general consul in Johannesburg reported that SIB photographs had been set up as an exhibition to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution in the Johannesburg City Library; visitors to the exhibition wrote in the comment book, “Now I believe!” and “A stunning answer to the capitalist countries.”38 Though such photographs failed to reframe the Soviet Union as a different kind of polity—at least on the terms envisioned by SIB’s leadership—they appealed to foreign audiences.
Yet appeal was insufficient, at least according to house policy at SIB. Soviet photographers were missing the opportunity to present the fully democratic, federal, and—increasingly—noncosmopolitan face of the USSR. The Soviet Union had turned the Russian Empire’s vast, multiethnic territories into the world’s largest experiment in postimperial federalism and citizenship. Photographers ought to be contrasting this accomplishment with Britain and [End Page 565] France’s formal colonies, imperialists’ retention of personal civil status in their colonies, or the inequality inherent in bourgeois parliamentary institutions.39 Instead, Soviet photographers had indulged themselves with coverage of Moscow, Leningrad, and high culture that did little to distinguish the Soviet polity from its rivals. The next shooting year would have to be different.
Inscribing Central Asia
As SIB’s photographers fanned out into the field once more, reframing the USSR as a superior form of multinational polity would require coming to terms with innumerable political questions. Three of them will be the focus of this section: the status of native women, European settlements, and the periphery in the metropole.
Women and their bodies represented a crucial front for the transformation of colonial subjecthood into federative citizenship. The symbolic work to be accomplished was particularly urgent in Central Asia. There, not only was the traditional horsehair veil thought to be particularly odious, but women “oppressed” by the veil were also thought to form a viable “surrogate proletariat” that could compensate for the absence of any significant local working class.40 Earlier Soviet photodocumentary endeavors had devoted considerable space to the “woman question,” demonstrating how Bolshevik rule had empowered women to deveil and become socialist citizens. The avant-garde magazine SSSR na stroike covered this topic extensively. One 1931 feature on Tajikistan, for example, highlighted the case of a 16-year-old girl wearing a paranja as she stood in a courthouse, suing her husband for abuse. The judge in the courthouse, the feature underscored, was “the first woman in the city to discard her veil after the revolution.”41 The photographic presence [End Page 566] of female judges submitting men to the (Soviet) law stressed the transition from male-administered customary and sharia law to a uniform civil code that applied uniformly to Soviet citizens, without any difference between men and women. One element was so far missing in the photographs presented in SSSR na stroike, however. Because their stress lay on the transition from feudal inequality to socialist emancipation, they did relatively little to explain the relationship between nationalities policy and socialism.
This changed in SIB’s photography of Central Asian women. It bears noting that these photographs were taken after the massive wartime evacuation of industry to the region, an event that exponentially increased the number of industrial enterprises—and, with it, the number of women in industry—in the region.42 Partly because of the transformed opportunities for women in the region after 15 additional years of Soviet power, photographers could now move beyond legal emancipation to emphasize the doubly national and Soviet character of exemplary women across the region. Photographs of schools in Tajikistan depicted young girls with “native” braided hairstyles, skullcaps, or, lavish “native” clothing; yet paranjas—the crucial markers of difference—disappeared.43 The women depicted in SIB’s Central Asian campaigns symbolized a victorious present rather than an imminent future. Women had not only shattered the legal order of the customary law, the sharia, of the Emirate of Bukhara but had also evolved sufficiently to embrace primordialized national identities that were also grounded in Soviet citizenship. If photographs of the 1930s showed girls in a Central Asian classroom to celebrate the mere fact that girls were attending school, SIB’s photographs lionized the periodic order of Tajik girls recognizable as at once national (the fabrics of their dresses) and Soviet (their scarves and submission to a standardized curriculum). Similarly, a series of SIB shots of young Tajik women in Stalinabad emphasized their cultural accomplishments within Soviet Tajik institutions. One ballet dancer, Lyutfi Zakhidova, was featured as an outstanding representative of Soviet Tajiks and photographed before an oriental arabesque background.44 The [End Page 567]
V. Shakhovskii, “Tajik female students study all their disciplines in their native language. A mathematics lesson in the sixth class of Women’s School no. 5.” From the folder “In the Tadzik Women’s School.” All photographs from SIB Photograph Collection, Harvard University.
V. Shakhovskii, “Lyutfi Zakhidova, the youngest Tajik ballet dancer, performs in the main roles on the stage of the Tajik Opera and Ballet Theater. The government of the Tajik SSR has awarded her the title of Honored Artist of the Republic.” From the folder “Kara-Kalpak Region.”
[End Page 568]
choice of Zakhidova as a subject was significant, since SIB staff in Moscow had complained about too much coverage of ballet in the Soviet capital (13 percent of photographs in 1947).45 They had not wished to ban ballet per se, however, but to emphasize that cultural forms deemed elitist in the capital could, having migrated to the periphery, stand in as markers of successful assimilation into Soviet culture. Central Asians may have been backward, but they were becoming Soviet Turkmen, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, members of a primordial nation and yet assimilated into a supranational Soviet citizenry.46 This conception of Sovietness was deeply influenced by select elements of Russian culture, but the dynamic was far from Russification.47
Photographs like these did double duty, satisfying Lozovskii’s original vision of the Soviet Union as a countermodel to the British Empire and United States, while simultaneously addressing the call to pursue less cosmopolitan (read: Moscow- and Leningrad-centric) subjects. Yet SIB did not designate all photographs as acceptable for foreign consumption, as the Harvard photograph collection shows.48 As negatives arrived in Moscow throughout 1947–48, not every attempt at unifying “the national” and “the Soviet” was deemed successful. In one 6 May 1948 discussion in Moscow, an SIB editorial member, Comrade Popov, criticized Max Alpert’s photographs of the First Central Asian State University in Tashkent.49 Popov pointed to the [End Page 569] longer-standing problems of random shot selection, but he also insisted that Alpert and other photographers find scenes that contained an unambiguous fusion of “national” and Soviet themes.
