Radical Tourism:
Sergei Tret’iakov at the
Communist Lighthouse*
MARIA GOUGH
Crash industrialization and forced collectivization—the twin and ultimately
catastrophic economic policies of the Five-Year Plans of the late 1920s and ’30s—
opened myriad new travel destinations for the intrepid cultural worker in the
Soviet Union: mammoth industrial sites, monumental hydroelectric stations,
extravagant canal construction projects, gigantic collective farms. Tours to such
destinations were typically authorized, organized, and funded by a network of
state agencies, whose purpose was not so much to gather information about these
far-flung sites—the secret police (OGPU [Unified State Political Administration])
stationed throughout the Soviet Union could much more efficiently assist with
that—but rather to secure much-needed affirmative representations of the suc-
cessful implementation of Plan policies. Soviet and foreign intellectuals, writers,
artistes, and photographers visited these sites of economic and social engineering
in droves; perhaps the most paradigmatic of all was the once sympathetic commu-
niste de coeur André Gide, dont 1936 tour resulted, unexpectedly, in a stingingly
negative critique, Retour de l’URSS.
The present essay unpacks a major episode in the crowded itinerary of one
such radical tourist, Sergei Tret’iakov. Beginning in July 1928 and continuing
through the summer of 1930, Tret’iakov made four extended visits, totaling some
five months in all, to a remote collective farm [kolkhoz], the so-called Communist
Lighthouse [Kommunisticheskii Maiak, or Kommaiak] in the Georgievskii district of
the northern Caucasus’s Stavropolskii region.1 These trips were authorized out of
Moscow by the primary state agency in charge of the collective-farm system,
*
My thanks to Devin Fore for kindly inviting me to contribute to this special issue on factogra-
phy, to Jamie Nisbet and Michael Gonzalez for their assistance with illustrations, to Rachel Churner for
her editorial expertise and patience, and to Jodi Hauptman, always my toughest reader.
1.
This essay is the first installment of a larger project that considers the production of a number of
radical tourists active in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, including John Heartfield, Gustavs Klucis,
Lotte Jacobi, and Langston Hughes. (I borrow the term “radical tourism” from Hans Magnus
Enzensberger’s classic essay “Tourists of the Revolution,” trans. Michael Roloff, in The Consciousness
Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media [New York: Seabury Press, 1974], pp. 129–57.)
OCTOBER 118, Fall 2006, pp. 159–178. © 2006 Maria Gough.
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160
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Sergei Tret’iakov
rowing. 1929.
Kolkhoztsentr (All-Union Center of Agricultural Collectives), and by the Federation
of Writers. The latter also published two anthologies of essays that Tret’iakov wrote
as a record of his experience, The Challenge: Collective-Farm Essays (1930) and A Month
in the Country (June–July 1930): Operativist Essays (1931).2
Over the course of his visits to the Communist Lighthouse, Tret’iakov became
directly involved in numerous aspects of its political, cultural, and agronomic orga-
nization, thereby transcending traditional definitions of the role of the literary
writer. Of these activities, I focus here on his photographic practice, the scale of
which was vast. Where once the camera had served exclusively as a powerful
metaphor for the documentary prose style he sought to develop—“I will kodak
[kodachit’],” he promised in his 1925 travelogue “Moscow-Peking”3—it now became,
literally, one of his two favorite “recording” devices, the other being the essay or
sketch [ocherk]. Out on the farm with his Leica, Tret’iakov took some two thousand
Sergei Tret’iakov, Vyzov: Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia, 1930); and idem, Mesiats v
2.
derevne (iiun’–iiul’ 1930g.): Operativnye ocherki (Moscow: Izd-vo Federatsiia, 1931). (The second title plays
on that of a classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: UN
Comedy in Five Acts [1850].) Many of these essays first appeared in Soviet newspapers and magazines. Dans
Décembre 1931, the Malik Verlag in Berlin published a slightly abridged compilation of both volumes
as Feld-Herren: Der Kampf um eine Kollektiv-Wirtschaft [Commanders of the field: the struggle for a collec-
tive economy], the dust jacket of which Heartfield designed on the basis of a Russian poster, in collabo-
ration with his brother Wieland Herzfelde.
3.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Moskva-Pekin,” Lef, Non. 7 (1925), p. 33; quoted in Devin Fore, “‘All the
Graphs’: Soviet and Weimar Documentary between the Wars” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University,
2005), p. 170.
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Radical Tourism
161
photographs.4 “Almost nobody [at the Communist Lighthouse] knows me as a
writer,” he reported; instead, “all the collective-farmer workers know me as the
‘uncle’ [‘diad’ku’ ] who takes photos.”5 Gratifying his desire to photograph at every
turn, Tret’iakov became on the farm what might be called a “photographist”
[fotografist], a neologism he himself coined in August 1928 to distinguish the non-
professional practitioner from the professional photographer, whom he con-
demned as a seductive purveyor of false syntheses.6
Twenty-one of Tret’iakov’s collective-farm photographs are reproduced in
The Challenge and A Month in the Country; others are published as photo-essays in
various illustrated magazines.7 Along with the writer’s scattered notes on photog-
raphie, the published photographs serve as the basis for the following discussion.8
My chief argument is that Tret’iakov’s experience on the kolkhoz, and in particular
his experience with the camera on the kolkhoz, tested the limits of the factographic
model that he had recently developed in concert with his colleagues at the journal
Novyi lef, and ultimately led to his formulation of a new model for cultural prac-
tice, to which he gave the name “operativism.” As a coda to my story of this shift, je
fast forward in the final section of the essay to consider the quite different place of
the photograph in Tret’iakov’s thinking circa spring 1934, on the eve of the first
All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, at which Socialist Realism was officially
announced as the “basic method” of Soviet literature and literary criticism.
