1. Wright, Edward, “The Romance of the Outlands,” Quarterly Review, 203.404 (July 1905), 47–72Google Scholar.

2. Maxwell, Richard and Trumpener, Katie, “The Romance of the Outlands: The Fin-de-siècle Adventure Story between History and Geography,” The Yearbook of English Studies 41, no. 2 (2011): 106–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 118.

3. One exception is Kirby, Lynne, who identifies Turksib as a “Soviet version of the Western,” Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, 1997), 190Google Scholar. The kul΄turfil΄m—meant to educate the masses about the new realities of Soviet life—had largely lost out to more entertaining “acted” films by the late 1920s, see Youngblood, Denise J., Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935, 2^nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 1985), 142–43Google Scholar.

4. Lavrent΄ev dates the origin of the Red Western to the 1920s and 30s with Little Red Devils (Krasnye d΄iavolata, 1923), By the Law (Po zakonu, 1926), and The Thirteen (Trinadtsat΄, 1936). He notes that the Western, construed as a narrative about the “taming” of new spaces, was pertinent in a country that perceived itself as forging a new world, Lavrent΄ev, Sergei, Krasnyi vestern (Moskva, 2009), 11Google Scholar). David MacFadyen similarly identifies “Red Westerns” as a genre of the 1970s and 80s, see “Action/Red Western,” Directory of World Cinema: Russia, ed. Beumers, Birgit (Bristol, Eng., 2011), 214–7Google Scholar; 216. As he shows, it shares features with the “adventure film” of the 1930s in which a lone hero tackles obstacles. As I argue, however, Soviet audiences were already well acquainted with the American Western by the 1920s, see Kartseva, Elena, “Amerikanskie nemye fil΄my v sovetskom prokate,” Kino i vremia: Biuleten΄, 1960: 193–212Google Scholar; 196. Turksib engages with the genre in its form of an epic of frontier society and nation-building. In general, American influence on Soviet filmmaking was a decisive phenomenon by the early 1920s, see Tsivian, Yuri, “Zhest i montazh: eshche raz o russkom stile v rannem kino,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 88 (2008): 65–78Google Scholar; 70.

5. This challenge would later be articulated by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974), where he argued that Soviet socialism did not exist because it failed to produce distinctly socialist spaces.

6. On the “Union Pacific” as Western subgenre, see Cawelti, John George, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, OH, 1984), 62–63Google Scholar.

7. Ford's work was important to Soviet directors for just this reason; see I. A. Pyr΄ev's 1946 speech to the cinema section of VOKS in which he extolled Ford's work, stating that no other American director could “so subtly and accurately reveal national history,” see “O tvorchestve Dzhona Forda,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1978), 343–46Google Scholar; 343.

8. Although there was frequent discussion of foreign imports in the early 1920s, it would have been difficult for contemporary Soviet reviewers to openly compare the films in 1929, Youngblood, Denise J., Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 50–67Google Scholar. The Iron Horse does not appear on Kartseva's list of foreign film screenings in the 1920s, but Soviet directors and audiences were likely aware of the film, especially since its popular precursor, The Covered Wagon (1923), was screened, Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3^rd ed. (Princeton, 1983), 201Google Scholar.

9. Geoffrey Bennington, “Frontiers: Of Literature and Philosophy,” Culture Machine 2 (2000), at www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/305/290, (last accessed March 29, 2018), and “Frontier,” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 17, no. 3 (1994): 224–26Google Scholar.

10. See Bennington, “Frontiers: Of Literature and Philosophy”; on frontiers and identity, see also Hartog, François, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Lloyd, Janet, (Chicago, 2001), 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Gouge, Catherine, “The American Frontier: History, Rhetoric, Concept,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to Present, 6, no. 1 (Spring 2007)Google Scholar, at www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2007/gouge.htm (last accessed March 29, 2018).

12. Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman, OK), 1973, 5Google Scholar.

13. Fenin, George N. and Everson, William K., The Western: from Silents to the Seventies, 2^nd ed. (New York, 1973), 1–8Google Scholar. See also Jim Kitses: “The Western is not just another movie type. . . [it] has provided a national myth and global icon, a cornerstone of American identity, its roots in history and the frontier providing a unique, rich body of signs and meanings,” “Introduction: Post-modernism and The Western,” in Kitses, and Rickman, Gregg, eds., The Western Reader (New York, 1998), 16Google Scholar.

14. Bassin, Mark, “Turner, Solov΄ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces,” The Journal of Modern History, 65, no. 3 (1993): 473–511Google Scholar; Alexander Etkind on differences between Turner, Solov΄ev, Kliuchevskii, et.al., Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 61–71Google Scholar. See also Sunderland, Willard, “The ‘Colonization Question’: Visions of Colonization in Late Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 48 (2000), 210–232Google Scholar; Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar; Bassin, Mark, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1999)Google Scholar; Brower, Daniel R. and Lazzerini, Edward J., eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, (Bloomington, 1997)Google Scholar; and Khodarkovsky, Michael, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, 2002)Google Scholar.

15. Sunderland, “Colonization Question,” 219.

16. Ibid., 210.

17. Etkind, Internal Colonization, 67–68.

18. Morrison, Alexander, “Russia, Khoqand, and the Search for a ‘Natural’ Frontier, 1863–1865,” Ab Imperio 2 (2014): 166Google Scholar.

19. Gorshenina, Svetlana, “Teoriia ‘estestvennykh granits’ i zavoevanie Kul΄dzhi (1870–1871 gg.): Avtoportret rossiiskikh voenno-diplomaticheskikh elit Sankt-Peterburga i Turkestana,” Ab Imperio, 2 (2014): 106–7Google Scholar, 155.

20. Sahadeo, Jeff, “Home and Away: Why the Russian Periphery Matters in Russian History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 379Google Scholar, 376.

21. See Clark, Katerina, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995)Google Scholar, for an overview of attempts to de-hierarchize life and redirect cultural attention toward the outer edge of Soviet space.

22. Widdis, Emma, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, 2003), 9–10Google Scholar.

23. Ibid., 10.

24. Vladimir Papernyi, Kul΄tura “dva” (Ann Arbor, 1985).

25. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

26. On nationalities policy, see Martin's, Terry The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar and Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

27. MacCabe, Colin, “‘To take ship to India and see a naked man spearing fish in blue water’: Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire,” eds. Grieveson, Lee and MacCabe, Colin, Empire and Film (London, 2011), 8Google Scholar.

28. Brown, Kate, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place,” The American Historical Review, 106, no. 1 (2001): 19–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 31. See also Sabol, Steven, “Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization: The ‘Touch of Civilisation’ on the Sioux and Kazakhs,” Western Historical Quarterly, 43, no. 1 (2012): 29–51Google Scholar.

29. Prusin, Alexander V. and Zeman, Scott C., “Taming Russia's Wild East: the Central Asia Historical-Revolutionary Film as Soviet Orientalism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23, no. 3 (2003): 261–62Google Scholar. For example, they argue that Mikhail Romm's 1937 The Thirteen (Trinadtsat΄) is based on John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934) and is similar to a Western “in terms of narrative structure and imagery.”

30. Ibid., 260–61.

31. Prusin and Zeman, “Taming Russia's Wild East,” 260, note Turksib's role in establishing orientalist themes that would be influential in other Central Asian historical films. Matthew Payne treats Turksib as an example of Soviet Orientalism throughout “Turksib.”

32. Layton, Susan, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 10Google Scholar, and Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 145Google Scholar.

33. Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 9. Concern over imperial practice was entwined with anxiety over Russia's “colonial” status in relation to the west; it was “as if Russia were made up almost entirely of periphery,” see Hokanson, Katya, Writing at Russia's Border (Toronto, 2008), 4Google Scholar. See also Greenleaf, Monika and Moeller-Sally, Stephen, eds., Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age (Evanston, Ill., 1998)Google Scholar; Ram, Harsha, The Imperial Sublime: a Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison, WI., 2003)Google Scholar; and Sobol, Valeria, “The Uncanny Frontier of Russian Identity: Travel, Ethnography, and Empire in Lermontov's ‘Taman’,” Russian Review, 70, no. 1 (2011): 65–79Google Scholar.