Another correspondent depicted the university in Tashkent. But depicting this is not so simple. Comrade Alpert must not have thought long about what was typical for this university, since there is much that is typical in it, because it is national and because it is Soviet. You have to show the national types of pedagogues and students in this university. You have to show the educational work, the social life. You have to show what people from everyday backgrounds (workers or kolkhoz workers) are studying here. You have to show the life of these students in their dormitories. These are the most elementary things. I am saying this so that you can edit out [razrabotat´] the appearance in the shot of any other random theme, so that you can pick out the typical characteristic traits that you need to fix upon [zafiksirovat´] , having tossed out everything that makes the theme shallow [melkoi] and meaningless.50
Not satisfied with a mere quantitative increase in the number of photographs, Popov rejected the idea that photographs from Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan were ipso facto “national” by virtue of their setting. In SIB’s institutional understanding, subjects merely inhabiting the ethnoterritorial boundaries of their titular republic did not automatically qualify visually as representatives of the “national.” Rather, the “national” had to be stressed through any number of primordialized ethnic markers deemed to belong to the “Uzbeks” or the “Tajiks,” for example—horse raising, as we will see in the case of Soviet Turkmen, or “oriental” textiles and arabesques in the case of Soviet Tajiks. At the same time, “national” types had to be depicted in “Soviet” contexts—opera houses, universities, collective farms—defined by “Soviet culture” (ballet, for example) and the planned economy. Regrettably, Alpert’s photographs do not form part of the Harvard Collection, though the stylized background in V. Shakhovskii’s accepted photograph of Lyutfi Zakhidova underscores Popov’s point: without the recognizably “Tajik” background, Lyutfi could have been anywhere.
Imprinting Central Asian places into a Soviet visual order mattered just as much as documenting progress on the “women question.” Earlier photodocumentary projects like SSSR na stroike had stressed the orderliness of newly constructed cities like Stalinabad (so named until 1961, when it [End Page 570] became Dushanbe), whose whitewashed dormitories and straight paved streets contrasted with the “clay huts with mud reeds” and the “narrow obscure streets” of the small hamlet that sat at the confluence of two rivers until Soviet modernization arrived.51 But SIB photographers, no longer merely content to represent the overcoming of backwardness, faced a different challenge: how to render visually the urban spaces of Central Asian cities, where a Slavic settler population dominated in the immediate aftermath of wartime evacuations? The answer was to depict Central Asian urban spaces (like pre-earthquake Ashgabat, pictured on the next page) as ethnically diverse spaces in which non-national Soviet culture advanced Slavic settlers and Turkmen natives alike. Photographs of the Turkmen SSR capital depicted Slavs in European dress out for a stroll on Gogol Street; Slavs and Turkmen swimming together at a city pool; and both Slavic and Central Asian citizens attending a horse race at a hippodrome. When faced with a heat wave, the inhabitants of the city escaped to civilized, hygienic spaces like the swimming pool, or spaces such as the boulevards of Ashgabat where they displayed healthy bodies in European garb, or engaged in formerly Russian aristocratic pursuits popularized as models of Soviet kul´turnost´.52 No longer did there appear the familiar visual cue of the “Muslim quarter” or the “Old City” as a space of backwardness to be overcome. No racist European settler empire—such was the story the photographs told—the Soviet Union had successfully combined ethnonational aspirations (the union republics) with the universal progress offered by Soviet culture. Prior to the anticosmopolitan campaigns to come, markers of Russian or European culture could serve as signs of a healthy, nonimperial life when transmitted to, and photographed in, the periphery.
Yet in spite of SIB’s claim to champion a progressive universalism, a closer look at photographs of Moscow itself suggests how a spatial hierarchy still pervaded SIB’s project. All places in the Soviet Union fit into a hierarchy that ranked them according to their journey from backwardness to acceptably national and Soviet spaces. Yet there existed another hierarchy that “divided spaces according to their metaphorical proximity to Moscow and level of sacralization.”53 One series of SIB photos on Turkmen Akhal-teke horses, [End Page 571]
M. Trakhman, “A huge swimming pool built in Ashkhabad by the city soviet.” From the folder “Ashkhabad—Capital of Soviet Turkmenia.”
M. Trakhman, “The stands at the Ashkhabad city stadium are always filled with spectators during sports competitions.” From the folder “Ashkhabad—Capital of Soviet Turkmenia.”
[End Page 572]
a prize export, underscored the hierarchies at play. An unidentified SIB photographer captured a horse farm near Ashgabat, while other photographers emphasized the role of Akhal-teke in horse races during Nowruz Toi, the mid-March celebration of New Year. But the most remarkable photographs from the “Akhal-Tekin Horses” file depict the pilgrimage of the horses and their Turkmen trainers to hippodromes in Moscow. Once the Turkmen and their horses arrive at the Central Moscow Hippodrome, they become a spectacle. The captions for the photographs ethnographize the horse expert Khalmi Gediyev, describing him as a “handsome specimen.”54 The captioning of the depiction of Gediyev, not to mention the angle of the shot, is nearly identical to that of the photographs of the horses (see next page), turning both the primordialized Turkmen and his stallion into forms of “symbolic tribute in the form of animals,” exhibits in the Soviet zoo of visual hierarchy used to reinvent 19th-century tsarist “colonial penetration.”55 However they may have been represented in their home republics, Central Asian subjects in the capital were defined according to orientalizing tropes and visual hierarchies. In contrast to the confident Tajik women who claim the Soviet national spaces of Stalinabad for themselves, Central Asians in Moscow are reframed as objects for twice-removed European consumption: once in Soviet locations like the hippodrome, then again by international audiences through the frame of SIB’s photographs.
Yet the visual order enshrined by SIB’s photographers ought not to mislead us into viewing this as just an iteration of an ideal type of colonial visual order. As scholars like Timothy Mitchell stress, European colonial empires frequently arranged “the world as exhibition” through photography to the point that visitors to Egypt carried in their head an “imaginary map” of the city and found themselves “rediscovering here much more than [they] discovered.” Scholars of the British Empire stress, likewise, how 19th-century [End Page 573]
Photographer unknown, “This handsome specimen of bearded Turkmenian, striking in his native sheepskin ‘busbie,’ is Khalmi Gediyev, who has been a jockey and trainer of Akhal-Tekin race horses at Stud Farm no. 69 for 25 years. He has trained many of the prizewinning horses which have made the Akhal-Tekins famous on Russian race tracks.” From the folder “Akhal-Tekin Horses.”
Photographer unknown, “Another fine specimen of Akhal-Tekin race horse that is the pride of Stud Farm no. 69, is Meleke, younger brother of Kizil.” From the folder “Akhal-Tekin Horses.”
