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Riding the Soviet Iron Horse: A Reading of Viktor Turin's Turksib through the Lens of John Ford

This article considers Viktor Turin's 1929 film Turksib to be a “Red Western,” or film that is indebted to an American cinematic, visual, and literary tradition in its production of a vision of a Soviet frontier. Turksib engages with a discourse of frontierority that proved central to the articulation of Soviet identity in the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing from prerevolutionary cultural paradigms for Russian national and imperial growth, as well as from the key American myth of the train's role in vanquishing the frontier, Turksib is a film meant to realize notions of territorial largesse in an ideologically-acceptable manner—that is, to reconfigure the dominant imperialist-capitalist model of the frontier in socialist terms. A close study of Turin's film in comparison to its western counterpart, John Ford's early classic, The Iron Horse (1924), reveals the challenge of distinguishing industrialization and modernization in socialist and avowedly anti-imperial rather than capitalist and colonial terms.