Making a Kolkhoznik
If the medium of this shift from factography to operativism was the camera, it
was also, and equally fundamentally, the collective farm itself. A first question to
ask, alors, is how and why Tret’iakov, a successful futurist poet, dramaturgist, film
scenarist, and sketch-writer [ocherkist], ended up in a place so utterly remote from
his experience to date. Like many of his contemporaries (et, en effet, ante-
cedents), Tret’iakov believed that literature both could and should contribute to
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Raport: Pisatel’—kolkhoznik,” Literaturnaia gazeta, Septembre 9, 1930;
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Diad’ka, kotoryi snimaet,” Zhurnalist, Non. 17 (1930); reprinted in Mesiats v
4.
reprinted as “Raport pisatelia-kolkhoznika,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 11.
5.
derevne, p. 195.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Fotozametki,” Novyi lef, Non. 8 (1928), p. 40; trans. as “Photo-Notes,” in
6.
Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, éd. Christophe
Phillips, trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), p. 252; see also Aleksandr
Rodchenko, “Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot,” Novyi lef, Non. 4 (1928), pp. 14–16; trans.
in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 238–42.
Voir, Par exemple, Sergei Tret’iakov, “Vykhodnoi v kolkhoze,” Smena, Non. 12 (1933), pp. 12–13.
7.
8.
To the best of my knowledge, there exists no study of Tret’iakov’s photography. A brief reference
to the photo-essays is made in Leonid Volkov-Lannit, “Grani prileteli k ob”ektivu,” Literaturnaia gazeta,
May 10, 1935, p. 5. With respect to the history of photography, Tret’iakov is primarily known, instead, comme
the Lef colleague of Rodchenko, and as the author of the text of the first-ever monograph on Heartfield;
see Sergei Tret’iakov and Solomon Telingater, Dzhon Khartfil’d: Monografiia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1936).
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162
OCTOBER
the resolution of social problems, and that it was the writer’s task to secure the
social efficacy of his own literary production. Among Tret’iakov’s Lef colleagues,
the most famous formulation of an activist role for the writer was that of the poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky, who in 1926 proposed the “social command” [sotsial’nyi
zakaz]—any requirement, désir, or wish voiced by the society at large or by a spe-
cific segment within it—as an “indispensable” element in the production of verse,
as essential to the poet as his or her words, pens, pencils, typewriters, skills, tech-
niques, and sense of purpose.9 Two years later Tret’iakov pushed the envelope of
Mayakovsky’s literary activism, by both responding to, and in turn reiterating, le
Party’s ubiquitous exhortation of that year: “Writers, to the collective farms!”10
The collective farm was a cooperative formed through the consolidation of
individual farms and peasants. The process of collectivization, already under way
on a voluntary basis since the October Revolution, was drastically accelerated in
response to the grain procurement crisis of 1927–28, which threatened the Soviet
Union with economic collapse. Considered an essential precondition for the mech-
anization of agriculture and the raising of labor productivity, collectivization was
often foisted upon a reluctant countryside. With the introduction of the first Five-
Year Plan in 1929, peasants were increasingly coerced into joining cooperatives by
means of a concurrent and extremely violent campaign of dekulakization.11 The
process of collectivization was as rapid as it was brutal: The average size of collec-
tive farms in the northern Caucasus, where the Communist Lighthouse was
located, increased almost fourteenfold in the course of a single year, from sixteen
households per cooperative in 1929, à 222.5 households per cooperative in 1930.12
In accordance with a ruthless economy of scale, collective farms were typically
amalgamated, in turn, to form gigantic combines [kombinaty]. Dans 1929, for exam-
ple, the Communist Lighthouse, initially established as a modest commune during
the civil war, was integrated with numerous other nearby collective farms to create
a combine called The Challenge [Vyzov], which Tret’iakov playfully referred to as
“the collective farm of [tous] collective farms.”13 A fold-out map included at the rear
of his first anthology plots the district’s new network of combines.
At the heart of the economic policy of collectivization lay a massive project of
social engineering: the transformation of the “backward,” illiterate, individual peas-
ant into a mechanically savvy, Party loyal, and “cultured” [kul’turnyi] collective-farm
Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 4; see also idem, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” Novyi lef, Non.
See Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Kak delat’ stikhi?,” Novyi mir (1926); trans. G. M.. Hyde, How Are Verses
9.
Made? (Londres: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 18–19.
10.
12 (1928), pp. 1–4.
11.
Dekulakization meant ridding the countryside of wealthy peasants, who were regarded as class
enemies; this involved seizure of property, forced deportation, and sometimes even execution of heads
of households. See the recent anthology of primary documents, The War Against the Peasantry,
1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, éd. Lynne Viola et al., trans. Steven Shabad (Nouveau
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
12.
13.
Ibid., p. 331.
Tret’iakov, Vyzov, p. 211ff, and idem, Mesiats v derevne, p. 9.
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Radical Tourism
163
worker [kolkhoznik (m.), kolkhoznitsa (f.)]. This was a social command writ large, et
it proved irresistible to Tret’iakov, who responded by signing up for the Communist
Lighthouse. While other writers hoped to contribute to the fulfillment of the social
command through the deployment of their professional skills of narration or
observation, Tret’iakov, as we shall see, strove for direct participation. (“Peasant
women will not become women cadres,” he wrote impatiently in January 1928,
“merely by so labeling them.”)14 Ainsi, if the kolkhoznik’s task was to produce grain
for the state, Tret’iakov’s task was to assist the state in its production of the
kolkhoznik. Tret’iakov insisted that in the collaborative process of making a collec-
tive farmer out of a peasant, il, aussi, became one.15 Conjoined in Tret’iakov’s
experience on the collective farm, donc, were two major topoi of the cultural
revolution of the early Plan years: agitation for the deprofessionalization of the
writer, et, concurrently, the struggle for his redemption (ou, as Iurii Olesha would
put it in retrospect, his wretched deformation).