[End Page 574]
Britons saw farflung regions of the globe, like the South Pacific, as part of a global “British space” thanks to paintings and scientific expeditions. In contrast, and as SIB’s staff glumly conceded, the Soviet visual imagination of Eurasia remained weakly developed.56 Whereas British colonial photographers noted as early as 1863 that “there is now scarcely a nook or corner, a glen, a valley, or mountain, much less a country, on the face of the globe which the penetrating eye of the camera has not searched,” Soviet photographers could not shake the sense that they had scarcely imprinted Soviet geography into citizens’ photographic imagination.57 Tellingly, before the SIB contributor quoted earlier commented on Americans’ inability to digest Soviet geography, he bemoaned that even Soviet students and, more tellingly, members of the intelligentsia “do not know our elementary map.” Indeed, SIB’s expeditions were premised on the assumption that SIB had barely documented the “national republics.”58 Far from saturating an existing visual canon with more “re-presentations” of the Orient, SIB’s photographers were creating the visual references that would make Central Asia intelligible to Soviet and foreign publics—an Orient at once mobilized through signs of Soviet civilization—opera houses, hippodromes, and Russian-language theaters—yet still spatially subjugated to Moscow.59
Struggling against Cosmopolitanism
SIB’s mission had been a success. Central Asia had been rescued from oblivion in the Soviet visual canon. Yet SIB’s quest to reinscribe the Soviet periphery took place parallel to another Soviet campaign against cosmopolitanism—a coincidence that would have consequences for the institution and the broader ideological mission in which photography of Central Asia was executed.60 As we saw, Stalin had made gestures in 1945 toward promoting Russian nationalism in favor of Soviet internationalism, but during 1947 and 1948 [End Page 575] the campaign to redefine the Soviet Union’s place in the world grew acidly xenophobic. The initial thrusts in the campaign seemed distant from SIB. During the summer and autumn of 1947, Bolshevik ideologues attacked the long-deceased Aleksandr Veselovskii, a scholar of 19th-century literature who had sought to establish a general (as opposed to a specifically Russian) theory of literature.61 Living authors like Isaak Nusinov were criticized, meanwhile, for disparaging Russia as an “Eastern country” that lagged behind the West.62 Soon the campaign took on an openly antisemitic tone. One month after the UN General Assembly’s November 1947 vote to create a Jewish and Arab state in Palestine, the director of the Soviet Union’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered. Many of the Soviet Union’s most famous Yiddish writers were sacked from Soviet Yiddish-language publications like Eynikayt (Unity), while Pravda released four of its Jewish journalists without cause.63 More and more, the formerly internationalist Soviet Union defined itself as an anti-Western power opposed as much to Jewish enemies within as American and British foes without.
Such policy shifts could not but affect an institution as closely tied with Soviet Jewry as SIB. As we saw, already in late 1947, internal criticism had mounted that photographic coverage still focused too much on Moscow, Leningrad, and high culture (in particular, ballet)—the spaces and institutions of an urban, educated Soviet elite wherein “Jewish and Russian [identity] were virtually interchangeable.”64 Indeed, this critique had propelled SIB’s coverage toward Central Asia in the first place. But throughout 1948, demands on SIB’s thematic coverage only increased. Photography of “art” needed to be replaced by “historical-revolutionary themes,” “industry,” “agriculture,” and “byt and production.”65 SIB photographers had to remove themselves from cosmopolitan spaces and present the Soviet Union to the world as a country not of opera, literature, and cosmopolitan urban spaces but rather of iron, [End Page 576] steel, and national republics. Only a few years earlier, the principle guiding Lozovskii’s mission had been to portray a multiethnic, multiconfessional Soviet Union as a virtuous alternative to the British Empire or the United States. Now, the challenge was to reify the Soviet Union as a country defined against the bogeyman of a Jewish “fifth column.” Needless to say, new demands made for a curious change of mission at SIB. Earlier, during the war, Soviet Jewish photographers had been tasked with visually redefining Nazi crimes against Jews into atrocities against denationalized “antifascists.” Now they were called upon to shore up a different vision of the Soviet Union as a superior form of empire—not because of its institutions but because of its rejection of an imagined Western and Jewish threat.
As editors discussed how to implement these policies, a xenophobic tone began to dominate staff meetings. The specter of “formalism” now haunted discussions. In a 19 February 1948 discussion, SIB’s employees used the American and British press as an example “of why we have to talk so much about the ideology and ideological direction of our work.”66 Holding up an issue of the American magazine Life, one editor disparaged the publication as an example of how a “random photograph of the life of our people, when selected randomly and without any ulterior thought, can be not only useless but also harmful.”67 SIB’s editors had always criticized photographers for ignoring the proper fusion of the national and the Soviet in their shot selections, yet now these problems were interpreted—using the Americans as a cautionary tale—as reflecting less carelessness and more a lack of constant ideological discipline. In a 6 May 1948 meeting with photographers, an editor, Comrade Grositskaia, declared a “merciless struggle against all signs of formalistic tendencies, the unprincipled imitation of the style and manner of American photojournalists. We should create a simple, clear, expressive photographic art—such kind of photographs that convey to the consciousness of the simple man the truth about our great Motherland and Her great deeds.”68 Grositskaia stressed the dynamism of Soviet society and the [End Page 577] challenges this placed before the photojournalist. “Only a creative collective that contains in itself the elements of uninterrupted creative growth,” she explained, could visually capture the constant development under socialism.69 Soviet society was evolving so rapidly that photographers who did not constantly adjust their style would produce not art but rather “a mere template, cut and dried.” Only two years ago, the United States had represented only a flawed capitalist democracy—and part of a crucial antifascist alliance. Now, however, given the new pressures of a Cold War ideological climate, America represented a grave example of how photography sans ideological direction would lose all political meaning.