34. Micciché, Lino, “The Cinema of the Transcaucasian and Central Asian Soviet Republics,” in Lawton, Anna, ed., The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema (London, 1992), 300Google Scholar.

35. Honarpisheh, Farbod, “The Oriental ‘Other’ in Soviet Cinema, 1929–34,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 14, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 187Google Scholar. Sarkisova, Oksana, “Edges of Empire: Representations of Borderland Identities in Early Soviet Cinema,” Ab Imperio 1 (2000): 226Google Scholar, 229.

36. Tsivian, Yuri, “More Real than the Real Thing: Images of Mongolia in Russian Film,” The Voice of Ulan Bator, 4 (1994): 8Google Scholar.

37. On Russian rail history, see Westwood, John N., A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964)Google Scholar and Payne, Matthew, Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh, 2001)Google Scholar.

38. Wheeler, Geoffrey, The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia (London, 1964), 173Google Scholar.

39. Baehr, Stephen L., “The Troika and the Train: Dialogues between Tradition and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” in Clayton, J. Douglas, ed., Issues in Russian Literature before 1917: Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (Columbus, 1989), 85–106Google Scholar.

40. Bethea, David M., The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, 1989), 57–60Google Scholar, 172, 175, 237–256.

41. Included in Stollery, Martin, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter, 2000), 78Google Scholar.

42. Widdis, Visions, 106, 126. The “quest for mobilized perception” led to a “cinematic obsession with the train and rail travel” (126). The image of the “steel steed” (stal΄noi kon΄) was ubiquitous in early Soviet culture, see Iurii Shcheglov, Romany I. Il΄fa i E. Petrova: Sputnik chitatelia, t.2 (Vienna, 1991), 446.

43. Widdis, Visions, 128.

44. One exception is the 1929 Tajik film Pribytie pervogo poezda v Dushanbe, directed by V. Kuzin, N. Gezulin, and A. Shevich, see Abikeeva, Gulnara, “Central Asian Documentary Films of the Soviet Era as a Factor in the Formation of National Identity,” Kinokultura, 24 (2009)Google Scholar, at www.kinokultura.com/2009/24-abikeeva.shtml (last accessed March 30, 2018). The railway, with “its links to the themes of construction and displacement,” is “an archetype of Soviet identity” (Abikeeva). The opening of the Turksib in 1930 “provoked a storm of documentary films, press eulogies, and literature in celebration.” These included the films Pervomaiskii podarok trudiashchimsia strany (1930), Ermolaev's Turksib (1930), Room's Turksib otkryt: Kino-ocherk (1930), and a portion of the 1930 film Giganty raportuiut (The Giants Report), see Emma Widdis, Visions, 104–5.

45. European films tended to demonstrate more ambivalence toward the train than did American, see Kirby, 194–95.

46. Film found for itself “an apt metaphor in the train” (Kirby, 2). The “essentially ‘modernist’ medium” of cinema was deeply linked to nineteenth and twentieth-century “economic, social, and technological developments” (Stollery, Alternative Empires, 16–17).

47. Kachura, A., “Viktor Turin,” Letopistsy nashego vremeni: Rezhissery dokumental΄nogo kino, eds. Prozhiko, G. and Firsova, D. (Moscow, 1987), 82–99Google Scholar; 83. See also “Viktor Turin,” Kino: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar΄, ed. Utkevich, Sergei (Moscow, 1987), 430Google Scholar and Leyda, Kino, 154.

48. Overview from Payne, Matthew J., “Viktor Turin's Turksib (1929) and Soviet Orientalism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 21, no. 1 (2001): 37–62Google Scholar; 37–48.

49. Leyda notes that Turksib was “a popular and immediate success abroad” and was well-received at home (260). Soviet critics responded favorably, for example, see I. Sokolov's review “Turksib i ego avtor Turin” (Kino i zhizn΄, 9, 1930, 7–8) praising Turin for creating the first “kinopoema” about socialist construction (7).

