THE MODERN SOVIET CITY:
After and Double After
Margarita Tupitsyn
(New York)
After the Revolution the temporal and ideological theme of "before" and
"after" functioned to separate the negatively charged Tsarist past from the
positively charged Soviet present. Commissioned by the editors of mass media publications,
Aleksandr Rodchenko and other Soviet photographers recorded Soviet cities as they were
undergoing major transformations throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1932, for
example, Rodchenko pictured Moscow as the epicenter of
modernity in respect to both city planning and everyday life. He photographed the newest
Constructivist buildings, workers’ clubs, gigantic parks, apartment buildings,
factories with advanced machinery, and mass kitchens. He offered an optimistic image of
Soviet urban men and women who appear as physically fit enthusiastic workers, politically
conscious citizens, and intelligent relaxers. The Moscow photographs demonstrate an
expanse of collective energy and no alienation. In its comprehensive survey of a variety
of city locations and everyday routines, Rodchenko’s city images convey a
sophisticated modern life determined by a concrete time and place rather than adhere to a
utopian vision of a future Soviet city. As a result, we observe the physiognomy of the
city which no longer exists; Moscow had been transformed several times since then.
More than fifty years "after" Rodchenko, a Kharkov
photographer Boris Mikhailov re-empowered the
camera by once again directing its lens at scenes of Soviet cities. They are caught
without the "mythological décor" of official post-War photography and review
the "double after" status of the Soviet cities. His long series Dissertation is a good example of such
photographic inspection. It consists of approximately 180 sheets of cheap drawing paper
with one or two photographs casually glued to the surface. The texts which follow the
images are either composed by Mikhailov or drawn from a variety of published sources
including Soviet scientific literature and books on philosophy and art. For Disstertation’s
subject matter Mikhailov "revisits" monuments and cityscapes, which were
conceived in the 1920s and 1930s, and finds the people who constructed them. Dissertation’s
pictures are of a reality that can be defined post-utopian with respect to the factography
of the 1920s, and post-mythographic with respect to the photo-staging of the subsequent
decades. Here the plus/minus dichotomy of "before" and "after" is
supplemented by minus-utopia of the "double after."
Copyright © (1998) by Margarita Tupitsyn
* Abstract of a paper to be presented at the Conference, Russia at the End of the
Twentieth Century (Stanford University, November 5-7, 1998).