These were not just obscure internal matters. Ideological debates at SIB took place in direct connection to foreign policy, since SIB supplied all photodocumentary information about the Soviet Union to an outside world increasingly suspicious if not hostile to Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. SIB’s control over photographs applied, moreover, not just to taking shots and selecting the ones deemed appropriate but also to the actual distribution of photographs to foreign news agencies. The task, stressed Grositskaia, was particularly urgent, since the British Empire was encroaching on the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Recently, she noted, the British had organized a successful photodocumentary exhibition in Budapest exhibiting the “absolutely prosperous life of the colonies of the British Empire.”70 But due to disorganization on the part of SIB and the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul´turnoi sviazei s zagranitsei, VOKS), no Soviet organization in Hungary had mounted a response. Similarly, SIB memoranda produced around the same time as Grositskaia’s speech bemoaned the random and disorganized dispatch of photographs to foreign outlets, proof of which was the fact that the top recipient of photographs was Austria. “More shots,” one report commented, “were sent to France than to Bulgaria or Poland, where they are constantly demanding that we increase our dispatches.”71 Such sloppiness was deemed disastrous, since 1947 was a crucial year in both countries. In Poland, Communists sought to consolidate the results of rigged elections. In Bulgaria, Communist Party General Secretary Georgi Dmitrov’s loyalty was under suspicion after he had attempted to move closer to Belgrade. After the Red Army liberated Bulgaria, such flirtation with the idea of a Balkan Federation was anathema. Shoring up the USSR’s credentials as a powerful, united, anti-Western people’s democracy was crucial [End Page 578] in the battle for public opinion in Warsaw and Sofia, as well as in other East European capitals.72
This campaign of anti-Westernism and anticosmopolitanism suited for a Cold War world did what earlier exhortations had not—it dramatically changed both the geographic and the thematic coverage of SIB’s photographic production. True, the change was relative. As an internal report on SIB’s photographs for the second half of 1948 showed, Moscow still accounted for one-third of the photographs (representing a decline by 50 percent against the first half of the year). But for the first time ever, all union republics received photographic coverage, with Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan (the two most populous Muslim-majority republics) receiving the most coverage after the RSFSR and Ukraine. It bears stressing that SIB’s target audience, even after this shift in coverage, remained primarily East Europeans. In the second half of 1948, Austria still received more photographs than all but 10 countries, but the pattern of distribution had largely been shifted eastward. In 1948, Poland received the most negatives (5,259), followed by Yugoslavia (4,838), Romania (4,776), Hungary (4,616), and Germany (3,854). China received 2,481 photographs, more than any country in Asia and double that of India, but SIB’s focus remained squarely on Eastern Europe. Soviet neighbors Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, for example, received just 91, 112, and 152 photographs, respectively.
The imposition of Stalinist visual order mattered, in short, but primarily for the role it could play in an East European arena. Lozovskii’s old vision of a Soviet Union struggling against the British Empire qua imperial federation and democracy had been displaced by a quest to hold the Soviet Union’s gains in Eastern Europe.73 Discrediting the British still mattered, but less in the context of debates over federation in the abstract and more in the context of [End Page 579] legitimizing Soviet hegemony in an East European theater seen as under threat from British or American intrigues. If even the formerly backward colonies of Turkestan now prospered under a regime of formal equality and citizenship within the Soviet Union, then it seemed illogical to claim that communist rule was oppressive or imperialistic. Photographs of full employment and empowered non-Russian citizens bolstered the impression—desperately needed by East European communist parties and far from discredited among West European publics—that socialism offered a genuine alternative to the mass unemployment, militaristic nationalism, and overseas colonialism many still associated with capitalism. Formerly peripheral areas of the Soviet Union were emerging on the light tables of both Soviet and Western journalistic outlets, albeit under the aegis of an agenda few would have predicted two years prior—an agenda, moreover, that would soon seem anachronistic as Moscow’s “East” was repurposed for consumption by postcolonial (not East European) audiences. Throughout, however, a visual style pioneered and crystallized in the late 1940s would govern the images of Central Asia shipped abroad to serve the very different agendas of the postwar decades.
The new ideological turn in Moscow soon destroyed SIB. After the foundation of Israel on 14 May 1948, the arrival of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir in Moscow, and the breakdown of Soviet-Israeli relations, antisemitic policies reached new heights. On 20 November 1948, Stalin announced that “as facts have shown, [the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee] is a center for anti-Soviet propaganda and regularly provides anti-Soviet information to the organs of foreign espionage agencies. Correspondingly, the press organs of this committee are to be closed, while the committee is to be stripped of its normal portfolio of affairs. No one is to be arrested yet.” The decision shattered the organization. As one former employee noted, SIB’s offices near Trubnaia Ploshchad´ in central Moscow were raided without warning.
Late one night we left work, bid farewell to one another, and made plans for the coming weekend. Everything was as normal.
But the next morning, arriving to work, we saw that the offices in which our work had just yesterday been feverishly boiling were totally empty. The only thing in them was the naked office furniture. Nothing—not our personal belongings, not even one staple. A day later nothing testified to the fact that the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee had been located here.74
A wave of terror soon began. On 13 January 1949, Lozovskii was called into the office of Georgii Malenkov, where he was forced to confess to anti- [End Page 580] Soviet activity. Later that month, Lozovskii was expelled from the Party and arrested. Back at SIB, “all the coworkers at SIB who worked with [Lozovskii], including those who were around during the war, were immediately dismissed.”75 Over the course of the next three and a half years, many other Soviet Jewish cultural activists were arrested, interrogated, and, in Lozovskii’s case, executed. Yet as the SIB chief noted in his last words prior to his execution along with several other Soviet Jews, “I’ve said everything and don’t ask for any favors. I need either a full rehabilitation or death.”76 Lozovskii was executed by firing squad on 12 August 1952; his wish for rehabilitation came three years later.