14.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Happy New Year! Happy New Lef !,” Novyi lef, Non. 1 (1928); trans. in Russian
Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, éd. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Presse universitaire, 1988), p. 265.
15.
See Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 15.
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Map of The Challenge combine. ca. 1930.
164
OCTOBER
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Tret’iakov and two collective-farmers at the Communist Lighthouse. ca. 1930.
An unsettling photograph taken by an unknown photographer at the
Communist Lighthouse in 1930 confronts us, cependant, with some of the contradic-
tions of Tret’iakov’s utopian enterprise. D'abord, it explicitly belies the writer’s fantasy
of his self-deprofessionalization and redemption in the guise of a kolkhoznik. Un tel
fantasy is disrupted by the evident persistence of class stratification: Dressed in
bright summer whites, Tret’iakov appears in the company of two unnamed collective-
farm workers clad in filthy work clothes. He is a relaxed and jovial presence before
the camera, they are awkward, stiff, and provincial: one poses for the camera,
squinting into the sun, grinning a little uncomfortably, while the other tries in vain
to resist the gaze of the camera altogether. Behind the trio appears a suggestively
wide-open door, as if the two have just been dragged from their labor for a photo
op with the visiting Moscow writer. Deuxième, in the gesture that Tret’iakov makes
with his left hand—adjusting the cap of his comrade so as to better present him to
the camera—the photograph thematizes the very project of social engineering in
which the writer, a fellow-traveler and futurist utopian, was engaged on the farm. Il
is hard not to read Tret’iakov’s gesture, no doubt made in a friendly enough spirit,
as an allegory of power, as an allegory of the subjugation of the peasantry through
the process of forced collectivization.
Radical Tourism
165
En Route to Operativism
When Tret’iakov arrived at the Communist Lighthouse for the first time in
early July 1928, he arrived as a factographer, eager to write some literature of fact [lit-
eratura fakta or litfakta]. Eager, that is to say, to put the model of practice that he had
collaboratively developed, along with Nikolai Chuzhak, Nikolai Aseev, and others in
the pages of Novyi lef, to work in the service of collectivization. The literature of fact
prioritized the “precise fixation of fact” over fiction. As such its chief hallmark and
object of desire was documentary prose, theorized as a raw, unmediated recording of
sensory data that strained against normative assumptions about communicativity, un
kind of fantasy, as Devin Fore has forcefully demonstrated in his recent study of
Soviet and Weimar factography, of the possibility of a total conflation of text and real-
ity.16 Documentary prose not only replaced the Lef futurists’ own earlier emphasis on
agitation through verse, but was also promoted in opposition to the platform of the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which insisted on “invented belles
lettres” and the psychological or realist novel as the vehicle for the portrayal and
awakening of revolutionary commitment.17 Tret’iakov argued, by contrast, that only
through the once para-literary or even extra-literary genres of the “memoir, travel
notes, the sketch, articles, feuilletons, reportage, investigations, [et] documentary
montage” (rather than the “belletristic forms of novels, novellas, and short stories”)
could the committed writer contribute to the construction of Soviet life through
“utilitarian, journalistic work on current social and economic problems.”18 The new
“novel” of Soviet life was no War and Peace, he asserted, but rather contemporary real-
ity itself, the medium of which was the mass-circulation newspaper.19
But the production of literature of fact on the farm proved to be more diffi-
cult than Tret’iakov had expected. In an essay written at the end of his first month
on the ground, Tret’iakov conceded that not only was the novel inadequate to the
revolutionary task before him, but also reportage itself: Neither a poetic descrip-
tion of the kolkhoz nor a compilation of the facts of its history could come
anywhere near to grappling with the realities of life on the farm. For the writer to
access the latter, Tret’iakov wrote in his essay “Against Tourists,” he or she needed
to have an organizational role within the farm’s day-to-day operations. Tret’iakov’s
sole, but in retrospect fundamental, accomplishment of that first month at the
Communist Lighthouse was thus the realization that he, as a literary writer, was a
“total ignoramus” [polnyi profan].20 (Hence his characterization of part one of his
See Fore, “‘All the Graphs,’” and idem, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” in this
Tret’iakov, “Happy New Year!,” p. 267.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “What’s New,” Novyi lef, Non. 9 (1928); trans. in Lawton and Eagle, Russian
16.
issue, pp. 95–131.
17.
18.
Futurism, p. 271.
19.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Novyi Lev Tolstoi,” Novyi lef, Non. 1 (1927), pp. 34–38; trans. as “The New Leo
Tolstoy,” trans. Kristin Romberg, in this issue, pp. 45–50. This paragraph is partially redacted from my
“Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October 101 (Été 2002), pp. 72–73.
20.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Protiv turistov,” in Vyzov, p. 132.
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166
OCTOBER
anthology The Challenge as the story of a “powerful commune and powerless
writer.”)21 To extricate himself from this condition of ignorance and uselessness,
the writer first needed to clarify the matter of his or her “observation post” [nabli-
udatel’nyi post]: “The worst thing is to observe in the capacity of a tourist or guest
of honor: Either you see like a local, or you see nothing.”22 But if seeing like a
local was essential to the efficacy of the writer with respect to his fulfillment of the
social command, how might the writer, coming from outside, access this particular
modality of vision? Tret’iakov’s answer was twofold: through sheer duration of
experience (c'est à dire., sustained involvement over time), and through advanced knowl-
edge of agronomy.
