No Longer An Image Not Yet A Concept Mo

‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’:
Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr

Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay
Aglaya Glebova
The photograph is laborious only when it fakes.1 (Roland Barthes, 1980).
In February 1933, Aleksandr Rodchenko made the first of three trips to the remote
Russian region of Karelia. He was on assignment to document the construction of a
canal that would connect the White and Baltic seas.2 The new waterway was part of
Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, a nationwide agenda for breakneck industrialization of
the superannuated Soviet infrastructure. The White Sea-Baltic Canal was also one of
the first major gulags, its nineteen locks built almost entirely with forced labour. The
construction was done practically by hand, with building tools and a few cranes made
on site, and aided by only small quantities of explosives, as no hard currency had been
allotted for the project.3 Some 300,000 prisoners are estimated to have passed through
the camp during the Canal’s twenty-month-long construction, and between twenty-
five and fifty thousand of them died there.4
Like many of the early gulags – those in operation between 1927 and 1934 – the
Canal was widely advertised by the Soviet government, which framed the camps
as a humane project to rehabilitate criminals and ‘class enemies’, a re-education
policy known as ‘reforging’ [perekovka]. ‘Reforging’ was to be achieved through
manual labour and educational activities at the camps, which included publishing
newspapers, running museums and putting on plays.5 The purported success of this
punitive system was propagandized through books, films, and photographs, aimed at
both the domestic and foreign audiences. Indeed, the very first Soviet sound film, The
Ticket to Life (1931), was based on, and partially filmed at, a youth labour commune; it
was shown in twenty-seven countries and went on to win a prize at the first Venice
Film Festival in 1932.
Rodchenko’s photographs from the White Sea-Baltic Canal were published in
Soviet newspapers, as well as a collectively authored, 400-page propaganda volume
Detail from Aleksandr
on the history of the Canal, entitled StalinWhite Sea-Baltic Canal: History of Construction, and a
Rodchenko, photomontage photoessay for the deluxe propaganda journal USSR in Construction (plate 1).6 The USSR in
for USSR in Construction,
number 12, December 1933, Construction magazine was published in four languages with each issue focusing on one
page 5 (plate 7). place or theme; the December 1933 issue, which consisted of Rodchenko’s photo-story
on the White Sea-Baltic Canal, had a print run of over 45,000 in Russian and almost
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12437 15,000 for its three foreign-language editions combined (English, French, and German).7
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 The photoessay’s forty-eight pages (not counting the back cover) are, for the most part,
42 | 2 | April 2019 | pages
332-361 dominated by Rodchenko’s photographs and photomontages, with small captions by
© Association for Art History 2019 333

Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay
1 Aleksandr Rodchenko,
cover for USSR in
Construction, number 12,
December 1933. Lithograph
and gravure, 42 × 29.5 cm.
© Estate of Aleksandr
Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/
VAGA, New York.
the writer Lev Slavin, who was also among the authors of the History of the Construction. Its
narrative arc traces the building of the Canal according to the ‘reforging’ policy. Here, the
journal tells us, the remnants of the pre-revolutionary world – the chaotic landscape, the
criminals attached to notions of private property – were remade according to the dictates
of the new socialist society.The journal’s issue aims to elide the camp’s harsh reality.
The degree of Rodchenko’s complicity and his knowledge of the atrocities
perpetrated at the Canal are subject to debate. Although he was not coerced into
advertising forced labour, his political situation at the time was precarious. In
1928, he had been accused of ‘bourgeois formalism’ in the journal Sovetskoe foto, a
dangerous charge since it implied that Rodchenko’s practice was not in line with state
ideology. In Rodchenko’s case, this invective was grounded in the formal similarities

Aglaya Glebova
between his work and that of Western – ‘imperialist’ – photographers such as László
Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Subject to especially biting criticism was
Rodchenko’s vertiginous diagonals and oblique angles – angles that he had, ironically,
championed as a way for the camera to shed bourgeois optics and reflect modern,
socialist reality. Four years later, he would be very publicly expelled from the October
group.
As a result of these attacks as well as new laws controlling the production of
photographic images, Rodchenko found himself largely out of work.8 The USSR in
Construction photoessay was, without a doubt, an attempt on Rodchenko’s part to save
his career by taking on an ‘ideologically correct’ project. The photoessay also marked
a return to Rodchenko’s earlier photomontage practice, which had inspired his
relatively brief espousal and active exploration of photography’s medium-specificity
between 1925 and his expulsion from October in 1932.9 By the time he travelled to the
Canal, a certain version of modernist photography – one that boasted of its distinct
visual language – was under attack for perceived ‘formalism’. It is hardly surprising,
then, that the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay frequently attempts to downplay its
photographic nature, gesturing to other media as a kind of visual indemnity. It alludes
to its possible status as a blueprint and a map; on other pages, it evokes perspective
manuals and nineteenth-century painting. These references are meant to veil, if not
eschew, modernist medium-specificity that Rodchenko and other members of the
Left Front of the Arts had championed in the 1920s.
In part because of its departure from the modernist paradigm, and in part
because of its particularly pernicious subject matter, this photoessay has long been
seen as the point of no return in the Russian avant-garde’s abandonment of its
revolutionary goals and the movement’s co-option by Stalin’s totalitarian machine.10
The moment of the work’s completion – just a few months before socialist realism
was proclaimed the official artistic style of the Soviet Union – has lent additional
credence to these claims, as has Rodchenko’s apologia, ‘Reconstructing the Artist’,
published in 1936 in the best traditions of Stalinist self-criticism.11 Yet Rodchenko’s
photoessay makes for strange and, at times, anaemic propaganda: its layouts
frequently open themselves up to ambiguity and multivalence, failing to supply
a single propagandistic reading. Many of these images leave pictorial – and, by
extension, political – tensions unresolved, fracturing the possibility of a readily
legible narrative and, at times, undoing their own claims through their pictorial
incoherence. Put differently, the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay displays the
constructed and conflicted nature of representation despite largely relinquishing
many of the tools in the avant-garde’s arsenal of visual self-reflexivity, such as blank
space, disjuncture, defamiliarization, and factography’s embrace of a contingent and
constantly expanding documentary archive.12 In so doing, this work also resists the
designation of it as ‘totalitarian art’, which, as Christina Kiaer has recently argued,
‘has the power to foreclose analysis of both artworks and artistic identities’.13 This
article takes close formal analysis as its methodological point of departure in order to
probe how the radically expanded, and seemingly incoherent, visual language of the
Soviet avant-garde in the early 1930s could function not only to reinforce, but also
potentially to question and attenuate the dictates of the Stalinist state despite largely
(albeit not entirely) renouncing its earlier explicit dialecticism.
The Attack on the Land

One of the most elaborate and confounding images in the White Sea-Baltic Canal
issue is a two-page photomontaged layout, situated about a quarter of the way into

2 Aleksandr Rodchenko, the essay, that presents a sprawling vista of a construction site (plate 2). On the right,
The Attack on the Land,
photomontage for USSR in against the backdrop of rock blasting, groups of workers break up the stony terrain
Construction, number 12, with chisels and a jackhammer; on the left, labourers, some shovelling dirt and others
December 1933, pages 10
and 11. Gravure, 42 × 59 cm. pushing wheelbarrows along rickety wooden pathways, clear rubble from the future
riverbed of the canal. A half-finished dam curves through the snow-dusted landscape
VAGA, New York. in the distance. The two halves of the photomontage feature radically different spaces:
an open field, which makes a show of obeying perspectival conventions, on the one
hand, and, on the other, a craggy escarpment with no middle ground, presenting a
slope so precipitous that the chisellers seem to defy gravity. Rodchenko’s signature
appears on both pages – in the bottom left-hand corner – suggesting that this lay-
out may have been originally conceived as two separate works. Yet the artist worked
hard to soften the boundary that is the seam: the horizon line on the right is almost
matched to the snowy outcropping on the left, creating a line that unites the two;
halfway down the page, a crevice in the rock on the right lines up with what appears
to be the handle of an abandoned shovel on the left; and lower still, the muted outline
of a worker’s body – the hunch of his shoulders, the sole of his felt boot – joins the
shadows of the wheelbarrowers on the neighbouring page.
The diminutive caption accounts for this scene in language by turns ideological
and clerical. It proclaims, first, that ‘The attack on the land took place with spades and
explosives, iron and fire!’, jubilantly reiterating the contemporaneous Soviet view of
nature as the most obdurate class enemy of the socialist state. It proceeds to emphasize
the Herculean scale of this attack: ‘21 million cubic metres of soil were excavated. 2½

Aglaya Glebova
million cubic metres of rock were torn out. 4 million explosions cleared the path for
the canal in the granite’. Reading the caption against the photomontage, which shows
the primitive state of technology at the canal, the prisoners’ labour appears Sisyphean.
As notes from a 1931 Politburo meeting state, because ‘not one kopeck’ was allocated
for the canal’s construction, the millions of cubic metres of soil and rock were
excavated almost entirely by hand.14
This photomontage, which, for expediency and clarity’s sake I will refer to as The
Attack on the Land, is compositionally the most elaborate image in the entire photoessay.
It might also be the most labour-intensive, Rodchenko’s montage process paralleling
the layout’s emphasis on the intensity and scale of construction at the canal. The
Attack on the Land features over twenty different photographs, and this is a conservative
estimate; it is possible that there are as many as two dozen different photographs
combined here (plate 3). By comparison, most photomontages in the essay feature no
more than six different images per page. This pictorial complexity alone is reason
enough to look especially closely at The Attack on the Land.
Reading this montage is no easy task. The disparate images are piled on; this is
not a case of suturing junctions or assemblage – of photographs put together side by
side – but, rather, a kind of compression, with the images one on top of the other,
and the disjunctures of their edges flattened by the blue toning.15 This space is made
3 Aleksandr Rodchenko, The up of compacted layers, with the semi-transparent strata of images sometimes
Attack on the Land, with some revealing what lies beneath: note, for example, the handle of a pick showing through
of the individual photographs
highlighted. a photograph of snow in the very front of the montage’s right half, or the ghostly

object (a wheelbarrow?) where the snow field overlaps the riverbed on the left. In
the absence of a single focal point, this montage is difficult to grasp all at once. The
Attack on the Land does not pivot around a single figure or moment; rather, it presents
an overabundance of details that compete for the viewer’s attention. Faced with
this chaos, we have two choices: to skim the surface of the image, moving quickly
through it, or to pause falteringly at each figure or object one by one, while letting the
rest of the panorama fade from view. Although many contemporary readers of the
journal would have likely taken the former tack, flipping through the journal’s issue
without dwelling too long on any one page, this article follows the latter trajectory
while situating this montage within the larger aesthetic and historical context. This
close looking seeks to reveal more fully the ideological and pictorial complexity and
contradictions embedded in the White Sea-Baltic Canal issue and especially in The
Attack on the Land, its most elaborate photomontage. In so doing, this article does not
argue for the exceptionality of the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay, but rather
presents one model for rethinking the Soviet printed and mass media as bearers of
experimental and hybrid aesthetics which denote a politics not entirely in harmony
with their stated ideological aims.
Before moving to an in-depth discussion of The Attack on the Land, it is necessary to
position the photomontage both within this specific issue of USSR in Construction and the
journal’s publication history more generally. The Attack on the Land is situated a quarter of
the way through the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay, which begins with a map of the
canal and a portrait of Stalin, the quintessential iconographic pairing of the 1930s. The
reader is then briefly introduced to the main obstacles to the canal’s building: human
and natural material that is resistant to socialist transformation, to be ‘reforged’. The
Attack on the Land is the moment in which this transformation is presented as in progress
and fully under way. Everything in this photomontage – the landscape, the ground, the
prisoners who hurry back and forth across the construction site or upend the soil – is
here for the first time in movement, shifting. Although walls of a lock emerge from an
upturned landscape in the distance, the ultimate aim of this construction is not yet
clear. It becomes increasingly so as the reader moves through the issue, encountering
photographs of canal locks that tower over the workers. While the photoessay’s
narrative is not entirely linear, its overall progression is obvious: at the end, cargo ships
move across previously unnavigable territory; the prisoners are reformed; and, as
Party leadership surveys the result of record-breaking construction, a plan for the new
Moscow-Volga Canal (to be built also with forced labour) is announced.
Among those featured in the last pages of the issue, announcing the Moscow-
Volga Canal project, is the writer Maxim Gorky, who was among the journal’s editors,
and under whose auspices (despite his initial reservations about a photographic
periodical) USSR in Construction was founded in late 1929. The journal was published
by GosIzdat (the State Publishing House) in Russian, German, English, and French
between December 1930 and 1941, when (not counting a one-off issue in 1949)
it ceased publication with Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. USSR in
Construction aimed to publicize the technological and cultural achievements of the Soviet
Union to both domestic and foreign audiences.16 The journal’s issues, which consisted
primarily of montaged photographs with text playing only a supporting role, usually
revolved around one theme or subject, such as ‘Civic Aviation’, ‘Sport’, or, often, a major
engineering project or construction site – a model followed also by Rodchenko’s
White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay. The majority of USSR in Construction’s issues were
designed by the artist Nikolai Troshin, and featured images by some of the best-known
Soviet photographers, such as Boris Ignatovich, Arkadii Shaikhet, and Maks Alpert.

Aglaya Glebova
El Lissitzky worked on a number, frequently in collaboration with Sophie Lissitzky-

Küppers; and John Heartfield famously designed the December 1931 issue. With the
exception of the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay, Rodchenko collaborated with
fellow constructivist and life partner Varvara Stepanova on eleven of the journal’s issues
published between 1935 and 1941.
Engineered Chaos
The Attack on the Land is among the most compositionally complex images in the White
Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay and, in its multiperspectival (dis)organization of the
space (the winding path, the piled rocks and bodies), also unusual, as it stands in stark
contrast to the rigidly structured photographs of the Canal’s architecture that follow,
many of them also tinted blue. Just two pages (one lay-out) after The Attack on the Land,
we encounter another cyan-toned photograph, this one of a partially erected lock
in winter (plate 4). The walls of the lock, receding from the viewer – whose spatial
position is admittedly ambiguous, hovering somewhere at the upper edge of the walls
– move decisively towards a single vanishing point, while the clear geometric grids
of the walls’ square surfacing and the scaffolding evoke the orthogonals of Albertian
perspective. The sinuous line of a wooden path cuts through the snow at the bottom
of the lock, and a small figure at its end in the distance provides a sense of depth and
scale.
Hence, while many of the montages in the White Sea-Baltic Canal essay do
‘provide a coherent, unified state for the activity [Rodchenko] documents’ and ‘allow
for a suturing identification between the beholder and the centre of perspectival
projection’,17 as Leah Dickerman has argued, The Attack on the Land presents a scene so
replete with visual incident and so decentred and fractured that an immediate reading
is rendered impossible. Moreover, the photomontage lacks, or denies, clarity in
multiple ways. If we are to read this image in a way that makes sense temporally, we
would have to read it from right to left: the vortex of the elements, the stone that is just
being broken down and the explosions that did much of the initial work of clearing
the canal’s path would have preceded the transport of rubble that dominates the left
half of the image (not to mention the unfinished locks that frame the riverbed in the
background). Yet doing so would go against Western reading conventions, and hence
against the narrative of this issue of USSR in Construction, turning time backwards. This
inwardness, a turning around of history, is not confined only to The Attack on the Land –
but here it further underlines the image’s lack of temporal and spatial cohesion.
Yet this chaos and difficulty of reading is a result of careful calculation: The Attack
on the Land is nothing if not meticulously constructed. I use the term ‘constructed’
pointedly, for it gets at the montage’s relationship to Rodchenko’s earlier constructivist
practice, with its emphasis on the artist as an engineer and builder. The figure of the
engineer would have been on Rodchenko’s mind during his time at the Canal. With
the increasing attacks on the artistic avant-garde, Rodchenko’s earlier teaching career
at Vkhutemas (Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios), and especially his former
championing of moving art into industrial production, proved a political liability. In
1932, one of Rodchenko’s former colleagues, Vladimir Favorskii, published an open
letter entitled ‘No More Playing Engineer’, suggesting that Vkhutemas’s early attempts
to enter industrial production were little more than a farce.18 And in the spring of
1933, while Rodchenko was shooting at the canal, Varvara Stepanova informed him
that the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment had suggested that a ‘public trial’
be staged against the ‘former left professorship of Vkhutemas, with the charge of the
corruption of youth and – as a result – the lack of young new artistic cadres’.19

While no trial against Rodchenko did take place, the early 1930s saw multiple
trials against ‘bourgeois specialists’ – scientists and engineers trained in pre-
revolutionary Russia, who were often sceptical of the First Five-Year Plan’s grandiose
designs for rapid industrialization.20 It was also these trials that supplied the
Canal with engineers, most of whom were political prisoners. The Attack on the Land
intimates the centrality of the figure of the engineer in several ways, but perhaps
the most obvious indication of this is right in front of the viewer, hard to miss
and camouflaged all at once: the pair of men conversing at the montage’s edge.
Rodchenko’s original photograph (plate 5), which served as the basis for this image
photomontage for USSR
in Construction, number
12, December 1933, page
14. Gravure, 42 × 29.5 cm.
VAGA, New York.