Concluding Thoughts
A new era of Soviet photographic engagement with the outside world would eventually emerge from the ashes of SIB. New cadres entered the institution, albeit more and more of them professionally trained and credentialed. Most were ethnic Russian photographers from reorganized Moscow institutions of higher education, rather than the autodidact geniuses from the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia who had initially staffed the organization.77 New SIB offices opened in London, Paris, Washington, and, later, in Delhi and Warsaw, part of a broader Soviet journalistic engagement with the outside world.78 In 1961, Sovinformbiuro was reformed into the Novosti Press Agency, which acted as the Soviet Union’s press agency until 1990. Yet something had been lost since the 1940s. “If I compare SIB during the years of the war with SIB during the 1950s,” reflected one SIB veteran:
the difference between the two was substantial. During the war years the life and excitement in our organization … things were literally boiling. We arranged various conferences, met with representatives of different [End Page 581] embassies, the best writers in the country did work for SIB on advance and brought us fantastic material. All of the creative light of Moscow gathered at SIB’s conferences. But all that ended with Lozovskii’s arrest. In the postwar years we did a lot hurriedly—there were no problems in it, but Soviet reality started to become embellished. It was understood that such materials wouldn’t interest the foreign reader. The efficacy of the propaganda started to decline.79
In sum, the story of SIB demonstrates how the Cold War linked domestic visual orders with the foreign political order. As SIB’s early photographic statistics and photography of subjects not exclusively according to “national” and “Soviet” categories suggest, were it not for exogenous geopolitical pressures, the institutions’ photographers might have never embarked upon photographic expeditions to Moldova or Turkmenistan. In the case of Central Asia, geopolitics, not curiosity, informed SIB’s photographic inscription of the region into the Soviet Union’s visual representation of itself to the outside world. Haphazard as such interventions may have been, they had long-term consequences for the politically acceptable visual landscapes of territories that found themselves within the Soviet imperium. After the “discovery” of the Holocaust by Soviet Jewish photographers, for example, a forgetting of the massacre of Europe’s Jews was drilled into the Soviet visual order. Sites of Jewish suffering were transformed into memorials to antifascist solidarity. In Central Asia, meanwhile, a tendentious obsession with “national types” consolidated heterogeneous territories into nationally delimited republics assigned to their “titular nationality.” These changed interpretations of geography and borders, however, inevitably meant that certain groups—think Tajiks in the Uzbek SSR, Uzbeks in the Kyrgyz SSR, or the Russian diaspora inhabiting many of the region’s urban spaces—found their stories and images culled out of Soviet visual orders.80 Throughout, a very specific kind of photographic actor—the institutional assignment photographer, not necessarily the lone creative genius or the amateur photographer—operating according to script and working within state institutions made this reframing [End Page 582] of the Soviet Union possible. Future studies of the visual ordering of the entire Soviet Union—not just the Central Asian periphery examined in this piece—would do well to follow the intersection of geopolitics and state institutions as the self-portrait the USSR produced about itself changed in the decades after the 1940s.
Investigating such shifting visual orders, however, matters not just for history but also because of the enduring role they play in post-Soviet visual orders. In Central Asia, the long-standing search for the “national” as opposed to the “Soviet” helped forge the basis for a postindependence obsession with “national culture.” Even as the post-Soviet Central Asian regimes jealously emphasize their nationalist authenticity, their visual culture remains startlingly similar in formal terms: switch out one dictator for another, or a photograph of the Registan for a statue of Ismail Somoni, and the background of children in national costume and cotton fields remains constant.81 Themes and actors not inscribed in SIB’s daguerreotype of the region find only limited expression in state-commissioned photography of these now independent republics. Examining the visual order created by Lozovskii and SIB—its reflection frozen, hovering, in the silver particles of the SIB collection—we may hope to find not only the rays of light that structured and continue to structure the Central Asian visual order but also, perhaps in their shadows, the possibility of a genuinely post-Soviet visual order for the region. [End Page 583]
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
1727 Cambridge Street
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nunan@wcfia.harvard.edu
Timothy Nunan is Freigeist Fellow at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin. A scholar of Russian and Soviet history in an international context, he is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (2016) and the editor and translator of Carl Schmitt, Writings on War (2011). His present research agenda explores the clash of Sunni and Shi’a Islamists with socialists and the Soviet Union in Cold War Eurasia.
Footnotes
1. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
2. See, for example, Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934); and Joshua Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand: The Rebirth of Central Asia (New York: International Publishers, 1935).
3. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 33, 40, 70, 123; for Leopold Senghor on the Soviet Union, see 341 and 344.
4. This is all the more curious in light of a recent small renaissance of works on Soviet Eurasia in general. See Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Paul Stronski, Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); and Masha Kirasirova, “‘Sons of Muslims’ in Moscow: Soviet Central Asian Mediators to the Foreign East, 1955–1962,” Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2011): 106–32. Krista Goff is working on a book on the history of nontitular nationalities in the USSR, while Artemy Kalinovsky is currently working on the postwar history of Soviet Tajikistan. The Spring 2015 issue of Kritika (16, 2: 331–94) devoted a forum to the question of Central Asia as “center” and periphery.
5. Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). See, as an exception, Vladimir M. Magidov, Kinofotofonodokumenty v kontekste istoricheskogo znaniia (Moscow: RGGU, 2005). For an innovative general work on Russian visual culture, see Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Russian Visual Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
6. Heather S. Sonntag, “Photography and Mapping Russian Conquest in Central Asia: Early Albums, Encounters, and Exhibitions, 1866–1876” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2011).
7. For a useful introductory debate to this subject, see Central Asian Survey 26, 4 (2007). Additionally, see David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post in Postcolonial the Post in Post-Soviet? Notes Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, 1 (2001): 111–28; and Laura L. Adams, “Can We Apply Postcolonial Theory to Central Eurasia?” Central Eurasian Studies Review 7, 1 (2008): 2–7. This move toward empire in the study of Soviet history built upon a stronger move in the study of the Russian Empire. See, e.g., Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
8. Adeeb Khalid, “Locating the (Post-)Colonial in Soviet History,” Central Asian Survey 26, 4 (2007): 471. For examples of work in other fields, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Inge Boer, Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images (New York: Rodopi, 2004); and John Crowley, Imperial Landscapes: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
9. Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 46–67; Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Katharine Holt, “The Rise of Insider Iconography: Visions of Soviet Turkmenia in Russian-Language Film and Literature, 1921–1935” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013).
10. For several recent treatments of the postwar media, see Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How The Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Dina Fainberg, “Notes from the Rotten West, Reports from the Backward East: Soviet and American Foreign Correspondents in the Cold War, 1945–1985” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2012).
11. For more on SIB as an institution, see Paul Roth, Sow-Inform: Nachrichtenwesen und Informationspolitik der Sowjetunion (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1980); Roth, Die kommandierte öffentliche Meinung: Sowjetische Medienpolitik (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald, 1982); Roth, Cuius region, eius information: Moskaus Modell für die Weltinformationsordnung (Graz: Styria, 1984); N. Iu. Nikulina and Z. N. Soroka, “Sovinformbiuro v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (analiz istochnikov),” in Problemy istochnikovedeniia i istoriografiii: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Kaliningrad: Kaliningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1999), 58–64; M. I. Afanas´eva, APN: Ot Sovinformbiuro do RIA Novosti. 60 let v pole informatsionnogo napriazheniia (Moscow: RIA Novosti/Vesti, 2001); and G. A. Kovalev, “Sovinformbiuro v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny,” Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1987): 14–23.