50. Payne, “Turksib,” 45.

51. Roberts, Graham, Forward Soviet!: History and the Non-Fiction Film in the USSR (London, 1999), 110Google Scholar.

52. Leyda, Kino, 260–1. Emphasis mine.

53. The press referred to the project as “the forge of the Kazakh proletariat” (Payne, “Turksib,” 41), but, as Emma Widdis notes, the Turksib was also called “the first Soviet railway,” see her Visions, 105, emphasis mine.

54. Mordaunt Hall, “THE SCREEN; Railroad Building in Russia,” May 26, 1930, at www.nytimes.com/1930/05/26/archives/the-screen-railroad-building-in-russia.html (last accessed March 30, 2018).

55. “Some Memorable American Films Circulated by The Museum of Modern Art Film Library,” at www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/285/releases/MOMA_1935-37_0008.pdf?2010 (last accessed March 30, 2018).

56. Lejeune, C. A., Cinema (London, 1931), 179–187Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 182.

58. Ibid.

59. Philip French, “The Iron Horse; The Soviet Influence: From Turksib to Night Mail,” The Guardian, at www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/23/iron-horse-turksib-dvd-review (last accessed April 3, 2018); and Dennis Grunes, “Turksib,” at https://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/turksib-viktor-a-turin-1929/ (last accessed 1/20/2015).

60. Dennis Grunes, “Turksib,” at https://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/turksib-viktor-a-turin-1929/ (last accessed 4/26/2018).

61. Burch, Noël, Life to Those Shadows, trans. ed., and Brewster, Ben (Berkeley, 1990), 35Google Scholar.

62. Ellis, Jack C. and McLane, Betsy E., eds., A New History of Documentary Film (New York, 2005), 38Google Scholar.

63. Fenin, George N. and Everson, William K., The Western: From Silents to Cinerama (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, at http://archive.org/stream/westernfromsi00feni/westernfromsi00feni_djvu.text (last accessed April 3, 2018).

64. Fox Studios commissioned The Iron Horse as “a sort-of sequel” to Paramount's The Covered Wagon; the two films are credited with establishing the genre of the “epic Western.” The Iron Horse was greatly hyped by the standards of the day, see Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John ford (New York, 1999), 78–79Google Scholar, 87.

65. Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CN, 1998), 94Google Scholar.

66. Roberts notes the allusion to Stalin, Forward Soviet!, 110.

67. Levy, John Ford, 94, emphasis mine.

68. See, for example, Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, on how the attainment of international socialism was understood as the end point of history.

69. As on the Turksib, interracial tensions were present during construction of the Transcontinental Railroad; European workers directed persistent violence against Chinese laborers at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tcrr-reports/ (last accessed April 3, 2018).

70. The European/Russian workers on the Turksib “violently objected to nativization” and the inclusion of Kazakhs among the proletarian ranks (Payne, Stalin's Railroad, 10). There was also “class warfare” between the engineers and the workers on the Turksib, despite the supposed disappearance of worksite hierarchies (Payne, Stalin's Railroad, 7).

71. MacCabe, “Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire,” 13.

72. Matthew Payne likewise asserts that the workers’ battle against nature is central to the film, see “Turksib,” 55.

73. Lavrent΄ev, Krasnyi vestern, 16.

74. This is how many have read the scene. For example, Anne Dwyer argues that Shklovsky views the image less as an expression of the threat of extinction than as a suggestion that the train and the camel will operate together in this new Soviet space, though in different ways, see her “Standstill as Extinction: Viktor Shklovsky's Poetics and Politics of Mobility in the 1920s and 30s,” PMLA, 131.2 (2016): 269–88. Emma Widdis reads this scene as emblematic of the film's attempt to create “a harmonious relationship between the natural world and those that inhabit it,” Visions, 105. In Sarah Dickinson's work on Turksib, however, she observes that the film demonstrates “regret for the fate of Central Asia's indigenous culture before the onslaught of Sovietization” and that this constitutes the “primary interest” of the film; see “Iron Steed as Little Golden Calf: Turksib and the Modernization of Central Asia,” unpublished paper, 4.