Aglaya Glebova
cropped photograph
submitted for publication in
Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal:
History of Construction, 1933.
Crayon or gouache on gelatin-
silver print, dimensions
unknown. Moscow: State
Archive of the Russian
Federation (fond R-7952,
op. 7, d. 94). © Estate of
Aleksandr Rodchenko/RAO,
Moscow/VAGA, New York.
(a retouched copy of which is now held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation,
or GARF), shows the unnamed man on the right gazing back at the viewer, while
the head of the canal’s construction, Semën Firin, hands in pockets, looks away
(the worker behind his companion on the right is preserved in The Attack on the Land).
Through a series of alterations ranging from the minute (such as softening the shape
of Firin’s budënovka, or military hat) to radical (an entirely new face), Rodchenko fit an
anonymous figure into the outline of Firin’s body – though, in a ghostly reminder of
yet another layer, the edge of Firin’s phantom coat remains.

Foregrounded in this image, then, is not the secret police, but an unidentifiable
worker. This newly created figure’s individuality is entirely suppressed by his flattened
profile, which in turn moves our attention from his face to the signifiers of his status.
Clues to Firin’s class belonging are expunged: the unmistakable outlines of the
military hat are blunted and the edges of its tell-tale Red Army star at the front erased,
a simple wool coat substituted for the luxurious fur-trimmed leather trench. What is
provided in their stead is civilian clothing (the man is hence neither a secret police
officer nor a labourer), a large folder stuffed with papers (plans or maps, perhaps?)
and a notepad sticking out of the new coat’s pocket. Based on these additions, I want to
propose that this newly created character is an engineer.
Perhaps we could even imagine him to be a specific engineer by the name of
Magnitov, whose fictionalized story is told in the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal.21 In this
narrative – collectively written by seven authors, Viktor Shklovsky among them –
the engineer Magnitov, imprisoned and put to work on the canal for his bourgeois
leanings, is called away from his comfortable, well-heated office and thrown into
construction work at the site. There, he is deeply unsettled by the disjunction
between his designs and the land before him, which is to say, a radical decoupling of
abstract signifier and real-life referent:
He feels completely lost at the site. At the bottom of a giant pit he sees a crowd of
workers armed with primitive tools of labour: shovels, barrows, picks. He sees a
chaotic pile of dead matter: that terrible water, which covers the bottom of the pit,
the heavy stone, the frozen soil, the senselessly and hideously upturned womb of
the earth.This is far worse than the primeval landscape he witnessed when he had
just arrived [at the canal]. At least there was some sort of order, meaning [in it].
But this [landscape] has lost all its former features and has not yet acquired any
new ones. This is no longer an image but not yet a concept [my emphasis].22
This passage is an apt description of Rodchenko’s photomontage, which presents itself

as a blueprint or a map, while also wanting to be a dynamic image of a construction
pit. It never quite succeeds in doing either, and becomes a strangely liminal space
where matter has been taken out of its original order but has not yet produced a new,
legible system – much like Rodchenko’s photoessay in its entirety, which attempts to
leave the individual ‘image’ – the raw, indexical photograph – behind, yet never quite
adds up to a ‘concept’, or a fully resolved ideology.23
Blueprint
The idea of The Attack on the Land as an engineering blueprint is flagged by its cyan colour.
The use of toning is not exceptional for this photoessay: of its forty-eight pages, eighteen,
not counting this photomontage, are tinted blue in whole or in part, and another five
make use of green. But although it is not unusual for this issue (or later issues of USSR
in Construction), the light blue colour is hardly marginal to the pictorial work The Attack on
the Land performs.24 It recalls the cyanotype, also known as the blueprint, a reprographic
medium that dominated the fields of architecture and engineering until the 1940s.25
The blueprint is a peculiar kind of technology: it is undeniably, instantly material
and tangible and, at the same time, conceptual. As a cameraless process that relies on
photosensitized paper, the cyanotype is in direct contact with the object it depicts, hence
producing a physical impression, rather than a mirrored copy, of the object; this lands
the resulting representation, as Carol Armstrong has written, a sense of exceptional
indexicality.26 At the same time, the blueprint is, as the word’s less technical meaning

Aglaya Glebova
suggests, also a model of something, since the cyanotype was generally used to copy an
idea for an object rather than the object itself.This push and pull between the actual and
the conceptual embodied in the blueprint – not just an image nor only a concept – is one
of the key characteristics of Rodchenko’s photoessay as a whole. In its entirety, the White
Sea-Baltic Canal photo-story attempts to be, simultaneously, a believable representation
of one camp and a propagandistic account of the justifying idea – reforging – behind
the Gulag as an institution. In this, as Leah Dickerman has observed, the photoessay
as a whole also resonates with the ‘impossible aesthetic’ of socialist realism that is
perpetually attempting to reconcile realism and tendentiousness.27 Further, it also
flouts Rodchenko’s own earlier critique of ‘synthetic’ art forms (such as painting) that
attempted to present the ‘sum total’ of events and people through generalization, rather
than embracing the multiplicity and documentary authenticity of photography.28
Rodchenko’s use of cyan toning to analogize the photomontage to a blueprint also
suggests that The Attack on the Land is meant to be a faithful representation of the canal’s
construction.29 The illusion of objectivity was critical for photographic propaganda.30
The editorial preface to the Russian edition of the very first issue of USSR in Construction,
in 1929, made this aim explicit:
In order to rob our enemies inside and outside the Soviet Union of the ability
to distort and discredit the display of words and numbers, we decided to turn
to drawing with light, to the work of the sun – to photography. You do not
accuse the sun of distortions, the sun illuminates what exists as it exists.31
The Russian word for ‘drawing with light’ [svetopis’] used in this passage was an
archaic one by the 1930s, more or less equivalent both in its etymology and rarity
of use to the English term ‘heliography’. In choosing this term, the editors, as Erika
Wolf has pointed out, likely wanted to ‘evoke the early years of photography, when it
was accepted as an utterly objective, unmediated form of representation of external
reality’.32 The lack of mediation is especially crucial here; in mimicking a cameraless
reprographic technology, Rodchenko may have wanted to downplay the subjective –
which is to say, in this case, formalist – nature of his work. This seems all the more
plausible since the journal’s editors, in discussing El Lissitzky’s earlier designs for USSR
in Construction, agreed on the necessity of using photomontage economically, so as to
preserve the magazine’s ‘simplicity and naturalness’.33
Although The Attack on the Land is a positive print – unlike a blueprint, the lines are
blue and the background is white – its cyan tint still conjures up a plan or a model, an
idea. As one of the photoessay’s captions informs us, when the route of the Canal was
initially marked out in 1931, it was ‘only an idea – an idea of water’ that required the
relocation of thousands of people to Karelia. The Gulag itself was, of course, a blueprint
for a new kind of society and a new kind of citizen, in which the ideologically
suspicious, upon being exposed to socialism and hard labour, would reproduce, in
their politics and values, the model new citizen sketched out by the state.
The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal volume often returns to this notion of the model
or template in its narratives of construction. Everything is viewed as a model, and
all models are subject to remodelling. An engineer who was successfully ‘reforged’
is described as ‘a model that had been redesigned’.34 But it was not just the human
material that was subject to remaking. ‘Nowhere in the world’, the passage continued,
‘was there another such laboratory. In it languished, as though in the waiting room of
a courtroom, models. All the buildings of the [canal’s] construction resided here in
miniature. And many came out of it changed in order to grow and live.’35

