The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
The 1920s saw emerge two outstanding silent films about railroad construction: John Ford’s fictional Iron Horse (1924); the pulsating Soviet documentary Turksib, by Viktor A. Turin. Ford, in the U.S., had embarked on a path to greatness. Only Turksib has rescued Turin from obscurity.
In many ways Turksib is the signature Soviet film. Documenting the construction of a railroad linking north and south, it is a celebration of the Soviet nation’s determination to overcome Nature, which is here portrayed as being harsh and brutal, in order to better the lives of its people(s) and to unify its vast territory. Informing Turin’s perspective is Karl Marx’s own attitude toward Nature, which is dismissive and contemptuous. In Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857), Marx wrote: “Nature does not build machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs . . . They are products of the human industry.” On the other hand (or in the other Kino-eye), Turin’s portrayal of Nature in his film, by default of humanity’s romance with Nature to which Marx was peculiarly immune, is often bewitchingly beautiful. Probably unconsciously, Turksib bridges the exaltation of “human industry” and a recognition of Nature’s beauty, for all its perils, regional bleakness, and challenges to progress.
Like The Iron Horse, Turksib is an epic. Taken together, the film’s bounty of mostly brief shots composes a hymn to national purpose, the arduous piecemeal task of realizing a daunting enterprise and achieving a noble end. Metaphorically, the building of the Turkestan-Siberian Railroad everywhere suggests the realization of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Now that the nation in question has fallen and vanished, the film allows us, therefore, to glimpse afresh the hope and spirit that the idea of the Soviet Union once brought to the world. Turksib encapsulates the Soviet dream.
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Dennis Grunes 