12. Shimon Redlich, K. M. Anderson, and L. Altman, eds., War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 134; David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
13. RIA Novosti’s official institutional history also includes the following authors as contributors to SIB publications: Ivan Bardin (1883–1960); Aleksandr Fadeev (1901–56); Konstantin Fedin (1892–1977); Boris Gorbatov (1908–54); Vilis Lacis (1904–66); Leonid Leonov (1899–1994); Aleksandr Melik-Pashaev (1905–64); Ivan Moskvin (1874–1946); Boris Polevoi (1908–81); Marietta Shaginian (1888–1982); Konstantin Simonov (1915–79); Evgenii Tarle (1874–1955); Nikolai Tikhonov (1896–1979); Sergei Vavilov (1891–1951); and Nikolai Zelinskii (1861–1953). See Afanas´eva, APN, 9.
14. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 94, 99. As Shneer notes, the politics of SIB’s depictions of Nazi war crimes was complicated, since not only had the Soviet Union been allied with Nazi Germany in their destruction of the Polish state from 1939 to 1941, but British newspapers had also published photographs of Nazi atrocities against Polish Jews during the same time span. According to Shneer, the rapidity with which Soviet newspapers were able to publish photographs of German atrocities (the first photographs appeared in Ogonek three days after the German invasion) suggests that photographers had collected photographs of Nazi atrocities during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
15. The Black Book was eventually scrapped for publication in the Soviet Union. Only in 1980 was a Russian-language edition published in Israel. See Vasilii Grossman and Il´ia Erenburg, Chernaia kniga: O zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami vo vremenno-okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lageriakh unichtozheniia Pol´shi vo vremia voiny 1941–1945 gg. (Jerusalem: Tarbut, 1980).
16. The Red International of Labor Unions (Krasnyi internatsional profsoiuzov), commonly known as Profintern, was an international body within the Comintern directed toward coordinating communist activities within trade unions around the world. Profintern’s main enemy was the International Federation of Trade Unions, a noncommunist international organization of labor unions whose headquarters moved from Amsterdam to Berlin, Paris, and London throughout the 1930s. Following the announcement of a Popular Front policy between communist parties and socialist and social democratic parties in 1934, however, Profintern became redundant and was eventually shuttered in 1937 after 17 years of activity.
17. Ernest A. Zitser, “Picturing the Soviet Union’s Greatest Generation: The Soviet Information Bureau Photograph Collection of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies,” Slavic and East European Information Resources 8, 1 (2007): 3–10.
18. For more on Steiger (1900–70), see “Andrew J. Steiger, Ex-Soviet Reporter,” New York Times, 5 September 1970, 16; and Biographical Encyclopedia of the World (New York: Institute for Research in Biography, 1946), 959.
19. For more on Magidoff (1905–70), see Robert Magidoff, In Anger and Pity: A Report on Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949). On this incident, see also Zitser, “Picturing the Soviet Union’s Greatest Generation,” 5–6.
20. Evgeny Khaldei (1917–97) was a Red Army photographer, probably best known for his 2 May 1945 photograph “Raising a Flag over the Reichstag” but also active as a successful photographer throughout much of his life. Georgii Zelma (1906–84), a Soviet photographer known primarily for his photographs of the Battle of Stalingrad, also had a wide-ranging career in Soviet photography after the war. Arkadii Shaiket (1889–1959), a Soviet photographer and photojournalist, was a contributor to SSSR na stroike and photographed the story “24 Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family” (originally published in Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung as “24 Stunden aus dem Leben einer Moskauer Arbeiterfamilie”) prior to his work for SIB. Iakov Khalip (1908–80) was a Soviet photographer who had worked, prior to SIB, as a contributor to SSSR na stroike and Sovetskii fotograf. Max Penson (1893–1959) was a Jewish Belarusian photographer who, after fleeing the Eastern Front of World War I for Kokand, Uzbekistan, in 1917, became particularly interested in Uzbekistan. After working several jobs in Kokand and Tashkent, he worked for Pravda Vostoka as a photographer from 1925 until 1948, when Soviet antisemitism forced him to resign.
21. There are much larger collections of photographs on Central Asia per se in the United States, perhaps most interestingly the 12,000-image collection of Semen Friedland’s work on Central Asia at the University of Denver. In March 2008, David Shneer and university curators displayed some of these images as part of an exhibition. For more, see Kristal Griffith, “Four DU Entities Collaborate to Exhibit Soviet Photography,” University of Denver Blog, 3 March 2008 (http://blogs.du.edu/today/news/four-du-entities-collaborate-to-exhibit-soviet-photography).
22. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, ll. 387–88, “Stenogramma doklada tov. Lozovskogo avtoram Sovinformbiuro po voprosu osveshchenii izbiratel´noi kampanii v nashei presse za granitsei” (9 January 1945). Lozovskii’s statement was only half-correct. Territorial delimitation took place in Central Asia in several phases, with an Uzbek SSR being formed first in 1924 but including a Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic inside it. The latter polity became the Tajik SSR in 1929, but only after receiving territory (including the wealthy region of Sughd) from the Uzbek SSR. Furthermore, many of these territories had not been formal colonies per se but part of the Emirate of Bukhara, itself transformed into a Russian imperial protectorate in 1875.
23. Lozovskii was referring to members of Western communist parties who held seats in legislatures during this period. Nine months after Lozovskii’s remarks, the Communist Party of France won the single largest share of seats in elections for the French National Assembly, while an alliance between the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party won 31 percent of the vote in the 1948 general elections. Communists’ successes in Great Britain were more modest. From 1935 to 1950, at least one member of the Communist Party of Great Britain sat in Parliament (two from 1945 to 1950).
24. “Stenogramma doklada tov. Lozovskogo.” The context of Lozovskii’s remarks make clear that he was criticizing not only the inherent unrepresentativeness of the House of Lords or the US Senate apropos British subjects in the United Kingdom or American citizens living inside the United States, respectively, but also the relationship of those two institutions to (for example) South Asians or Filipinos.
25. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, ll. 343–44, “Stenogramma soveshchaniia avtorov dal´nevostochnogo otdela Sovinformbiuro” (25 May 1945). Unfortunately, the archival record does not indicate who made this statement.
26. This correction itself underscores the SIB “house line” against European empires and the United States during the immediate postwar period. The point for them was not that Muslim populations had, perforce of their religion, any special claim to self-determination or self-rule. Rather, Western empires had failed to develop their backward populations (whether conceived of religiously or, as the SIB authors did, nationally) within a framework of empire or federation.
27. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, ll. 9–10, “Soveshchaniie u tov. Lozovskogo po rassmotreniiu plana Otdela knig i broshiur k XXX-letiiu Velikoi Oktiabr´skoi Sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii, 28 dekabria 1946 g. Prisutstvuet: t.t. Lozovskii, Sokolov, Frolov, Maglievich, Evnovich, Troianovskii, Akoliia, Lazarev, Sharmanov, Sharov” (28 December 1946).
