China in the early Soviet cultural imagination is an extremely interesting case that sheds light on the evolution of the Soviet project, from the early anti-imperialist socialist internationalism to the Stalinist imperial project. China proved to be a litmus test of early Soviet perceptions and political intentions, revealing both the nature of Soviet messianism and the contradictions within Soviet internationalism that later led to its degeneration into Stalinist imperialism.
In his analysis, Tyerman reveals different aspects of what he defines as an “internationalist aesthetic.” This notion allows the author to connect the sphere of politics with the sphere of culture. Proceeding from the assumption that “cultural texts may provide imaginary resolutions to real contradictions,” the author coined the term “internationalist aesthetics” to define “this collective attempt to express and resolve the contradictions of internationalism through the production of culture” (5).
Tyerman's book is among a whole series of first-rate studies (by Katarina Clark and Michael David-Fox) that have focused on the culture of Soviet internationalism. But it examines not only international relations matters, but also broader issues of nation-building that are relevant to understanding the dynamics of “the national question” within the USSR, where the problems of colonialism, overcoming the imperial legacy, nationalism, and the construction of national cultures were very much at the core of political battles in the 1920s and 30s.
The author turns to the close reading of cultural production, the corpus of which is not particularly large. Most of it was produced by Sergei Tretyakov. He rightfully takes center stage in the book as a theorist of documentalism, as a writer, as a playwright, and as a cultural mediator. Among the texts under consideration are mainly biographies, travelogues, short stories, plays, documentaries, and the ballet The Red Poppy to music by Reinhold Glier and a screenplay by Mikhail Kurilko. The author has managed, however, to avoid the complete fixation on the personality of Tretyakov. There are also Boris Pilniak, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Meyerhold to name a few.
The book is richly documented. The author demonstrates a deep familiarity not only with the material but also with the context—critical literature and secondary sources; making extensive use of archival materials, he recreates the cultural environment, the whole network of interconnections that make up the fabric of culture. All this makes his analysis persuasive and insightful, and his arguments easy to grasp. The structure of the book also contributes to this. Each of the four chapters is devoted to a different medium. The first one deals with literature (fiction, travelogues, and biographies), the second with translating China onstage (plays and ballet), the third one with documentaries; and in the last and fourth, documentary and factualism.
The book combines textual analysis and insightful and sophisticated interpretation with comprehensive historical commentary. The author draws connections between aesthetics and politics. As for the “internationalist aesthetics” itself, it turns out to be an effective working tool, allowing the author to understand the very process of mediating, in which he sees “the attempt to fashion an internationalist subjectivity.” The author's task is to understand what role modern media forms play “in crafting modern sociopolitical subjectivities” (29).
Tyneman's book allows us to approach many questions of Soviet cultural history in a new way. And this was the task of the author. He corrects our ideas about Soviet Orientalism, the role of culture in advancing the political agenda, the limits of Marxist internationalism in Soviet Russia, and the evolution of the imperial project in the USSR. Overall, this book deals with a failed political project: Soviet internationalism proved to be too bound up with Russia's imperial past and melted too quickly into a new Stalinist imperial project. But this is not surprising: the very turn of Soviet leftist intellectuals towards China (and more broadly towards the east) was a reaction to a failed world revolution in the west. Having turned away from one project, Soviet culture created a new one, one that was to prove Vladimir Lenin's view of the world revolution correct, one that was now supposed to win in yet another weak link of imperialism, this time in China. And so it happened. But history has proven that this was only an episode in the political perturbations of the twentieth century. Tyerman's book makes one take a fresh look at the early Soviet experience through the prism of painful attempts to move beyond the imperial imagination of a century ago, and will be an invaluable guide for those interested not only in problems of Soviet-Chinese relations but also in problems of nationalism, cultural interactions, and the universality of the Soviet experience.