A model or a template, however, is only part of the referential work of The Attack
on the Land. Not only does the montage look like a blueprint, but it also has about
it a sense of a chart or a map. The winding path-cum-future-canal in the left half
of the photomontage recalls the sinuous line of the new Arkhangelsk-Leningrad
route highlighted in red on the photoessay’s cover (see plate 1), and alludes to the
cartographic marking-out of the canal’s route. The panorama we see in The Attack
on the Land is, hence, also a relative of the Soviet preoccupation with mapping – one
of the crucial means of state control – and, in particular, with one variant of Soviet
cartography, the cinematic ‘living map’. Such a map appears, for example, at the
beginning of Solovki, a seven-part 1928 propaganda film about the Solovetskii forced
labour camp, the progenitor of the Gulag system that supplied much of the workforce
for the canal. The animated map gives us a simplified aerial view of the northwestern
part of the Soviet Union, with arrows indicating the distance between Moscow
and the various stopping points on the way to the camp, which was situated on an
island in the White Sea. Although the map is spliced with footage of a train carrying
prisoners, alluding to the duration of the days-long journey, it overcomes the distance
in a flash, magically connecting destinations hundreds of miles away from each other
(plate 6).
Similar maps, which usually demonstrated the White Sea-Baltic Canal’s dramatic
cutting down on shipping times via tiny ship models moving along dotted lines,
opened many of the cinemagazines [kinozhurnaly] dedicated to the construction of the
canal. Maps were defined in terms of their visualization of movement and activity
rather than, say, directions or distances, off the screen as well. Again, Stalin White
Sea-Baltic Canal gives us a telling description of one such map, which is described as an
‘instant photograph of the spaces of the Soviet Union’ that is ‘full of movement’ – an
oxymoron of an image, which can both freeze and splice time:
This map shows enormous areas as though in a state of geological revolution.

Everything is seized with boisterous movement. The North has begun to draw
back […]. The connectivity of our map is astonishing. We see how one part
of it strives for the other and – they are connected [...]. The map of the future
classless country must become whole, like a plan of one city.
The country, this narrative insists, changes so quickly that pilots ‘do not recognize the
maps’ they use for flying.36
This map is both a mass reproduced snapshot and a record of spatio-temporal
flux. Here, then, is another crucial tension in The Attack on the Land: that between
transfer or copying and circulation.37 This dyad is of course already embedded in
any work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: Rodchenko’s photographs
were in wide circulation precisely because they could be endlessly reproduced.38
But circulation, as Yves Cohen has observed in the context of Stalinism, is distinct
from transfer or borrowing: it is, as the word itself foregrounds, a non-linear
process, one that alters that which is put in its circuit, be it people, goods, or ideas.
Circulation requires not only forward movement, but also a return, a circling back,
even if that which has been circulated becomes deeply altered or unrecognizable
in the process.39 In this sense, the Gulag project, as it was presented in the White
Sea-Baltic Canal propaganda, fits both the transfer model (the creation of citizens
according to a blueprint) and the circulation model, since (presumably) the
criminals were extracted from society only to be reforged and returned to it after
their time at the camp.

Aglaya Glebova
6 Film still from Solovki, In describing the infamous Dmitlag camp, a successor to the White Sea-
1927–28. Produced by
Sovkino; directed by Baltic Canal in both its aims (the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, which
A. A. Cherkasov; animated Rodchenko would in turn propagandize in a 1938 issue of USSR in Construction) and its
by R. F. Bantsan. Krasnogorsk:
Russian State Archive of Cine- employment of hard labour, the cultural historian Karl Schlögel has emphasized the
Photo Documents (no. 2700).
© Russian State Archive of
circulatory, arterial character of the waterway:
Cine-Photo Documents.
It cannot be doubted that, for contemporaries, the fascination of such a huge
building project lay in the fact that it represented a manifesto of connectivity,
of networking, of the compressed significance of a nation that was extending
and expanding in every direction. It was a symbol of the idea that mountains
could be moved, but also that a gigantic country could be bound together to
produce a global organism.40
The Attack on the Land presents this simultaneous extreme compression and apparently
uncontrollable expansion that characterized the Stalinist conception of geography.
Repetition
The Attack on the Land is hence defined also by the push and pull between movement
and repetition. The vision of the line of workers propelling wheelbarrows
in both directions, and the dozens of people working in the newly dug-out
riverbed, evokes the canal’s supposed facilitation of movement – its enabling of
circulation – of goods and ships from the White to the Baltic seas. The image
underscores the scale of the undertaking, which is powerfully brought forth by
the densely populated space that teems with activity, with unceasing chiselling,
shovelling, and carting. Yet despite the caption’s insistence on the titanic sweep
of the construction, the photomontage presents us with only two detonations,
demarcated by billows of smoke that dominate the sky in the right-hand half of
the image. Both explosions are borne of the same photograph, indeed of the same
blast: the cloud of smoke on the right is simply a cropped version of that on the
left, as their identical right sides attest.41
Repetition is among the White Sea-Baltic Canal photoessay’s foremost
structuring principles. Bodies are where much of the repetition or echoing
resides: note the conveyor belt of the wheelbarrowers next to the page seam,
and down the pathway to the left. On the right, the driller and the man behind
him are in such similar positions and clothing as to suggest either a doubling

photomontage for USSR in
December 1933, page 5.
Gravure, 42 × 29.5 cm.
VAGA, New York.
or a splitting of the self.42 The front cover and the last page of the essay feature
identical images of a lock, while page thirty-four offers a photograph of the
same lock from only a slightly different vantage point. We could also think of
Rodchenko’s double signatures in The Attack on the Land as an instance of repetition,
or even of duplicity – a twofold appearance that makes the artifice of this montage
all the more apparent.
At first glance, this reuse of images might appear related to Rodchenko’s
figuration of the industrial process as relying on a set of interchangeable building
blocks, seen in his earlier photographic Vakhtan series and constructivist spatial

Aglaya Glebova
constructions. Yet in this photoessay, the iteration of the same photograph quickly
stops speaking to industrial methods of construction and begins to produce an
impression of scarcity instead.43 The repeated images complicate, and even border
on undoing, the dynamic, forward-moving narrative of the photoessay (and,
hence, the ideology it purports to illustrate) by suggesting a kind of enclosure
within which people, instruments and slogans recirculate endlessly, or, perhaps,
within which people, instruments, and slogans lose all individuality and begin to
seem the same.
I want to pause on one particular instance of repetition: Rodchenko’s use of the
‘Let’s bring forth water!’ [‘Daësh’ vodu!’] placard, which appears in the photoessay
VAGA, New York.

twice, on pages five and thirty-three (plate 7 and plate 8). These two photomontages
operate according to a similar visual logic: greyscale, roughly divided in half, with the
placard’s injunction joining the upper and lower domains. Page thirty-three features
the original photograph from which Rodchenko had cut out the banner. Slightly tilted
and reinserted into a crowd of workers on page five, it served as an answer to – or,
perhaps, a reaffirmation of – the facing montage, the caption for which described
the canal’s humble beginnings as ‘an idea of water’. Here, the prisoners answered the
Party’s – or in this case, the secret police’s – call for the reforging and release of water
and, by extension, their own eventual release.
The photomontage on page thirty-three is the last time we see the canal in the
process of construction; the remaining fifteen pages show the completed locks
and the various delegations and Soviet luminaries surveying them. It is also the
last time that we see the prisoners up close, or at work. At the top left-hand corner
of the page, letters affixed to a wood-panelled wall proclaim that the ‘[water]
way can now be opened’. The work has been completed; all that is left to do is to
open the proverbial floodgates, to release water into the body of the canal and
let it make its highly controlled, dammed and tiered way north to the White Sea.
This next step is encapsulated in the ‘Let’s bring forth water’ banner just below.
Finally, the narrative is completed by a photograph of a small waterfall. This
waterfall, however, is hardly convincing as a stand-in for the great waterway meant
to connect the two seas: it is more mud puddle than cataract, and the water’s
movement seemingly needs to be facilitated by two small brigades of workers
shovelling sludge as though to push the recalcitrant stream along. This narrative
appears all the more halting because the waterfall faces inward, towards the seam,
rather than outward, toward the flow of the constructed canal. The enclosed
nature of this layout – its backwards flow – reinforces the sense of the canal as a
space of confinement.
In both its second-person, collective nature – Let us! – and its origins in the
early years of the Revolution, in the atmosphere, that is, of pervasive Taylorism and
militarism (this particular slogan was inspired by a sailors’ command44) – Let’s bring
forth water! is kindred to the Let’s move production forward! of El Lissitzky’s 1920 propaganda
board. And just like the text of Lissitzky’s board, it too is malleable. Even so, the
moment when it appears in 1929 and 1933 is epochs removed from the heady, futurist
uncertainty of War Communism. As the 1934 Writers’ Congress, where didacticism
is pronounced a requisite for art, approaches, Soviet propaganda moves away from
modernism’s explicit desire to throw into doubt the various systems of signification
(although photography proves to be, perhaps surprisingly, a thorny medium in this
quest for ‘accessible’ art).45
One of the most common slogans of the First Five-Year Plan, the phrase Daësh’ –
Let us give, or let us bring forth – stood as a beginning to countless political summons
in the late 1920s and early 1930s. ‘Down with kitchen slavery, let us bring forth [daësh’!]
new byt!’, shouted Grigorii Shegal’s famous 1931 poster. Let’s bring the Five-Year Plan in four
years! [Daësh’ piatiletku v chetyre goda!] was another popular slogan. But despite its directive-
like nature, the word Daësh’ possesses a certain degree of semantic malleability. In
addition to ‘Let us’, it could also be read as either ‘give your [one’s] all’ or ‘you give
[us]’, and the phrase could hence simultaneously speak for workers’ desires (you give
us!) and their own determination of the process (let us!). Rodchenko’s photoessay
seems to enact precisely this semantic ambiguity: ‘Give us water!’ the masses of
workers shout on page five, and then on page thirty-three, declare that it was in fact
them who brought forth water. Or, perhaps, the other way around: ‘Let us bring forth

