Unveiling Empire: The Multiple Lives of The Silk Maiden
This article examines The Silk Maiden, a tale of heroism and cultural significance, as it modifies its messages and meanings across the twentieth century. From its Islamic underpinnings at the turn of the century, through the powerful tumult of Socialist Realism, to the national awakenings of the 1960s and 1970s, The Silk Maiden remained an iconic tale of loyalty and resistance. Despite its continued iconic status, the story also brings to light a relentlessly adaptive subaltern culture. First the tale reveals a remote world on the edge of the Russian Empire, then a culture quickly absorbed in the Soviet experiment, finally an expression of autonomy and independence. The social and political changes reflected in the story were mirrored in the medium as well, the oral epic became an opera and later a film. It is the story of modern Kazakhstan
Cinema for the “Soviet East”: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film
Before the eyes of the vast, ignorant masses of the eastern nationalities, the fast-moving frames of cinema will reproduce the many achievements of human knowledge. For the illiterate audience, the electric beam of the magic motion-picture lamp will define new concepts and images, will make the wealth of knowledge more easily accessible to the backward mind. Bakinskii rabochii, 18 September 1923 Pictures, so the first Bolsheviks believed, speak louder than words. Visual propaganda was essential in their campaign to reach the illiterate and poorly literate masses, to engage them in a new Soviet style of life. By the end of the civil war, every leading member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party valued the political uses of film. As commissar of nationalities, Iosef Stalin recognized its potential; in his simple expression, film was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” Like cinema, the Bolsheviks appeared at the confluence of two worlds, the traditional and the modern. For them, film was the perfect medium by which to critique the old and celebrate the new. Film viewed the world as they did, with one measure of hard realism, another of soft utopianism.
STALIN'S FIRST VICTIM: THE TRIAL OF SULTANGALIEV
From June 9-12, 1923 the Central Committee, Central Control Commission and responsible workers from the national republics and oblasts met in Moscow for the fourth (and probably last) time since 1920. The subject of their meeting was the "trial" of Mirsaid Sultangaliev, the most prominent Muslim Communist in the Soviet Union and the leader of the Volga Tatars' in the state and Party apparatus. He was accused of treason for corresponding, with a view towards an alliance, with the Basmachi, specifically with one of their leaders, A. Z. Validov. Secondly he and, by implication, his followers, were also accused of having engaged in unlawful factional activity and the formation of a deviant l i ne -Su l t anga l i ev i sm or "national Communism"-opposed to the Party line. This was the first show trial of any major Communist and was linked to a subsequent purge of national "deviationists" in 1923-24. As such this trial and purge were events of the first magnitude in Soviet history. They impinged on the subsequent nationality policy of the Party and upon the rise of Stalin to leadership. They also are of profound importance for assessing the nature of the show trial and purge phenomenon and the linked issue of GPU involvement in Party affairs during the NEP. Inasmuch as the trial's ramifications and its causes in Sultangaliev's undeniable disenchantment with Soviet rule are covered in extenso elsewhere,l I propose to focus attention upon the issues relating to the Stalin succession and the related phenomena of the purge and GPU involvement. The necessity for doing so is not just traceable to the lack of Western and Soviet assessment of this trial's significance. New theories concerning the nature of the purge process in the mid-twenties, propounded by J. Arch Getty, which have aroused much controversy, enable us to test the validity of his theories against the actual record of events. According to Getty, the term purge should be restricted to those operations which were membership accountings, usually inaugurated after periods of mass enrollment in the Party 2