Committing himself to both (with three more extended visits over the next
two years and classes in agricultural science and economy), Tret’iakov became
involved in a wide range of organizational tasks on the farm. Dans 1930, Par exemple,
Tret’iakov, Vyzov, p. 5.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Na kolkhozy!” Novyi lef, Non. 11 (1928), p. 9; reprinted as “Pisateli, na kolkhozy!,»
21.
22.
in Vyzov, p. 17.
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Gauche: Diagram of cultural and educational work at The Challenge
combine. ca. 1930. Droite: Front page of Vyzov. May 21, 1930.
Radical Tourism
167
he was elected to the council of The Challenge combine, and was entrusted with
the organization of its cultural and educational infrastructure, the purpose of
which was to make collective life more “cultured [kul’turnaia] and interesting.”23
This infrastructure he schematized in a diagram published in The Challenge: myr-
iad satellites of culturedness spiral around a cultural nucleus.24 One of these
satellites was the combine’s newspaper, which also bore the name The Challenge
and of which he became the editor. For Tret’iakov, the editorship was a chance to
exercise control, as he had earlier suggested, over the medium of contemporary
reality itself.25 As Tret’iakov tells it, the combine’s newspaper played a fundamen-
tal role in the collectivization process; indeed “it would have been difficult to
manage without it.”26 From a reluctant Moscow, he secured a typesetter, a type-
face, and paper on which to print, and then apprenticed a local herdsman, un
“self-taught artist,” to assist the typesetter. Within its first year of publication, plus
than fifty issues of the newspaper appeared; their articles routinely exhorted col-
lective farmers to give their all: “First in the sowing, we will be first in harvesting”
shouts the headline for May 21, 1930.
It was through his work in these var ious ventures at the Communist
Lighthouse that Tret’iakov came to formulate a new model of the writer, the oper-
ative essayist or sketchwriter [ocherkist-operativnik].27 Tret’iakov used the term for
the fir st t ime in a report on his collect ive-farm exper ience published in
Literaturnaia gazeta in September 1930, and subsequently anthologized in A Month
in the Country.28 Thus, only at the conclusion of his four extended visits to the
Communist Lighthouse did he clarify, at the level of taxonomy, the transforma-
tion that had occurred in his own thinking as to the insufficiency of factography
alone to the fulfillment of the social command. Certainly, it was operativism that
he promoted as his new model of the writer during his speaking tour in Germany,
Austria, and Denmark between January and April 1931. No specific reason for this
trip is known, but it was most likely prompted, as Fritz Mierau suggests, by the
polemical debates then raging in both the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany
over the deprofessionalization of the writer and the so-called end of literature.29
Tret’iakov presented an overview of his work at the Communist Lighthouse
to the Society for the Friends of the New Russia in Berlin on January 21, 1931; ce
lecture formed the basis of his essay “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” that
Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 3.
23.
24.
Tret’iakov, Vyzov, p. 325. The central circle designates the cultural HQ, around which are represent-
ed various sections and departments, clockwise from the top: political education; the library; the newspa-
per Vyzov; the protection of mothers and infants; after-school programs; sanitation, hygiene, and physical
éducation; artistic work (drama, live newspaper, choir, musique); and radio and cinema.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Verlag, 1976), p. 26.
Tret’iakov, “Novyi Lev Tolstoi.”
Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., pp. 3–15.
Fritz Mierau, Erfindung und Korrektur: Tretjakows Ästhetik der Operativität (Berlin: Akademie-
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168
OCTOBER
appeared in Das neue Russland in 1931.30 Là, Tret’iakov offered his most suc-
cinct formulation to date of his theory of operativism and its status as a major
advance upon reportage. The operativist transcended the factographer’s earlier
valorization of the “little reporter” over the belles lettrist, Tret’iakov argued, mov-
ing on instead to differentiate between two different kinds of reporters—the
merely informative journalist on the one hand, and the operative writer on the
other, who participates directly in the “life of the material” in an organizational
capacity: “To invent an important theme is novelistic belles lettres,” he explained,
“to discover an important theme is reportage,” but “to contribute constructively to
an important theme is operativism.”31
Sergei Tret’iakov, fotografist
Nowhere in his diagram of cultural and educational work on the collective
farms does Tret’iakov mention photography. No reference to photo-clubs, photo-
circles, or photo-correspondents, such as were flourishing in factories across the
Soviet Union, particularly in the major cities. Perhaps equipment and materials
were simply unobtainable, or their cost prohibitive, but the absence of photography
in Tret’iakov’s plan is puzzling for a number of reasons. D'abord, as Tret’iakov himself
had asserted in 1928, “Lef’s . . . uncompromising focus [est] on the literature of fact
and on the photograph.”32 (The latter part of Lef’s twin focus was largely shaped, it
should be noted, by the theory and practice of Aleksandr Rodchenko, as Leah
Dickerman argues in her essay in the present volume.)33 Deuxième, Tret’iakov had
called for the expansion of the ranks of factographers to include amateur photogra-
phers and photo-correspondents. Over the protests of some of his comrades, il
had even welcomed any shutter-clicking kid [foto-malchik, lit., photo-boy] into the Lef
fold as one more foot soldier in its war against the easel painters.34 Third, and most
significantly, there is the fact of his own extensive use of the camera as a recording
device at the Communist Lighthouse.
In addition to making “notes, minutes, [et] sketches,” he wrote, “I am record-
ing [zapisyvaiu] collective-farm life with a camera. So far, I have about 2,000 . . .
negatives.”35 In an essay devoted to his farm photography, Tret’iakov described his
Leica as “an indispensable photo-diary [foto-dnevnik],” and informed the reader
See Fritz Mierau, “Tretjakow in Berlin,” Berliner Begegnungen: ausländische Künstler in Berlin 1918
30.
bis 1933 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), p. 207.
31.
Tret’iakov, “Der Schriftsteller und das Sozialistische Dorf,” Das neue Rußland 7, Non. 2 (1931), p. 42;
quoted in Hubertus Gassner, “Heartfield’s Moscow Apprenticeship, 1931–1932,” in John Heartfield (Nouveau
York: Abrams, 1992), p. 260. See “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” trans. Devin Fore, in this issue,
pp. 63–70.
32.
33.
34.
35.
Tret’iakov, “Happy New Year!,” p. 265.
See Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” in this issue, pp. 132–152.
Tret’iakov, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” p. 4.
Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 11.
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Radical Tourism
169
Tret’iakov. Tractor Drivers Gather
around a Bowl of Borscht. ca. 1930.
that with a forty-exposure roll of film that takes just minutes to load, he is able to
record his various encounters more accurately than he could using notebooks;
thanks to the camera, he no longer even bothers to transcribe diagrams, wall
newspapers, posters, and the like, but simply photographs them for the record.36
Malheureusement, cependant, Tret’iakov’s photographic archive is now presumably lost,
perhaps seized along with his Leica at the time of his arrest and execution in 1937
by the secret police.37 Of those 2,000 photographs, we now have access only to
those Tret’iakov himself selected for reproduction in his kolkhoz anthologies and
sundry photo-essays and illustrated articles of the early 1930s, none of which,
malheureusement, escapes the low production value of most Soviet publications of this period
(a result of poor quality paper, inks, and registration processes).
Not surprisingly, Tret’iakov’s published selection from his kolkhoz archive
exemplified his anti-aesthetic, functionalist theory of photography. While “[t]ici
is no such thing as Lef photography,” there is, cependant, a “Lef approach,” he
argued: “What matters most is how you go about setting . . . en haut [the shot], le . . .
purpose of the photograph and why you have to take it, and then finding the most
rational means for the actual photographing and the points of view.”38 This decla-
ration was Tret’iakov’s riposte to the often automatic association of the Lef group
with the oblique-angle photography of Rodchenko (lequel, it is true, animated
most of Novyi lef ’s covers, and many of its pages).39 In accordance with his theory,
Tret’iakov, “Diad’ka,” in Mesiats v derevne, pp. 197–98.
36.
The NKVD file of Tret’iakov’s arrest and execution, which includes details of what was seized, est
37.
transcribed in “Vernite mne svobodu!»: deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terro-
ra, éd. V. F. Koliazin (Moscow: Medium, 1997), pp. 46–68.
Tret’iakov, “Photo-Notes,” in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, p. 253 (emphasis added).
38.
See Leah Dickerman, “The Radical Oblique: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera-Eye,” Documents,
39.
Non. 12 (Spring 1998), pp. 22–25. On the controversy over oblique-angle photography, see the debate in
Novyi lef between Rodchenko, Boris Kushner, and Tret’iakov, in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era,
pp. 243–51, 270–72.
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170
OCTOBER
most of Tret’iakov’s photographs are shot from conventional viewpoints, avec le
exception of an occasional bird’s-eye view, justified in order to provide an overview
of a particular feature of the collective farmscape (such as its canal system). Même
the most exceptional—a close, overhead view of nine tractor-drivers lying face
down in a field, their bodies fanned around a communal bowl of borscht that they
share for lunch—may be justified in terms of the “purpose” of the photograph: à
foreground in the most explicit way possible the intimacy and community of social
relations among this cohort of newly skilled collective-farm workers.
Unlike much first Five-Year Plan photography, such as the professional pho-
tographs published contemporaneously in the luxury photographic magazine
USSR in Construction, Tret’iakov’s photographs do not overtly fetishize the instru-
ments of agricultural mechanization. In only a single photograph—a steeply
recessed view of an industrial incubator—is the photographic field given over to
an infinite extension of gleaming metal. But even then, two skilled workers are
seen in the left foreground, apparently installing or repairing the incubator’s
plumbing, while the detritus of their labor is scattered in the foreground, a facto-
graphic detail that elsewhere (dans, say, USSR in Construction) would likely have been
retouched and eliminated.
Most typically, Tret’iakov’s photographs feature human subjects, often in
groups but occasionally alone, and almost all representing the project of social
engineering discussed above: the transformation of the peasant into a kolkhoznik.
Several do so through the portrayal of workers in conjunction with the accou-
trements of their newly mechanized agricultural practice: trying out a tractor, ou
working with a grain thresher. Others reveal new forms of labor organization
intrinsic to the acceleration of industrialization and collectivization under the
Plans, such as the shock-brigade (par exemple., a group portrait of the combine’s “Third
Tractor Brigade”) and socialist competition (par exemple., the distribution of work bonuses
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Tret’iakov. Gauche: Incubator. Droite: The Tractor Is Mounted on Springs in Order to Teach
Balanced Steering. ca. 1930.
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Tret’iakov. Top: The Third Tractor Brigade of The Challenge Combine. Middle: A Loud and
Burly Woman Commander. Bottom: At the Women’s Conference of The Challenge Combine,
Twelve (Femelle) Collective-Farmers Entered the Party. ca. 1930.