Aglaya Glebova
design for Daësh’, number 14,
December 1929, page number
unknown. Letterpress
and gelatin-silver prints,
30.3 × 23.2 cm. © Estate of
water!’ the prisoners shout at the essay’s beginning; in the end, they ask the Party to
release the product of their labour and liberate them.
Daësh’ was also the name of a short-lived illustrated journal – a total of fourteen
issues was published, all in 1929 – to which Rodchenko contributed work, most
famously a photoessay on the AMO (Avtomobil’noe Moskovskoe Obshchestvo, or Moscow
Automobile Association) car factory. The journal, dedicated to the workers, had the
explicit aim of raising artistic literacy of the proletariat.46 Each issue was focused on a
particular theme (some more baleful than others), which always started with the word
Daësh’: Let us bring forth the cleansing of the state apparatus! Socialist competition!
Bread! Coal! These proclamations are neatly captured in a 1929 photograph Rodchenko
took of the journal’s advertising billboard in front of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Its shape reminiscent of a PA loudspeaker – perhaps even of Gustav Klutsis’s 1922


design for USSR in
Gravure, 42 x 29.5 cm.
design for a ‘radiorator’ – the advertising board conceals Peter Klodt’s famous sculpture
of Apollo’s quadriga on the Bolshoi’s facade, as though the proletarian cry has now
replaced the pre-revolutionary veneration of ‘bourgeois’ arts on the city’s stage. The
billboard’s representation of the proletarian call that fills the square is echoed in an
eponymous poem Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote for Daësh’ in 1929, which began with a
panorama of Saint-Petersburg in the early days of the Revolution as ‘enlaced’ [obvityi] by
the order Daësh’, a word that was so profoundly Soviet, so ‘ours’, Mayakovsky wrote, that
it scared off the Whites.47
Curiously enough, although the journal Daësh’ ostensibly addressed itself to the
worker, Rodchenko’s AMO photoessay featured almost no images of the factory’s

Aglaya Glebova
employees, instead presenting highly modernist close-ups of car parts, all gleaming,
polished steel and metal (plate 9). Leah Dickerman has suggested that the focus
on the industrial process, rather than on the finished products or workers’ faces,
spelled the photoessay’s refusal of a linear narrative. Yet this refusal was reactionary
rather than disruptive; as Dickerman argues, the AMO photoessay is the first
instance of conflation between Rodchenko’s photographic practice and the politics
of the First Five-Year Plan, namely its reckless dedication to productivity and
efficiency.48 The work hence manifests Rodchenko’s fetishism of mass production,
as expressed in the endless replications of car parts – a vision of manufacture by
fission, from which the worker’s labour has been almost entirely effaced. (This
is also the case with the 1931 Vakhtan series, in which Rodchenko frequently
minimized the workers’ bodies, since they threatened to dissolve the vision of
successful industrialization.)49
But the effect of repetition in the canal photoessay is of an entirely different
order from that in the AMO images. First, because this repetition is based on the
reuse of the same image, rather than on an image of many identical parts, it speaks
to scarcity and recirculation, at least when it comes to the canal’s infrastructure: rock
blasts, banners, locks. What does seem endless, by contrast, is the supply of workers,
countless bodies that seem similar and even interchangeable. This is signalled in
one photomontage where Rodchenko doubled the size of a crowd by including
11 Aleksandr Rodchenko, A
Rally at the White Sea-Baltic two photographs of the same group of internees, but taken from slightly different
Canal, 1933. Gelatin-silver vantage points. It is also apparent in the photoessay’s many reproductions of slogans
print, dimensions unknown.
Moscow: Multimedia that align workers with numbers. One such board, for example, lists the names of
Art Museum. © Estate of individual labourers next to the percentage by which they overfulfilled their daily
Moscow/VAGA, New York. work quota: 180, 200, even 405 percent (plate 10). In these images, not only are

prisoners easily replaceable, but also the capabilities of the human body are made to
appear inexhaustible.
Yet Rodchenko’s use of the Let’s bring forth water! placard leads our eye to prisoners
who seem far from the elastic automata suggested by the quota overfulfillment
percentages. Note how the grainy print deforms the workers’ features on page five (see
plate 7), where Rodchenko’s signature appears next to figures who resemble apparitions
more than flesh-and-blood people. And, on page thirty-three (see plate 8), the internees
appear aggressively unhappy; more striking yet, one of them displays a conspicuous
injury – a black eye. This worker is standing just to the left of the banner’s post, his
shoulder bordering on the rubble in the photograph above. Not only did Rodchenko

portrait of Osip Brik
(unpublished design for
the cover of Lef ), 1924.
Gouache on gelatin-silver
print, 23.6 × 18 cm. Moscow:
Multimedia Art Museum.
VAGA, New York.

Aglaya Glebova
keep this bruised and unsettling figure in the image – although, as The Attack on the
Land demonstrates, removing him would have been a painless operation – but he also
carefully cut around this figure, placing him at the very edge of the image and hence
emphasizing him. The original photograph reveals that this labourer was, in fact,
wearing an eyepatch (plate 11); in the USSR in Construction montage, Rodchenko pasted
a minuscule cut-out eye over it, as though to reconstruct the prisoner’s vision (see
plate 8). On the other hand, Rodchenko appears to have retouched another internee’s
face to opposite ends. In the original photograph, the man standing on the other
side of the banner is staring straight at the camera, his blindingly white eye – perhaps
accentuated by a lens of his glasses – making for a potentially frightening encounter
between the viewer and the photographed; in the photomontage, the worker’s gaze
has been averted. On the most immediate level, these corrective operations dictate the
ways in which the workers are permitted to engage with the viewer (and vice versa):
neither partial nor overly penetrating vision is allowed. Rodchenko’s meticulous
examination and modification of these minute details likewise makes clear that
the anonymity of the crowd does not insulate the workers from surveillance. These
pictorial procedures also raise the spectre of avant-garde conceptualization of vision:
the eyepatch restoration calls to mind Rodchenko’s 1924 portrait of Osip Brik, the
fanatical proponent of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), with the name of the group in
place of one eye (plate 12).
Vision
In Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, the eye was an ideologically charged organ,
and vision the most politically fraught of the senses. Rodchenko, who had written
that photography would allow the spectator to shed her pre-revolutionary views, was
not the only one to praise the camera’s expository powers. Dziga Vertov’s manifestos
and films, such as Kino-eye and Man with a Movie Camera, hailed the new possibilities
given to vision by the prosthesis of the camera, setting out to make the covert
overt and the hidden manifest. Malcolm Turvey has recently described this as the
‘revelationist’ tradition of cinema, defined by what he terms ‘visual scepticism’, or
a profound distrust in the powers of human and empirical vision coupled with an
urgent desire to overcome these limitations through cinema (and, we might add,
photography).50
As is well known, distrust and watchfulness were part of the vocabulary called
on by the avant-garde. Vertov, for one, compared the mission of his group, Kinoks, to
that of the secret police, writing that the two shared both a mission – ‘to separate out
and bring to light a particular issue, a particular affair’ – and a methodology, which
entailed ‘closely watching the environment and the people […] and trying to connect
separate, isolated phenomena according to generalized or distinctive characteristics’.51
At around the same time, in 1924, Aleksei Gastev, the head of the influential Central
Institute of Labour and the foremost champion of Taylorism in the Soviet Union,
published his manual on the scientific management of labour, entitled How to Work.
In it, Gastev advocated for educational reforms that would include the establishment
of what he called ‘laboratories of observation’, in which young people would be
trained to ‘keep a vigilant watch over, and to precisely record, life’. These powers of
watchfulness and recording – the ability, as Gastev wrote, ‘for the eye to function
exactly like a camera’52 – were, for the ideologues of the avant-garde, indelible to the
development of the new socialist citizen.
No such ‘laboratories of observation’ were ever established, unless we count the
secret police as a metastasis of Gastev’s ambition. In the 1930s, the kind of constant,

