The adventures of Przhevalskii in socialist China: performing friendship at the inter-imperial periphery

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalskii (1839–1888) conducted extensive expeditions in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and northern Manchuria: contested inter-imperial peripheries between the Russian and Chinese empires of the nineteenth century. In 1950, the biopic Przhevalskii, directed by Sergei Iutkevich, became the first collaboration on a fiction film between the Soviet Union and the recently founded People’s Republic of China. Intended as a performative affirmation of Sino-Soviet friendship, Przhevalskii was ultimately rejected by the Chinese government, which insisted the film’s positive portrayal of the explorer did not align with his historical status as an agent of Russian empire. Building on recent scholarship on Soviet cultural and cinematic internationalism, this article reads Przhevalskii as an allegorical vision of late-Stalinist Soviet internationalism, shaped by the simultaneous expansion of the socialist world into East Asia and the Russian-nationalist triumphalism that drove the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns. This hierarchical, centripetal mode of internationalism clashed with the priorities of a newly socialist Chinese state wary of any reduction to a periphery of a socialist world dominated by Moscow. These tensions find expression in the film’s complex treatment of performance as the mode through which both collaborative authorship and Soviet primacy are affirmed.