172
OCTOBER
to shock-workers). Some foreground the process of social transformation even
more directly: Tret’iakov photographed a “loud, burly, peasant woman [baba],»
OMS, through joining the kolkhoz, has risen to become a “commander [komandir-
sha]” of the field; a group of young peasant women who had just joined the Party;
and a couple of collective-farmers becoming “cultured” through library study.
But it was not just a matter of individual photographs. Precisely in order to
flesh out the social engineering of his human subjects, Tret’iakov advocated the
application of his earlier cinematic principle of “extended observation” [dlitel’noe
nabliudenie] to the medium of still photography, in order to produce photo-essays
that would treat his subject in a serial fashion. Neither anthology reproduces such a
series, but in A Month in the Country Tret’iakov describes how, over the course of his
several visits to the Communist Lighthouse, he produced a “photo-biography” of a
Kazak peasant, documenting through a series of photographs the process by which
she became a “tractor-driver–collective-farmer” [tracktoristka-kolkhoznitsa]. Ce
involved the writer greeting her in her village in the morning with his camera, et
then following her through the course of her day with the tractor brigade as she
gradually acquired, au fil du temps, the skills of a Soviet traktoristka.40
In accordance with their affirmative purpose overall, Tret’iakov’s published
photographs tend to suppress the conflict and discord that characterized the collec-
tivization process. But there are two exceptions. In one, a family’s deliberation over
whether or not to join the kolkhoz is staged in terms of an intergenerational conflict:
A clean-shaven (read: modern, Soviet) young man faces the camera, while a bearded
(read: backward, pre-Soviet) older man, wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and slinging
something like a knapsack over his left shoulder, turns away, as if departing the
40.
Tret’iakov, “Diad’ka,” in Mesiats v derevne, pp. 200–201, and idem, “Dlitel’noe kinonabliudeniie,»
in Vyzov, pp. 205-dix. See also idem, “Ot fotoserii—k dlitel’nomu fotonabliudeniiu,” Proletarskoe foto, Non.
4 (Décembre 1931), pp. 20–43; trans. as “From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation,»
trans. Devin Fore, in this issue, pp. 71–77.
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Tret’iakov. The Son Is For
the Kolkhoz, the Father
Against. ca. 1930.
Radical Tourism
173
scène: “The son is for the kolkhoz, the father
against,” Tret’iakov’s caption explains. That
image of turning away, of imminent depar-
ture, inevit ably summons the specter of
dekulakization, wherein any individual peas-
ant who refused to join a cooperative farm
could be labeled a kulak, and thereby forcibly
deported from the fertile agricultural regions
of the south to the frozen hinterlands of the
north. Another photograph documents the
phenomenon of the internal purge: A hand
deposit s a folded ballot in a locked box
labeled “purge” [chistka], underneath which a
sign explains “For the purge of commune per-
sonnel.” A purge was the process by which
members of the cooperative could vote one
another off the farm. En tant que tel, it was a means
by which a collective farm with “problems” in
the social composition of its leadership (read:
kulaks) could eliminate those problems, et
thereby avoid being denounced by t he
Kolkhoztsentr as a “false collective farm.”41 The purge, in other words, was a
euphemism for dekulakization. Tret’iakov readily listed purge-participation among
his activities on the farm, including the fact that he addressed meetings devoted to
purging the collectives of “kulak or anti-collective farm elements.”42
Tret’iakov. A Purge Is Taking Place.
ca. 1930.
There were some significant ways, cependant, in which Tret’iakov’s impulse to
record was thwarted rather than assisted by the camera. One had to do with precisely
his emphasis on human subjects, namely, the sheer difficulty of recording people at
travail. This difficulty is evident in nearly all the photographs we have considered so
far, in the discomfort registered in the awkward poses of their subjects, in their ten-
dency to look away or even at their feet. Tret’iakov regretted the “reluctance” among
kolkhozniki, especially among women, “to be photographed during working hours”:
“‘This is an old dress,’” they would object, or “‘My hands are dirty,’” or “‘I have to
look at what I’m doing, you won’t see my face.’” Seemingly clueless about the extra-
photographic social conventions that might induce or even dictate this reluctance,
Tret’iakov blamed this desire to pose for the camera on the professional (c'est à dire.,
studio) photographer, whose production of idealized portraits had encouraged what
he defines, rather severely, as “the habit people have of lying about themselves.”
Confronted by the apparent undoing of his documentary project, Tret’iakov resorted
See Viola et al., The War Against the Peasantry, p. 123.
Tret’iakov, “Raport,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 10; see also “Chistka,” in Vyzov, pp. 293–302. It is worth
41.
42.
noting that this last essay was excluded from the Malik compilation Feld-Herren (see note 2, p. 158).
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174
OCTOBER
to deception: “The method I used to bring people out of their stiff posing was to turn
their attention to some defect in their work, and while they were straightening it out,
to photograph them—before they had a chance to adopt a pose.”43
Tret’iakov’s documentary impulse was also frustrated by certain technical par-
ticularities of camera vision itself, such as the distortions produced by fore-
shortening. He describes an incident in the engine repair shop at the Communist
Lighthouse when “the workers were forced [by the writer] to pose against their
will.” A technician was measuring the thickness of an engine shaft with a ruler and
calipers, but because foreshortening would have reduced the calipers to a tiny
“piece of cotton thread,” Tret’iakov asked his comrade to reposition the calipers
against another shaft, so as to avoid any distortion. The technician replied forth-
rightly: “You want to make a fool of me? That shaft can never be measured with a
pair of calipers.” Tret’iakov concludes his story with an ambivalent observation: “For
this man it’s the opinion of his fellow technicians that is important. He wants to be
photographed as an engineer, not as a hero.”44
A third complication was introduced by Tret’iakov himself, when he began to
stage “instructional” photographs: “At one time I would shoot only in documentary
mode [dokumental’no],” he writes in A Month in the Country, “I tried, c'est, to cap-
ture reality as it is. [Mais] in addition to such ‘documentary’ photographs, I now also
take ones that are set up in advance.” The latter show “not how the work is done in
reality, but how it should be done”: Par exemple, how to mount a tractor correctly,
or how to dissect the carcass of a pig.45 Again, Tret’iakov was advancing his argu-
ment for a purpose-driven photography: to assist, literally, in the transformation of a
peasant into a kolkhoznik who could contribute to the accelerated fulfillment of the
Plan. En tant que tel, the camera was not just a recording device, but also a production tool.
Tret’iakov’s experience on the kolkhoz thus relaxed his hitherto factographic exclu-
sion of the staged. “Photography is not just a stenographer,” he writes in the final
issue of Novyi lef in December 1928, six months after his first visit to the Communist
Lighthouse, “it also explains.”46 And though he continues to insist on a binary of
documentary and staged, he scare quotes the former term, as we have just seen, as if
acknowledging the fragility of its very concept. Tret’iakov’s insistence here is signifi-
cant, for it was the complete collapse of that binary in favor of the staged that would
soon become the distinguishing feature of Socialist Realism: “seeing life as it [est]
becoming, rather than life as it [est].”47
Tret’iakov, “Photo-Notes,” in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 253, 255.
Ibid., p. 254.
Tret’iakov, “Diad’ka,” in Mesiats v derevne, p. 201.
Sergei Tret’iakov, “Ot redaktsii,” Novyi lef, Non. 12 (1928); trans. in Phillips, Photography in the
43.
44.
45.
46.
Modern Era, p. 271.
47.
See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the
1930s (Oxford: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 1999), p. 9. For a recent discussion of the problem of the rela-
tionship of factography and Socialist Realism, see Maria Zalambani, La morte del romanzo: Dall’avan-
guardia al realismo socialismo (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2003), pp. 126–42 and Appendix II.
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Radical Tourism
175
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Tret’iakov et al. “The
Camera in the Hands
of the Writer,»
Sovetskoe foto, Non. 2
(March–April 1934).
Photographic Waste
By spring 1934, Tret’iakov had repudiated the polemical aspects of factography
and operativism—the deprofessionalization of the writer, and the end of litera-
ture—but nevertheless maintained his preoccupation with both the essay and the
photograph. In this final section, I consider a provocative response he gave to the
magazine Sovetskoe foto in March 1934, when it invited a number of Soviet writers to
reflect upon the role and place of the camera in their literary production.48 The
respondents to this survey represented a heterogeneous group: In addition to
Tret’iakov, it also included, inter alia, his former adversary Vladimir Stavskii (un
once prominent leader of the now defunct RAPP, who would soon become First
Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers); the great master of the psychological
novel, Leonid Leonov; and the satirical novelist (and later photo-essayist) duo, Il’ia
Il’f and Evgenii Petrov.49 Such heterogeneity was typical of attempts to create a
postpolemical discursive environment in the wake of the Party’s April 1932 liquida-
tion of separate literary organizations (such as the RAPP), with their supposedly
“narrow” and “elitist” platforms, in favor of a single union of all Soviet writers that
would be inclusive of Party members and fellow-travelers alike.
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Sergei Tret’iakov et al., “Fotoapparat v rukakh pisatelia,” Sovetskoe foto, Non. 2 (March–April 1934),
The other contributors were Dzako Gatsuev, Boris Gorbatov, Mikhail Levidov, and Liudmila
48.
pp. 24–37.
49.
Popova.
176
OCTOBER
But the lead response was by Tret’iakov, and there is reason to believe that it
was perhaps he who instigated the survey on behalf of the reportage-oriented
Sovetskoe foto: Over the past few years, the magazine had served as something of a
forum for his defense of hybrid genres such as the photo-essay and photomon-
tage.50 In his response, Tret’iakov begins by associating his use of the camera with
travel writing in particular, as he has always done. On a “literary journey,” he
explains, the Leica is a device as essential to the writer as his traditional instruments:
“I don’t know which would be worse: to lose my notebook and pen, or my camera.”
Continuous-roll film enables him to create a “visual diary” of his experiences en
route and on location, which later plays a fundamental role in his writing process.
Accompanying his response are two such diary entries: The upper photograph was
taken during a summer 1931 trip Tret’iakov made with a brigade of writers to con-
struction sites in the mineral-rich Lake Baikal region of southeastern Siberia, à la
invitation of the newspaper Za industrializatsiiu [For industrialization], an organ of
the People’s Commissariat of Ferrous Metallurgy.51 In sharp sunlight, a sheet mica-
carver holds a thin shard of the mineral up close to her eye, and peers through its
translucent materiality as if looking through a viewfinder (as if, in fact, parodying
Tret’iakov’s act of photographing her). In the lower photograph, which he took in
Février 1931 while in Europe promoting his new model of the operative writer,
two lightermen guide low-slung barges loaded with lumber and other building
materials as they are tugged through a Hamburg canal, just as the ice is beginning
to break into shards.
Aside from their most minimal captions, Tret’iakov says nothing about either
of these reportage-style travel photographs, but the fact of their inclusion in the
survey is significant. Though taken in 1931, at the height of Tret’iakov’s promotion
of operativism, neither pertains to the development of that model, which had
become his major preoccupation after the demise of Novyi lef, as we have seen.