13 Mikhail Cheremnykh,

Strike Kulaks who Agitate for
Reduction of Sowing, 1930.
Poster, 73 × 48.2 cm. Prague:
Ne Boltai! Collection.
© Ne Boltai! Collection.
observant alertness promoted by the avant-garde quickly turned into omnipresent

suspicion. ‘Vigilance’ [bditelnost’] came to define Stalinism, especially as the political
ground was being primed for the deadly and irrational sweep of the Great Terror.
In January 1933 – while Rodchenko was shooting at the canal – Joseph Stalin gave a
speech at the Party Plenum. In this address, he codified the deep distrust of surface
appearances that defined Soviet vigilance, a way of seeing that framed everyone and
everything as ideologically suspect, and sought to unmask the ‘class enemies’ who
were allegedly hiding in plain sight. Although the collectivization of agriculture
was largely complete by 1933, Stalin focused on kulaks, or peasants who refused to
collectivize, as his main example of the class naiveté and blindness of the Soviet

Aglaya Glebova
population. (Kulaks also made up the majority of prisoners at the Canal and other
early labour camps.) Good socialist citizens, Stalin lamented, ‘look for the class
enemy outside of the collective farms, they look for him in the guise of someone
with a villainous countenance, with enormous teeth, a thick neck, and holding a
rifle. They look for a kulak as we know him from posters’. Criticizing the
caricatured portrayal of kulaks in earlier propaganda images – such as Mikhail
Cheremnykh’s 1930 poster Strike the Kulaks (plate 13), which showed an armed, thug-
like peasant hoarding bags of grain – as out-dated, Stalin concluded that ‘such
kulaks have long ceased to exist on the surface’.53 Only vigilance and its companion
form of vision, prozorlivost’, which could be described as penetrating vision or

design for USSR in
VAGA, New York.

far-sightedness, could counteract this ‘class blindness’ and guarantee the unmasking
of the chameleon-like enemy.
Rodchenko’s photoessay endows the Party leaders and members with vigilance
and, especially, with farsightedness: Stalin, members of the secret police, guards,
Maxim Gorky, and, to a lesser extent, the engineer in The Attack on the Land, all gaze
on the diagonal outside the page, observing, marking out, and addressing that
which is inaccessible to the viewer, or the average citizen (plate 14 and plate 15).
Their gazes survey far ahead, escaping the confines of the treacherous and
misleading surface. This kind of looking is not entirely denied to the workers:

inside back cover for USSR
in Construction, number 12,
December 1933. Gravure,
42 × 29.5 cm. © Estate of

Aglaya Glebova

VAGA, New York.
one, holding a jackhammer, stares into the distance; but it is also precisely the
direction of his gaze that emphasizes the prisoner’s distraction from his work –
note the jackhammer resting languidly against his pelvis – making it clear that
the labourer is posing (plate 16). In general, the prisoners (when their faces can be
discerned) are given two ways of looking: looking back at us (exceptionally), or
(predominantly) focusing on the task at hand. Farsightedness and vigilance are
privileged modes of seeing.
In The Attack on the Land, the workers are denied the powers of looking back.
Of the forty figures that can be made out in this photomontage, not a single one

looks at the viewer. These workers, facing away, many with their backs turned to
us, are no Rückenfiguren; they do not – cannot – survey the site, their heads tipped
forward, focused on the work in front of them. Many are precariously positioned
and out of place; yet at the same time, they are firmly rooted in, inseparable from,
the ground on which they are working – so rooted, it seems, that they cannot
look up or away. These labourers are so single-mindedly focused on their task
that the notion of collective work, a fundamental part of the canal’s ideology and
propaganda, does not come through here. With few exceptions, the prisoners in
this photomontage appear to toil in isolation; but even when they are working
in a group, they hardly interact with, or even look at, one another. In the group
chiselling snow next to the montage’s seam, there is no contact between the four
men, with the parallel positions of their bodies underlining their automata-like
appearance.
The labourers are glued onto this terrain in the most unlikely of poses and at
unrealistic angles, falling down, tipping over, in danger of sliding off the surface onto
which they have been planted. If we are to imagine entering this topsy-turvy space,
we would be guaranteed to stumble onto a worker, to fall, to come up against the rock
and the soil that beset the prisoners. We would, in other words, take the internees’
place, a position that perhaps Rodchenko too felt he had come to occupy as he worked
on this montage, hunched over his desk, cutting out and gluing on miniature figures
and tools, reshuffling this landscape’s surface.
One prisoner, next to Rodchenko’s signature on the left-hand side of the
photomontage, is in a particularly abject position (see plate 2). The angle of his body
does not change from the original photograph, which espouses constructivist
diagonals. Yet here, taken out of the initial context, he seems to be forever faced
with nothing more than stony matter; the picks and handles that surround him,
painstakingly added by Rodchenko, seem to pin him permanently to the page, like a
specimen in a collector’s album. The prisoner’s labour is doubly senseless: not only
has the barrow he was filling in the original photograph disappeared, but whatever
excavation he may have achieved is immediately undone by the workers above, who
are shovelling dirt directly onto him. Perhaps if we are looking closely enough we
will not be surprised to learn that the canal ultimately turned out to be too shallow
for most sea-going vessels. The construction unfolding before our eyes is absurd – and
this photomontage, like the worker in front of us, is just barely scratching the surface
of the material it tries to take on.
Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the College Art Howard, New York, 1981, 87.
Association’s 103rd Annual Conference in 2015, as part of the 2 The question of who initially commissioned Rodchenko’s photographs
‘Reconsidering Art and Politics:Towards New Narratives of Russian is unresolved. While Rodchenko had been on the payroll of the state
and Eastern European Art’ panel, organized by Galina Mardilovich publishing house Izogiz (Art Department of the State Publishing
and Maria Taroutina. I would also like to thank the Humanities House) starting in April 1932, Erika Wolf has found archival
Commons at the University of California, Irvine for a publication documentation that the February 1933 trip was commissioned by the
grant to cover the costs of image rights for this article. A note on German media organization Worker’s International Relief. See Erika
translation and transliteration: with the exception of names that Wolf, ‘The Visual Economy of Forced Labor: Alexander Rodchenko
have a well-established spelling in English (e.g. Maxim Gorky) and and the White Sea-Baltic Canal’, in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual
the published titles of works or institutions, this essay follows the Culture, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, New Haven, 2008,
Library of Congress transliteration system, including throughout 168–174.
the endnotes. All translations are my own, with the exception of 3 See Nick Baron, ‘Conflict and Complicity: The Expansion of
Rodchenko’s writings included in Alexander N. Lavrentiev, ed., the Karelian Gulag, 1923–1933’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 42, 2001,
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, 615–648.
Letters, and Other Writings, trans. Jamey Gambrell, New York, 4 Estimates of the construction’s ultimate toll vary. In her overview of
2005, and Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: the history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum, drawing on accumulated
European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York, 1989. historical scholarship, puts the figure at upwards of 25,000 and