75. Dwyer, 280.

76. The “Cowboy Artist” Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926) portrayed the closing of the frontier in nostalgic-elegiac terms. His experience as a cowboy and time spent among members of the Blackfeet Nation lent an air of authenticity to his work. See Taliaferro, John, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist (Boston, 1996)Google Scholar. Image courtesy of the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction.

77. Prusin and Zeman note that Ford “often visually recreated . . . images from classic American frontier art, such as the paintings of Frederick Remington.” They further suggest that Soviet directors also engaged in this practice, noting that “an interesting comparison may be drawn” between Mikhail Romm's The Thirteen (1937) and Frederick Remington's 1903 painting “The Fight for the Water Hole,” see “Taming Russia's Wild East,” 262.

78. There was Native American resistance to the Transcontinental Railroad, but not to the extent dramatized in Ford's film; see “Native Americans and the Transcontinental Railroad,” at http://www.pbs.org./wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-tribes/ (last accessed May 21, 2015, no longer available), and Hine, Robert V., Faragher, John Mack, and Coleman, Jon T., The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, 2000), 291–93Google Scholar.

79. Cawelti identifies the elegiac as a key mode of the Western: it mourns the end of a state of wilderness and the destruction of a pre-modern Native American way of life (The Six-Gun Mystique, 80).

80. Forced settlement in the mid-1930s destroyed the Kazakhs’ traditionally nomadic way of life, sparked famine, and caused large loss of life, see Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives,” 30–32.

81. Matthew Payne similarly suggests that the American version of such a scene typically emphasizes the “tragic nobility” of the Native American defeat by the train. He reads the chase in Turksib purely as farce, however, “Turksib,” 53–54.

82. Film and literature in this period rejected the individual hero as a means of decentering narrative attention, see Clark, Petersburg, 266.

83. Marx, Leo, “The Railroad in the American Landscape,” The Railroad in the American Landscape: 1850–1950, Curator, Guest, Walther, Susan Danly (Wellesley, MA, 1981)Google Scholar. Russian colonization was widely construed as an act of giving life to a “lifeless,” “empty” region, see Sunderland, “Colonization Question,” 217. David Rainbow examines the metaphor of “giving life” in Siberian colonial discourse in “The Life of Siberia: Biology as Metaphor in Late Imperial Russia” (unpublished paper presented at Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Conference, San Antonio, TX, November 2014).

84. Lenin expressed concern with the “plague” of Oblomovism in a 1922 speech and elsewhere. See “The International and Domestic Situation of the Soviet Republic: Speech Delivered to a Meeting of the Communist Group at the All-Russian Congress of Metalworkers,” March 6, 1922, Collected Works, trans. Skvirsky, David and Hanna, George, 2nd English ed. (Moscow, 1965)Google Scholar, v:33, 212–26; 223 at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/06.htm (last accessed 5/21/2015).

85. Martin Stollery notes the projection of the “peasant problem” onto Central Asia. See his Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter, Eng., 2000), 84Google Scholar.

86. Roberts, Forward Soviet!, 111.

87. The cinematic portrayal of industrialization under Stalin was meant to show how Russia's vast space could be “tamed and domesticated,” see Widdis, , “‘One Foot in the Air?’ Landscape in the Soviet and Russian Road Movie,” in Harper, Graeme and Rayner, Jonathan, eds., Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation, and Cultural Geography (Bristol, 2009), 78Google Scholar.

88. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 67–70.

89. MacCabe, “Watching Films to Mourn the End of Empire,” 6.

90. Marx, “The Railroad in the American Landscape,” 14.

91. Nye, David E., American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 46Google Scholar.

92. Ibid., xiii-xv.

93. Matthew Payne notes that machinery is “the real hero” in Turksib, “Turksib,” 41.

94. This worker is Russian; I am grateful to Katherine Holt and Anne Dwyer for noting that this privileging of the Russian physique reveals perhaps unconscious tension around official ideology.