28. I. V. Stalin, “Toast to the Russian People at a Reception in Honour of Red Army Commanders Given by the Soviet Government in the Kremlin on Thursday, May 24, 1945” (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945/05/24.htm).
29. “Turetskii,” while appearing to denote Turkish provenance, is actually a Jewish surname stemming from the small settlement of Turets in Grodno oblast, Belarus. Quotation from GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, l. 157, Turetskii, in “Soveshchaniie u tov. Lozovskogo S. A. ekonomistov, avtorov statei dlia SIB” (29 October 1946).
30. Vasiutin, in ibid., l. 165.
31. There are echoes in the evocation of Florida with the work of Johanna Conterio, who, in a recent piece on the environmental history of Sochi, argues that “the subtropics did not exist as a mapped territory before the 1930s but were rather invented in that decade” (“Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1929–36,” Kritika 16, 1 [2015]: 94). Perhaps illustrating Conterio’s point about the contingent construction of the subtropics as a space within Soviet mental maps, however, here the photographer Vasiutin made the parallel between the Floridian subtropics and arid Central Asia, not the Caucasian Black Sea Coast.
32. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, l. 60, Grinberg, “Stenogramma soveshchaniia kompozitorov i muzykovedov v Sovinformbiuro” (2 December 1946).
33. Sonntag, “Photography and Mapping”; Holt, “Rise of Insider Iconography.”
34. Conterio, “Inventing the Subtropics”; Alexander Morrison, “Writing the Russian Conquest of Central Asia, 1839–1915,” lecture delivered at the University of Michigan, 8 February 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVtLtjZsMRY).
35. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 285, l. 22, “Otchet o rabote otdela Fotoinformatsii Sovetskogo Informbiuro za 1947 god.”
36. Needless to say, the Soviet capital did not lack industrial enterprises or railway stations. However, the statistics speak for themselves: SIB photographers preferred to photograph cultural events rather than workers before being directed to focus on alternative subjects by their editors.
37. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 285, l. 22, “Kharakteristika fotoinformatsii v territorial´nom razreze.”
38. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 178, ll. 14–15, “Spravka ob ispol´zovanii fotoinformatsii, rassylaemoi Sovetskim Informbiuro” (12 May 1948). Although this report was authored in 1948, the comments of the Soviet diplomats came from the summer of 1947.
39. Historically, many empires—but not the Soviet Union—distinguished among subjects through the application of personal status, pronouncing subjects (often religious minorities) as under the jurisdiction of Quranic or Mosaic Law (and thus religious courts) in the first instance, rather than as citizens subject to a civil code. In France, for example, even Jews in metropolitan France had to apply individually for civil status until 1870, whereas one of the key demands of Muslim Algerians and French reformers was the reform or abolition of “Islamic personal status” in favor of a model of French citizenship that would still recognize cultural differences. See Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 16–17; and Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 23–28.
40. Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, 2 (2006): 252–72.
41. SSSR na stroike, no. 10 (1931): no page nos.
42. Stronski, Tashkent, 81–84.
43. The paranja (a Russian-language appropriation of the Turkic parandji, itself a borrowing from the Persian faradji) was a heavy cotton robe that came down to the ankles and was often worn by women in late tsarist and early Soviet Central Asia. The term, however, was often shorthand for the chachvon, a horsehair veil that completely covered women’s faces. See Adeeb Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 75.
44. Zakhidova (1925–1995) was indeed exceptional, going on to become a National Artist of the Soviet Union and perhaps the most famous non-Russian ballet dancer in the USSR. She was born in Kanibadam, a city in what was then the Uzbek SSR before being reassigned to the Tajik SSR. In consequence, Zakhidova was redefined as a distinctly Tajik ballerina.
45. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 285, l. 22, “Otchet o rabote Otdela fotoinformatsii Sovetskogo Informbiuro za 1947 god.”
46. Adrienne Edgar, “Marriage, Modernity, and the ‘Friendship of Nations’: Interethnic Intimacy in Post-War Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Central Asian Survey 26, 4 (2007): 586. As Edgar notes, since the Soviet Union created national republics but (unlike the French experience in Algeria) did not lose them, failures of Soviet Central Asians to assimilate to the “Soviet nation” unintentionally created points of reference for primordial identity, even though none of the SSRs was more than a couple of decades old.
47. Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Adeeb Khalid makes the point most specifically in noting that “even when, after the mid-1930s, Russians became the elder brothers of all other ‘fraternal Soviet peoples,’ and thus the recipients of saccharine praise for their role in leading all Soviet peoples to socialism and beyond, their primacy was rooted not in any innate racial or ethnic supremacy, but rather in the fact of their having progressed further along the evolutionary path than all others in the union” (“Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, 2 [2006]: 250–51).
48. Indeed, the photographs in Harvard’s possession nearly all bear a stamp of approval from Soviet censors for export—a system of visual censorship that deserves investigation but remains outside the bounds of this piece.
49. Frustratingly, in many cases the Sovinformbiuro archives indicate only the last name of SIB staff members. In spite of research in Russian, European, and North American libraries, I have not been able to establish the identities of the two staff members cited by name in this piece, Popov and Grositskaia. The name of the university was not a shorthand but its actual name (Sredneaziiatskii gosudarstvennyi universitet). In 1960, said institution was renamed Tashkent State University, whereas today it exists under the name of the Mirzo Ulugbek National University of Uzbekistan.
50. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 286, l. 28, Popov, in “Protokol 2 soveshchaniia sotrudnikov Otdela fotoinformatsii 6.V.48g.” (6 May 1948).
51. SSSR na stroike, no. 10 (1931): no page nos.
52. For the best exploration of this transformation of Russian aristocratic pursuits into cultured Soviet pursuits, see Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
53. Katharine Holt, “Respatializing Identity in Stalinist Central Asia: The Almanac for the 10th Anniversary of Turkmenistan, 1924–1934” (unpublished paper), 1. These dynamics of cultural hierarchy and development are perhaps most visible in the case of Soviet Central Asia, a former tsarist colony, but it would also be worthwhile to investigate the place of Jewish enclaves such as Birobidzhan in the story that Holt suggests—particularly so for the narrative here. However, the SIB photos do not focus on Birobidzhan; indeed the only explicitly Jewish-themed photograph in the collection depicts the first Soviet Jewish woman to be named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
54. I have not been able to establish with certainty who, or what institution, the author of the captions for these and the other Sovinformbiuro photographs was. However, several of the photographs in Harvard’s SIB collection (including the ones discussed here) were originally prepared by an English-language section of SIB in Moscow (many of the photos are stamped “SIB Photoservice MOSCOW”). In nearly all cases, this stamp is imposed over the captions on the backside of photographs, while many of the photographs are labeled with a number not obviously corresponding to any numbering system used by World News Services in Canada or any other receiving organization.
55. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), 116; Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 2 (1989): 221.
56. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes.
57. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 30.
58. Samuel Bourne, quoted in Ryan, Picturing Empire, 47.
59. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 31. Of course, it bears emphasizing that SIB’s archive was only one of many photographic projects pursued by the state. Scholars from the Institute of Anthropology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, for example, mounted numerous “ethnographic expeditions” to Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia during the 20th century that collected markers of local culture and difference (channeled, all the same, through ethno-federal units governed by the standardized CPSU and planned economy).
60. This piece cannot explore postwar state-sponsored Soviet antisemitism in depth, but useful reference points include Gennadii Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona: Politicheskie presledovaniia evreev v poslednee stalinskoe desiatiletie (Moscow: Mezhudarodnye otnosheniia, 1994); and Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
61. Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov, “From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, 1 (2002): 66–80.
62. Isaak (Yitzhak) Nusinov (1889–1952) was a Soviet scholar of literature who published extensively on Yiddish culture and literature more generally, authoring many of the articles in the Great Soviet Encylopedia on literature. He was arrested in 1949 and executed in 1950. Like Lozovskii, he was posthumously rehabilitated within the CPSU.
63. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 213.
64. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 285. The case of Soviet ballet—itself a central part of the Soviet Union’s legitimization of socialist culture to foreign audiences—is suggestive in this context. During the period discussed in this article, one of the Soviet Union’s leading choreographers, Leonid Iakobson (1904–75) and perhaps the leading ballerina, Maia Plisetskaia, faced severe professional discrimination as a result of being Jewish. For more, see Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 142, 177, 180.
65. “Kharakteristika fotoinformatsii v tematicheskom razreze,” l. 20.
66. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 286, l. 4, Glebovskii, in “Protokol no. 1 soveshchaniia rabotnikov Otdela fotoinformatsii 19 fevralia 1948 goda” (19 February 1948).
67. Ibid.
68. Grositskaia, in “Protokol 2 soveshchaniia sotrudnikov Otdela Fotoinformatsii 6.V.48g.,” ll. 17–18. Grositskaia may have been referring to the First Hungarian Postwar International Salon of Photography, which ran from 15 December 1947 to 15 January 1948. This would be consistent with her anxiety about the reception of the Soviet Union in the country, as the fall of 1947 and the winter of 1947–48 were a time when the Soviet Union had placed the Hungarian Social Democrats (ostensible partners of the Hungarian Communist Party) under intense pressure to merge with the Communist Party, thus consolidating Soviet hegemony over Budapest. The “merger” of the two parties was completed in 1948, only weeks after the SIB meeting cited here.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., ll. 2–3.
71. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 285, l. 18, “Otchet o rabote Otdela fotoinformatsii Sovetskogo Informbiuro za 1947 god.”
72. As Mark Kramer and Geoffrey Roberts explain in contributions to a recent volume, several concerns played a role in Stalin’s view of postwar Eastern Europe. As Roberts notes, Stalin took seriously the idea that only a long-term ethnic alliance between the Slavic nations of Eastern Europe could hold back the resurgence of Germany. Consolidating a rim of allied communist states would also shore up Soviet security after an inevitable collapse of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. See Geoffrey Roberts, “Stalin’s Wartime Vision of the Peace,” and Mark Kramer, “Stalin, the Split with Yugoslavia, and Soviet-East European Efforts to Reassert Control, 1948–1953,” in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, ed. Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
73. The newfound focus on Eastern Europe did not mean that photographic distribution to Western Europe stopped: Italy received more photographic negatives than any country other than Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Hungary, while France and Great Britain still constituted the sixth- and seventh-largest recipients of SIB photographs in 1948. As noted above, West European communist parties, particularly those in France and Italy, still commanded vast portions of the electorate and needed material proof of the Soviet Union’s accomplishments.
74. Elizaveta Gus´kova, quoted in APN, 24.
75. Liliia Solonetskaia, quoted in ibid., 21.
76. Lozovskii, quoted in Vasilii Malinovskii, “Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel,” Vestnik, no. 2 (2009), 19 January 1999 (http://www.vestnik.com/issues/1990/0119/koi/malin.html).
77. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 214. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Soviet Jewish photographers were either fired, forced to sign their photographs with Russified surnames, or required to change positions from active photographers to photography instructors within institutions like TASS or Sovinformbiuro. Many sacked photographers, notes Shneer, found employment as event photographers at the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh) or with less prestigious magazines like Klub i khudozhestvennaia deiatel´nost´ (Club and Art Hobby). In contrast to a postwar generation of journalists, SIB’s earlier photographers were autodidacts. Evgenii Khaldei began employment in a factory at age 13 and taught himself to take photographs, while Max Penson trained in an industrial arts school in Vilnius and as a draughtsman in Kokand before acquainting himself with photography.
78. Fainberg, “Notes From the Rotten West,” chap. 1.
79. Liliia Solonetskaia, quoted in APN, 21.
80. Tarik Cyril Amar, “The Making of Soviet Lviv, 1939–1963” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006); Franziska Exeler, “Reckoning with Occupation: Soviet Power, Local Communities, and the Ghosts of Wartime Behavior in Post-1944 Belorussia” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014). For Central Asia and the broader phenomenon, see Sergei Abashin, “Vozvrashchenie sartov? Metodologiia i ideologiia v postsovetskikh nauchnykh diskussiiakh,” Antropologicheskii forum, no. 10 (2009): 252–78; and Mark Saroyan, “Beyond the Nation-State: Culture and Ethnic Politics in Soviet Transcaucasia,” in his Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (Berkeley: Institute of International and Area Studies, 1997), 135–66. See also Krista Goff’s work on subnational nationalities, mentioned above.
81. The Registan (Place of Sand) is the majestic square in central Samarkand, Uzbekistan, framed by three madrasehs from the 15th and 17th centuries. Ismail Somoni was a 10th-century Samanid amir whom elites have embraced as a national hero in post-independence Tajikistan.