Aglaya Glebova
Michael Jakobson at possibly as high as 100,000. See Anne Applebaum, moment in 1933, see also Kiaer’s ‘Lyrical Socialist Realism’, October,
Gulag: A History, New York, 2003; Michael Jacobson, Origins of the Gulag: 147, Winter 2014, 56–77. See also Susan Reid, ‘Socialist Realism in the
The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934, Lexington, 1993, 128–131; and Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–1941’, The
A. I. Kokurin and Iu. N. Morukov, eds, Stalinskie stroiki GULaga 1930–1953, Russian Review, 60: 2, April 2001, 153–184.
Moscow, 2005. 14 Politburo meeting of 10 February 1931, cited in Baron, ‘Conflict and
5 For more on the cultural activities as part of ‘reforging’ at the White Complicity’, 640.
Sea-Baltic Canal, see Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in 15 This flattening is also part of the montage’s evocation of a blueprint,
Stalin’s Gulag, Brighton, 2014. which represents a three-dimensional object through a schematic
6 Some of Rodchenko’s photographs (without credit) also appeared in two-dimensional rendering.
an album of postcards of the White Sea-Baltic Canal printed by Izogiz 16 For an illuminating study of the audience and reception of USSR
in 1933 with a run of 10,000. The text for the postcards was written by in Construction, as well as a detailed overview of its origins and
the well-known Soviet writer Lev Kassil. At the time Rodchenko was aims, see Erika Wolf, ‘When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do
on contract with Izogiz, which reserved the rights to reproduce his They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in
photographs. Construction)’, Left History, 6: 2, 1999, 53–82. See also Ekaterina
7 The canal propaganda is astonishing simply for its volume and Romanenko, ‘Photomontage for the Masses: The Soviet Periodical
variety: it included not only Rodchenko’s photoessay and the Stalin Press of the 1930s’, Design Issues, 26: 1, Winter 2010, 29–39, for a
White Sea-Baltic Canal volume, but also tourist guides, as well as a different perspective on the editorial role of photomontage in Soviet
1934 play Aristocrats [Aristokraty] by Nikolai Pogodin and a film, The illustrated journals of the 1930s.
Convicts [Zakliuchënnye] (1936), based on the play. These, however, 17 Dickerman, ‘The Propagandizing of Things’, 93.
were not isolated attempts to glorify the Soviet penal system at the 18 V. A. Favorskii, ‘Zabyt’ ‘igru v inzhenera’: (Anketa o khudozhestvennoi
time. There were also photographs and narratives of Magnitogorsk, akademii)’, Brigada khudozhnikov, 4/5, 1932.
a city built in part by forced labour, and images of juvenile labour 19 Varvara Stepanova, Letter to Aleksandr Rodchenko, 29 April 1933, in
communes (likewise run by the OGPU) in USSR in Construction. At Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda: Pis’ma, poeticheskie opyty, zapiski khudozhnitsy,
least three films – Solovki (1928), The White Sea-Baltic Waterway (1934), ed. O. V. Mel’nikov, Moscow, 1994, 274–276, 275.
and the aforementioned The Road to Life [Putëvka v zhizn’] (1931) – 20 For an overview of these trials and the political motivations behind
included documentary footage of Gulags put to propaganda use. them, see Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and
For more on these propaganda films, see Cristina Vatulescu, ‘Secret the Fall of the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA, 1993.
Police Shots at Filmmaking: The Gulag and Cinema’, Police Aesthetics: 21 It is not known whether Rodchenko had read the volume or simply
Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times, Stanford, 2010, provided a selection of his photographs for possible publication. Firin
123–160. also appears elsewhere in the issue, for example on page four in plate
8 According to a 1933 law, any filming on Moscow streets required a 14, where he is shown surveying the landscape before him, following
permit. Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi, the direction set out by Naftalii Frenkel’. Both Firin and Frenkel’
eds, Aleksandr Rodchenko, New York, 1998, 310. were top administrators of the Canal camp, and as such among those
9 Rodchenko acquired his first camera in 1923 in order to facilitate his directly responsible for its brutal policies and prisoner deaths.
work on photocollages, taking his first photographs that winter. The 22 M. Gorky, L. Averbakh, S. Firin et al., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni
following year, having acquired a 9 × 12 cm plate camera, he began Stalina: Istoriia stroitel’stva, Moscow, 1934, 276.
to produce photographic portraits of friends and family. Although he 23 For an analysis of this tension between the cartographic
bought two more cameras in Paris in 1925 – an Ica (a plate camera) miniaturization and photography’s indexical quality and excess of
and a Sept (a 35 mm film movie camera) – it was only in 1926 that he detail of photography – and the difficulty of representing colossal
made photography a regular part of his practice. In 1928, the same scale through the two media – see Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby,
year that he was criticized in Soviet Foto for his bourgeois-imperialist ‘Panama’s Cut: Stereoview/Painting’, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal,
tendencies, he bought a Leica, which he would take with him to Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, Pittsburgh and New York,
the canal five years later. Dabrowski, Dickerman, Galassi, Aleksandr 2012, 122–151.
Rodchenko, 304–307. 24 Rodchenko also made extensive use of blue toning in his later book
10 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, designs, including other issues of USSR in Construction and the 1938
30, Fall 1984, 83–118; Leah Dickerman, ‘The Propagandizing of lavishly illustrated album on Moscow’s ‘reconstruction’ under Stalin
Things’, in Dabrowski, Dickerman, Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko, (Moskva rekonstruiruetsiia), with its diagrams, maps and photographs
63–99; Peter Galassi, ‘Rodchenko and Photography’s Revolution’, in dedicated to Stalin’s refashioning of the Soviet capital. The 1938
Dabrowski, Dickerman, Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko, 100–137; and Wolf, USSR in Construction Volga-Moscow Canal issue, also designed by
‘The Visual Economy of Forced Labor’. Rodchenko, is toned blue in its entirety, save for two pages. In this
11 This essay, written after the exhibition Masters of Soviet Photography in case, the use of cyan toning seems less pointed, but the issue also
1935 and published in Soviet Foto the following year, enumerated and does not make use of photomontage – hinting, perhaps, at a much
accounted for Rodchenko’s (presumably voluntarily abandoned) more direct ‘copying’ of the state’s vision than in the White Sea-
formalist tendencies. In it, Rodchenko also described his trips to Baltic Canal illustrations.
the canal as ‘his salvation […] ticket to life’ (echoing the title of the 25 Discovered in 1842 by John Herschel, a British scientist and one of
1932 propaganda film, The Road to Life, which can also be translated as photography’s earliest practitioners, the cyanotype process entails
Ticket to Life). Reciting canal propaganda, he wrote about the camp as placing objects or images to be copied directly on top of paper that
a place of ‘gigantic will […] the dregs of the past’, where man fought had been photosensitized with a mixture of potassium ferricyanide
against ‘untamed nature’ and ‘reconstructed himself’. Aleksandr (cyan, from Greek kýanos, meaning ‘dark blue’, gives the process its
Rodchenko, ‘Reconstructing the Artist’, in Aleksandr Rodchenko: name) and ferric ammonium. Once proper exposure to ultraviolet
Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. light is obtained, the print is washed with water and allowed to
Alexander N. Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell, New York, 2005, dry, producing a negative copy of the original. The medium did not
297–304. make its inroads into wide distribution until the 1880s, when the
12 For an in-depth analysis of the so-called factography movement introduction of commercially produced photosensitive blue printing
pioneered by members of the New Left Front of the Arts in the late paper made the cyanotype an easy and convenient printing option,
1920s, see the October special issue on factography, edited by Devin especially popular among engineers and shipbuilders. See Jan
Fore. October, 118, Fall 2006, 3–178. Arnow, Handbook of Alternative Photographic Processes, New York, 1982, 67.
13 For recent explorations of socialist realism as a productive and 26 Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–
dialogical artistic phenomenon, see Christina Kiaer, ‘Was Socialist 1875, Cambridge, MA, 1998,158. Lázló Moholy-Nagy also emphasized
Realism Forced Labour? The Case of Aleksandr Deineka in the 1930s’, this particular quality of the photogram in his 1929 Painting Photography
Oxford Art Journal, 3, 2005, 323–345. For a discussion of a different Film (with which Rodchenko would have been familiar), writing that

