New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. xi, 353 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231199193.
The central question of this study is how the “aesthetic tensions between emancipation and control…intersect with the political tensions of Comintern internationalism” in the context of early Soviet cultural productions concerning China (21). The term “internationalist aesthetics” here means “to render the world knowable as the site of a global struggle against capital and to create a new kind of political subject with horizontal affinities across the lines of national space and culture” “through mediated sensory experience” delivered by new media: “print, film, photography, and theater” (7, 20). Published in early 2022, the book argues that Soviet internationalism “failed to connect” the Eurasian territory, given that “Russia and China have reintegrated (in different ways) into a capitalist world economy” (246).
In his close Foucauldian readings of 1920s’ Soviet literature, ballet productions, and films (many unrealized), Tyerman interprets this internationalist project as aiming to achieve a “political function: connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present” (21). Sources in his study range from the avant-garde, to those based on artistic methods which were conventional at the time, to propaganda pieces on the theme of China. Some of these are important sources on early Chinese communism and Soviet experiences—that is, when approached using source criticism method—these include writings by Sergey Tretyakov (including the internationally successful theatre show Roar China), Boris Pilnyak, and Isaak Babel, as well as films meant to have been produced in collaboration with Sergey Eisenstein. The ballet Red Poppy had a lasting impact, spanning decades, on Soviet consumer culture. Chapters are organized according to the source pieces.
The author devotes each chapter to demonstrating how all artists failed to overcome the orientalism of pre-revolutionary times in their depictions of China (121). For example, the creators of the Red Poppy ballet were ignorant of Chinese names and made mistakes while using them (124). Moreover, Tyerman argues, “the flight’s assertion of internationalist connection across Eurasian space [between Moscow and Beijing] also echoed the longer tradition of the Russian state’s expansion into East Asia” (148). Other examples are “primitive exotica” in film depictions of Mongolia: “men on horseback, markets, Buddhist temples and monks, and camel caravans plodding through the Gobi Desert” (150). The fact that Tretyakov wrote a biography of Deng Shihua in Russian, and in Moscow is interpreted as proof that “the resulting narrative cannot be read as anything other than a form of truth produced by their authoritative demand” (207), one cannot help but wonder how we might then interpret an analysis of Russian sources produced in the United States, in English, using French literary theory.
It is surprising to read a narrative which posits that China had no agency vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, especially in the 1920s, when no Chinese central government existed. Tyerman, however, is not in conversation with anglophone primary source-based histories of the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power, which devoted much to the CCP-Guomindang relationship. This scholarship, produced over three decades by historians of China, earned China agency in the face of Western-Soviet-Communist Party and the Comintern. Deng Shihua, a former student of Tretyakov at Beijing University who comes to the Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV), tells Tretyakov through an interpreter about his life and about China. Tretyakov’s narrative of Deng’s life indeed echoes narratives of KUTV Chinese students, as Tyerman rightfully asserts. Yet, as Yeh Wen-hsin has shown in Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (University of California Press, 1996), patterns of familial and social relations in the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing in 1911 shaped the paths which led young Chinese to Marxism, some of them to the Communist Party, and some of those further to the Moscow KUTV. Those patterns are discernible in Deng’s life narrative, as well as in the personal narratives of some KUTV students. As it were, regrettably, Tyerman reinforces the old paradigm in which the West—the Soviet Union, in this case—acts upon a passive Chinese recipient. In fact, the author represents the same orientalist view that he claims to reveal in the sources.
Further in this line, Tyerman’s analysis misses the irony and sarcasm in the source texts. One example is Pilnyak’s “Standing on the Bank of the Yangtze” (68), in which he says he won’t ever know the name of the village he sees in front of him. This trope is an echo of the nihilism of Russian nineteenth-century and Silver Age poets, not of a condescending unwillingness to know, which could be interpreted as orientalism. Indeed, Tyerman uses the standard of anglophone academic writing to dismiss the avant-garde literary quality of Tretyakov’s biography of Deng. Tyerman finds in Tretyakov’s piece “inconclusive conclusions” (213) and that the introduction and conclusion contradict each other (229). In the end, Tyerman provides no explanation as to what signifies the project’s failure according to his own definitions, cited at the beginning of this review. While one can defend the validity of such a statement, I could not find documentation in the book for how the creation of the internationalist subject in the Soviet Union failed.
A regrettable lack of contextualization of internationally significant artists of the 1920s persists in this history of “Soviet internationalism.” As Tyerman mentions, most of these artists perished in Stalin’s purges and thus were no longer part of the establishment during the 1930s. What was it in their artistic internationalist approach that was at odds with Stalin’s totalitarian designs? Also curious is that throughout the book, “Soviet” and “Russian” are used interchangeably (68), this despite the fact that scholars have written about how “un-Russian” the early Communist Party was in the Russian Empire. Tretyakov himself was half German and born in Latvia, then travelled in Germany where he befriended Bertolt Brecht. Also half German was Pilnyak, although his father was a descendent of German colonists, not a first-generation German, unlike Tretyakov’s mother.
All in all, these interpretative mishaps aside, this is a very close textual analysis of important sources, some of which are not easily accessible, and thus this study will be useful for those interested in these sources.
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin