Mikhail Konstantinovich Churkin,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Omsk State Pedagogical University, Omsk, Russia; Tobolsk Complex Research Station of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Tobolsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“…There is a Chronicle for Us before the Screening”: Representations of the Soviet Project of Internal Colonization in the Film Magazine “Siberia on Screen”
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-5-5
In the work, based on the thesis, according to which the relationship between the metropolis and the colony (province) was initially based on inequality, hierarchy (subordination) and subordination (exploitation), as key elements of the representation of the project of internal colonization in the film magazine “Siberia on Screen”, significant plots were identified and characterized: the celebration of labor and revolutionary dates in the cities of Siberia, the representation of the central government, the conquest of nature and the agro-industrial development of new territories. In the course of the study, it was found that the Soviet government, in interpreting its own version of internal colonization, in comparison with the imperial discourse of “development” and “appropriation” of space and people of the previous era, having mastered cinematographic technologies, acquired a unique opportunity to directly broadcast its ideas about power and the immediate object exploitation – the people-subaltern. It is concluded that in the period of late socialism of the 1950s–1980s the element of exoticization of the peoples inhabiting the space of the region, which finally became the bearers of a common Soviet identity, was excluded from the representations of the Soviet version of the conquest of Siberia. At the same time, the mobilization and repressive-force logic of state building in the USSR actualized the significance of chronicle stories that demonstrated the colonization potential of the Soviet society, realized only under the condition of paternalistic guardianship of the authorities. It is determined that in the presented fragments, behind the propagandistic pathos characteristic of Soviet newsreels, the complex ideas of the imperial authorities, were hidden, specifically the ideals about the administrative-political, economic, socio-cultural and mental organization of the periphery space, as well as the system of actions aimed at overcoming the discreteness of the still remote outskirts, separatist memory were hidden and sentiments in Siberian society.
Publishing: 28/10/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 13/06/2022
How to cite: Churkin M.K. “…There is a Chronicle for Us before the Screening”: Representations of the Soviet Project of Internal Colonization in the Film Magazine “Siberia on Screen” // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 5 (25), pp. 64–71. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-5-05.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2022
Keywords: internal colonization; late socialism; chronicle-documentary cinematography; representations; “Siberia on the Screen”