‘the photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, forced labour (and famously documented by Margaret Bourke-White
which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, in a Life magazine photoessay) – states that the image has become so
is the real key to photography. It allows us to capture the patterned outdated in three short years that it can no longer represent the present
interplay of light on a sheet of sensitized paper without recourse to town, only ‘its childhood’ (Gorky, Averbakh, Firin et al., Belomorsko-
any apparatus’. Lázló Moholy-Nagy, ‘From Pigment to Light, 1936’, Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina, 21).
in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg, 37 In The Attack on the Land, the sense of constant movement and circulation is
Albuquerque, 1988, 339–348, 344. reinforced by the slanting lines of the drill, the flagpole and the derrick,
27 Dickerman, ‘The Propagandizing of Things’, 95. Realism and which draw the viewer’s eye across the seam in a dynamic, if syncopated,
ideinost’, or ideological content, were two of socialist realism’s diagonal, from the lower right-hand to the upper left-hand corner.
guiding principles, along with narodnost’ (accessibility to the 38 In describing the Stalinist state’s use of images included in USSR in
masses). For more on the difficulty of reconciling realism and Construction, Yves Cohen has suggested that the journal participated in a
ideology within socialist realist literature, see, for example, Régine state-organized ‘circularity’ that was fundamental to the functioning
Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter, of the Soviet government. Yves Cohen, ‘Circulatory Localities: The
Stanford, 1992; and Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Example of Stalinism in the 1930s’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Bloomington, 2000. Eurasian History, 11: 1, 2010, 11–45, 39.
28 Alexander Rodchenko, ‘Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the 39 Cohen, ‘Circulatory Localities’,13.
Snapshot’, trans. John E. Bowlt, in Photography in the Modern Era: European 40 Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge,
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, New 2012, 281.
York, 1989, 238–242. 41 Rodchenko likely did not take the photograph of this explosion. The
29 The cyanotype technology was in use at the Canal; the Stalin White original appears in a six-volume ‘manual’ for the operation of the
Sea-Baltic Canal volume mentions engineering blueprints several canal now held at the National Museum of Karelia in Petrozavodsk; the
times, at one point describing the ‘magnificence’ of the white ‘lace caption for the photograph (#1047) states that it was taken
of a draft [chertëzh]’ on a blueprint (Gorky, Averbakh, Firin et al., between 6 and 8 June 1932 – before Rodchenko had travelled to the
Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina, 57). It is worth noting that this canal. The same image appears in the RGALI file of Sergei Alymov, a
immediate sense of the colour – the relationship of the technology prisoner at the canal who contributed to the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal;
to the hue – is preserved in the Russian word for blueprint, ‘sin’ka’, here, it appears with a poetic caption, likely for publication in the
which comes from ‘blue’ [‘sinii’]. As a constructivist interested volume. Alymov did take photographs at the canal, but it is impossible
in contributing to industrial production, Rodchenko would have to ascertain the authorship of this image, as the ‘manual’ does not
doubtlessly been familiar with the blueprint technique from before provide any of the photographers’ names. It is worth noting here
his trip to the canal. He would have also seen El Lissitzky, Gustav that the fate of much of Rodchenko’s White Sea-Baltic Canal corpus
Klutsis and Sergei Senkin’s experiments with the medium from the is unclear. Over the course of the three trips he would eventually
late 1920s. make to the Canal, Rodchenko is said to have taken more than
30 The White Sea-Baltic Canal layout recalls the visual discourse of 3,000 photographs (this number is given by Aleksandr Lavrentiev,
scientific objectivity in several ways. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Rodchenko’s grandson and the heir to his estate). Aleksandr Lavrentiev,
Galison have shown, a particular kind of scientific objectivity – ‘Rodchenko v SSSR na stroike’, Sovetskoe foto, 1, 1981, 38–39, 38. Only a
one that sought to eliminate interpretation and subjectivity of few dozen of these (outside of the USSR in Construction photoessay and
the researcher in favour of exceedingly accurate representations the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal book) have been published. We know
of objects – emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth from Rodchenko’s correspondence that many of the negatives were
centuries; it found its visual parallel in the technology of censored before they even left the construction site. Several dozen have
photography. This drive toward ‘non-interventionist objectivity’ languished for decades in the files of the publishing house responsible
meant that atlases published from the late nineteenth century for the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal volume. These prints, most extensively
onward minimized the use of text – of the scientist’s voice – and let retouched, are now held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation
images speak for themselves. The laconic use of text in the White (GARF) in Moscow, and have so far gone unpublished. Additionally,
Sea-Baltic Canal issue (and many other issues of USSR in Construction) six thousand small, grainy prints that document the waterway’s
– captions placed mostly at the bottom of the page and usually construction were assembled in the aforementioned pictorial ‘manual’
consisting of just one or two sentences, hence playing a secondary for operating the canal. Some of these photographs may be by
role to the photographs and photomontages – conforms to this Rodchenko, but in the absence of signatures and studio stamps there is
practice, suggesting to the viewer that the information she needs no way to attribute them securely.
can be found in the images themselves, and that these images are 42 The figure behind the driller is reversed, suggesting that Rodchenko
an accurate representation of the camp and the construction. The may have positioned a mirror behind the worker to produce this
text’s frequent emphasis on numbers – ‘21 million cubic metres of photograph.
soil’, ‘2½ million cubic metres of rock’, ‘2,800,000 logs’, ‘350,000 43 It seems unlikely that there would have been a shortage of
cubic metres of concrete’ – professes the photoessay’s adherence photographic material by the time Rodchenko began work on the
to empirical observation whilst insisting on the grandiosity of photoessay. The fact that many of the photographs with his studio
the project. While Leah Dickerman reads the captions’ tone as the stamp held in the GARF Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal file are different
‘omniscient voice’ of authoritarian interpretation, I would suggest from those that appeared in USSR in Construction would indicate that
that the passive voice used in the photoessay, as well as the text’s Rodchenko had a choice of photographs to work with.
position vis-à-vis the photographs, are meant to evoke not (only) 44 Matthew E. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and
a totalitarian will but also the ‘objective’ text of a scientific atlas Soviet Newspapers, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 38.
or journal. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of 45 For a discussion of Lissitzky’s board and the modernist avant-garde’s
Objectivity’, Representations, 40, 1992, 81–128. relationship to propaganda during War Communism, see T. J.
31 SSSR na stroike, 1930, no. 1, 3, cited in Wolf, ‘When Photographs Speak, Clark, ‘God Is Not Cast Down’, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of
To Whom Do They Talk?’, 61. Modernism, New Haven, 1999, 225–297.
32 Wolf, ‘When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk?’, 79 n. 20. 46 Daësh’ was edited by Dmitrii Moor, whose satirical drawings often
33 Khalatov to Gorky, 2 April 1933, M. Gor’kii i sovetskaia pechat’, book I, 282, graced the cover of the journal; Aleksandr Deineka was also among its
cited in Wolf, ‘When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk?’, 73. illustrators, contributing several covers. Rodchenko was a contributing
34 Gorky, Averbakh, Firin et al., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina, 156. photographer for Daësh’. A biweekly, Daësh’ published fourteen issues (with
35 The Russian word ‘came out’ [vyshli] used in this paragraph has the a print run of up to 20,000) in 1929 before being turned into another
second meaning of ‘to be released from prison’. journal, Piatidnevka [The Five-Day Week], in 1930. Despite its print run of up
36 A caption for a photograph accompanying the text – a 1931 image of to 100,000, Piatidnevka also lasted only one year. See Boris Esin and Ivan
Magnitogorsk, another project of the Five-Year Plan built partially with Kuznetsov, Tri veka moskovskoi zhurnalistiki: uchebnoe posobie, Moscow, 2005.

Aglaya Glebova
47 Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Daësh’, Tom VIII, Moscow, 1931, 63–65.

48 Dickerman, ‘The Propagandizing of Things’, 84.
49 See Aglaya Glebova, ‘Elements of Photography: Avant-garde
Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature’, Representations, 142: 1, 2018,
56–90.
50 See Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition, New
York, 2008.
51 Dziga Vertov, ‘Kino-Eye’, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed.
Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, Berkeley, 2008, 60–78,
69. For an overview of the secret police’s involvement in cinema
production, as well as a discussion of the parallels between avant-
garde film theories and OGPU, see Vatulescu, ‘Early Soviet Cinema’s
Shots at Policing’ and ‘Secret Police Shots in Filmmaking: The Gulag
and Cinema’, 92–175.
52 Aleksei Gastev, Kak nado rabotat’: prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda,
Moscow, 1966, 46.
53 I. V. Stalin, ‘O rabote v derevne. Rech’ 11 ianvaria 1933 g.’, Sochineniia,
Tom XIII, Moscow, 1952, 216–233, 229.

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‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’:

Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr

The photograph is laborious only when it fakes.1 (Roland Barthes, 1980).

© Association for Art History 2019 333

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The Attack on the Land

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El Lissitzky worked on a number, frequently in collaboration with Sophie Lissitzky-

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This passage is an apt description of Rodchenko’s photomontage, which presents itself

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This map shows enormous areas as though in a state of geological revolution.

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10 Aleksandr Rodchenko,

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12 Aleksandr Rodchenko,

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13 Mikhail Cheremnykh,

observant alertness promoted by the avant-garde quickly turned into omnipresent

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14 Aleksandr Rodchenko,

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15 Aleksandr Rodchenko,

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16 Aleksandr Rodchenko,

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Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

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47 Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Daësh’, Tom VIII, Moscow, 1931, 63–65.

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