Plutôt, what is provocative about Tret’iakov’s response to Sovetskoe foto is his discus-
sion of the status and value of so-called photographic waste [fotograficheskii brak]:
photographic rejects, defective photographs, flawed photographs. On the kolkhoz,
Tret’iakov had analyzed the photographic defect as something to be remedied and
eliminated through instruction and experience.52 His argument in 1934 is quite
the reverse. In accordance with their character as diary entries or photographic
drafts [foto-chernoviki], Tret’iakov acknowledges that a writer’s photographs neces-
sarily vary considerably in quality: In some, Par exemple, contours are blurred due
to inadvertent or unavoidable movement of the camera, or to conditions of insuffi-
cient illumination. Though technically flawed, such photographs are nevertheless
See Tret’iakov, “Ot fotoserii,” and idem, “Raport proletarskogo khudozhnika: Boitsa bratskoi
50.
kompartii,” Proletarskoe foto, Non. 3 (Mars 1932), pp. 16–18. (Proletarskoe foto was the name of Sovetskoe
foto from 1931 jusqu'à 1933.)
51.
der Zeit des 1. Fünfjahrplans” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1983), p. 162.
52.
See Martin Schneider, “Die operative Skizze Sergej Tret’jakovs Futurismus und Faktographie in
See Tret’iakov, “Diad’ka,” in Mesiats v derevne, pp. 199–200.
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Radical Tourism
177
of value, he now insists, insofar as they assist the writer in his reconstruction of
events, or serve as points of departure for his illustrator.
More polemically, Tret’iakov then suggests that in terms of sheer dynamism,
blurred or underexposed photographs are ultimately more compelling than
super-slick images with crisply delineated contours that end up feeling, by con-
trast, static and monumental. Given this, he is convinced that photographic waste
will start appearing in the Soviet press, and that readers will eventually come to
appreciate photographs with defects [defekty]. As an example, he refers to a photo-
graph recently published in USSR in Construction, which documents the pre-dawn
inflation of a hydrogen balloon. Here Tret’iakov is most certainly referring to an
extraordinary photograph that appears in a photo-essay on the Stratostat SSSR in
the February 1934 issue of USSR in Construction, the text of which he himself had
just cowritten with the cinematographer Eduard Tisse, within an overall design by
El Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers. (A list of contributing photographers is given on
the last page of the issue, but the specific photograph is unattributed.)53
53.
See USSR in Construction, Non. 2 (Février 1934), n.p. Tret’iakov also co-wrote with Tisse the
photo-essays on the three other “Bolshevik victories” included in this issue. Earlier, he had contributed
the “photo-theme” and entire text of the magazine’s special issue on the Soviet Volga (Mars 1933),
and later co-wrote (with Stavskii) the text of its special issue on the peoples of the Orjonikidze territo-
ry in the Northern Caucasus (Mars 1937).
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Double-spread from the photo-essay “Stratostat SSSR” by Tret’iakov
and Eduard Tisse, USSR in Construction 2 (Février 1934).
178
OCTOBER
“With its indistinguishable figures,” Tret’iakov writes, “this is clearly a flawed
[porchenyi] photograph. But in an utterly exceptional way it conveys the pre-dawn
atmosphere of shadows and figures darting around in the floodlights, et le
grandeur of the Stratostat as it begins to inflate.” What Tret’iakov seems most to
respond to is the way in which this blurred photograph captures the inaugural
launch of the Stratostat as theatrical spectacle: raking light carves the stage-like
site with a jagged chiaroscuro; cloaked figures huddle at left and disperse around
the slowly animated drapery of the Stratostat at right. Precisely in its technical
imperfection—in its blur—the photograph records the dynamism of the occa-
sion, an effect further underscored by its reproduction across two pages of the
already oversize illustrated magazine. In his fascination with this object, the now
former champion of operativism is a long way from the unspectacular pho-
tographs reproduced in his kolkhoz anthologies. But Tret’iakov is also a long way
from the crisply contoured images that make up the remainder of the photo-essay
in which the Stratostat photograph appears, and of the February 1934 issue over-
tous, et, en effet, of USSR in Construction overall—blue-chip Soviet propaganda
distributed abroad and among the Party and bureaucratic elite—where defects
are routinely retouched away, giving its reproductions, as Tret’iakov suggests, un
static and monumental quality.
In the affirmative rhetoric of the Plans, the only waste, the only defect, le
only flaw is the class enemy—capitalists, kulaks, industrial saboteurs, bourgeois
intellectuels, and foreign imperialists. So what does it mean for Tret’iakov to val-
orize waste, the defective, and the flawed in referring to a photo-essay that
celebrates a newly minted “Bolshevik victory” in the realm of science and technol-
ogy, wherein the Soviets surpassed the record of the balloon’s inventor (the Swiss
scientist Auguste Picard), with the first-ever ascent of some nineteen thousand
meters? At first glance, it might seem that Tret’iakov broaches a kind of surreal-
ism, which could perhaps be set against Socialist Realism. But there are stakes that
are much closer to home: If Tret’iakov’s response to the Sovetskoe foto survey is
implicitly a repudiation of operativism, with its emphasis on the production of
product —the collective farmer socially engineered out of the peasant—then his
valorization of photographic waste represents a stunning return to, and defense
de, the notational, the provisional, and the partial quality of the factographic doc-
ument, whether note, sketch, diary entry, rough draft, or photograph. What
makes the Stratostat photograph factographic is its blur.
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