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"CINEMA ATLAS OF THE USSR": EDUCATIONAL FILM "EASTERN SIBERIA" (1935) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 3 (37). P. 117-127

The paper examines the role of educational cinema in the USSR during the 1930s, with a focus on films about the “socialist reconstruction” of remote regions of the Soviet Union. As an example, the film “Eastern Siberia” (1935) filmed at the “Sibtechfilm” studio, directed by A. I. Gaidul is analyzed, using scripts and other documentation from the State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region. The film is analyzed in terms of its place in the history of regional cinema and its role in the construction of ideas and images in the context of Soviet history. The paper also discusses the historical context of the creation of educational films in the 1930s, the production process at the Novosibirsk studio “Sibtechfilm”, and the biography and methods of the film's director, A. I. Gaidul are considered. The authors also address methodological issues related to educational cinema at the Sibtechfilm studio in the 1930s. It is concluded that the creation of educational geographical films was a significant development in Russian visual anthropology and that the analysis of such films helps to understand the ideological, conceptual, and creative considerations involved in their production and use in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s.

Keywords: visual anthropology, Soviet cinema, film production, educational cinema in the 1930s, Sibtechfilm, Eastern Siberia (1935), A. I. Gaidul

The cinema-atlas of the USSR: "Bukhara" (1927) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2023. Issue 2 (40). P. 90-99

The proposed study brings information about the ethnographic film “Bukhara” (1927) by well-known Soviet filmmakers, the cinematographer Ya. M. Tolchan and the editor E. I. Svilova. Based on this film work, the article examines the “experimentation of filmmakers” in the process of developing an ethnographic tendency in Soviet cinema. In the period under study, filmmakers fascinated by ethnographic exoticism and expeditionary romanticism actively tested various approaches to visualizing ethnicity and constructed a screen image of the Union of Nationalities Liberated by the Revolution, in which the party leadership, as the monopolist of thematic and production plans in the film industry, was interested, in order to strengthen the programs of the “Cultural Revolution” Among the tasks of the work is the description of the images of the collapse of the traditional existence of Uzbek society during the socialist upheavals in the east of the country in the mid-1920s, which were captured in the mentioned film. Since the heterogeneous Soviet East was one of the most problematic regions regarding Sovietization programs in the early Soviet period, it was assigned special cinematographic resources – the filming of the Central Asian film expedition by Ya. M. Tolchan and the subsequent editing of an independent film, “Bukhara” by E. I. Svilova, are considered in the context of the development of the large-scale state project “Cinema-Atlas Of The USSR” and in the context of parallel processes of Soviet national policy. The reference sources for the study were little-known archival documents and materials from the Soviet periodical press. The study uses an effective method of the author to read the film as a film text because, due to the peculiarities of silent film, the film “Bukhara” consists of approximately equal parts of film images and text subtitles interspersed in the narrative. The conclusion points to the film “Bukhara” as a multi-layered visual document of its time and to the need to study the phenomenon of the Soviet film atlas as a whole as a unique phenomenon that has produced a range of practical and theoretical materials that are in demand in modern visual anthropology.

Keywords: visual anthropology, Cinema-Atlas of the USSR, ethnographic film, "Bukhara"

Experiments in the Study and Visualization of Religiosity in Chuvashia in the Context of Anti-Religious Propaganda of the 1920–1930s // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2026. Issue 2 (52). P. 100-110

This article examines the impact of Soviet atheist policy and the specifics of the antireligious campaign in the national republics during the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on Chuvashia. Drawing on archival materials newly introduced into scholarly circulation, the authors show that a high level of everyday religiosity, represented by various religious “remnants,” persisted in the Chuvash Republic. The low effectiveness of direct campaigning, amid persistent religious syncretism and the complex religious landscape in multi-confessional regions of the USSR such as Chuvashia, compelled government ideologists to change tactics and activate the resources of scientific atheism. A key instrument of the new strategy was a detailed academic study of the current state of confessions in the Soviet Union, initiated by the Center (Leningrad Scientific Research Section of N. M. Matorin) and carried out in the regions by local historians. The particular development of religious atheism in the 1920s and 1930s was not coincidental. The practice of compiling religious and everyday maps became an important area in the academic study and mapping of religious sites during the period. The authors examine the phenomenon of religious mapping as a technology for the development, control, and subsequent suppression of religious life. An active promoter of this approach, which combined research and ideological objectives, was the ethnographer K. Elle (1896–1974), a member of Matorin’s Research Group. His work on creating catalogs and maps of historical and cultural heritage sites (using Kiremet’s map as an example) is reconstructed from archival sources. The practice of mapping religious sites in Chuvashia in the 1920s and 1930s, initially conceived as a tool for preserving unique religious and cultural locations and practices for science, simultaneously served as a precise spatial reference for their subsequent elimination as part of the “Cultural Revolution” policy. Moreover, due to the state's repressive policies against religious scholars in the mid-1930s and the curtailment of academic research in religious studies, this work was not fully developed. It did not become an effective tool in the antireligious campaign. However, the implementation of these experiments for mapping religious sites, which became a significant stage in the USSR's atheist policy, has multifaceted informational value for understanding the complex phenomena of Soviet ideological development.

Keywords: religious studies, Soviet antireligious propaganda, cultural revolution, visual politics, religious mapping, Chuvashia, N. Matorin, K.V. Elle