Nikolai Ekk, Road to Life, 1931

Matvei Pogrebinsky
(Матвeй Самoйлович Погребинский)
1895-1937
(image source: wiki)
no copyright infringement intended

Road to Life (made by Nikolai Ekk in 1931) is the first Soviet sound movie. The impression is of technology in transition: it keeps the characteristics of a mute film (like use of intertitles, or lasting the image on certain moments, to make it more emphatic). The voice comes over - a mute featuring sound. The mix is pretty well balanced and has a good dynamic. I enjoyed the intertitles very much, they're looking great, like a Constructivist manifesto, and add visual energy to the ensemble. And speaking about Constructivists, the movie generic is literally fantastic, suggesting (for me) the idea of a Tatlin Tower.

Путёвка в жизнь (Road to Life), 1931
(video by Rvision)

Nikolai Batalov plays in the leading role. When it comes to the history of Soviet cinematography, everybody today would mention another Batalov, Aleksey, with his long and fruitful career covering the second half of the twentieth century. But we should bring justice to his cognomen Nikolai (the two were unrelated), an eminent film actor of the 1920's. He covered a much shorter span, dying in 1937, due to a progressive form of tuberculosis. By then he was less than forty. Maybe here in Road to Life it was his greatest accomplishment. An unbelievably perfect match: a role like created for this actor, an actor like born for this role.

There is another actor in this movie who also needs to be mentioned, as he creates with Nikolai Batalov a formidable pair, with a replica at the same high level. It's Yvan (or Yuvan) Kyrlya. Born into a Mari peasant family, beginning his life as a farm laborer and herdsman, now and then begging to find ends meet, later becoming an actor and a poet, having the chance to be discovered by director Nikolai Ekk and receiving the role of Dandy Mustafa in Road to Life ... and then everything about him gets blurred. He published two or three books of poetry (in Mari language); in 1936 he played in a movie made by director Yevgeni Ivanov-Barkov ( I hardly found info about this movie, Наместник Будды - it seems that its release was forbidden by the Soviet censorship); in 1937 he started to play at the Mari State Drama Theater in Yoshkar-Ola; and finally he was sent to a prison camp, for "counter-revolutionary activity". He died in prison: a victim of Stalinist repression, like so many others in those years.

The personal story of this actor, Yvan Kyrlya, parallels the larger story told by the movie, and his tragic end is mirroring all that ultimately happened to the personages portrayed in the movie. It is the story of the myriad of orphans left by the Russian Civil War and the famine, wandering here and there without any status, the vagabonds of the streets, living from begging, theft, petty crime or prostitution. Massive raids were organized to get the street children and to place them in orphanages. The most determined were escaping to go back on the streets. For these recidivists large reeducation colonies have been built and the people interned there became the subject of a huge pedagogical experiment. The colonies were up to a point self-governing - communes of productive labor. Their organization was based on two mutual principles: the responsibility of each individual in front of the collective, and the authority of the collective over each individual. This meant that any inmate in the colony was to be controlled, judged, punished if necessary, by the collective. Ultimately this meant  reeducation through peer pressure and communalism, to the detriment of the natural right of the individual to remain just himself and to understand and decide on his own terms.

Much has been written, for better or worse, about these reeducation colonies. The first name that comes to mind is Makarenko, the author of the Pedagogical Poem, However he was not the unique responsible for this endeavor, there was a much larger structure under the authority of NKVD (which should say something about the whole thing).

I was expecting the movie to be based on the Pedagogical Poem and to be about the colony organized by Makarenko. And this was true for the remake, made in 1955 (and the subsequent TV series from 1969). As for the film of Ekk, it was based on another book (Фабрика людей), published in 1929 (prior to Makarenko's Pedagogical Poem) and authored by Matvei Pogrebinsky (impersonated in the 1931 film by Nikolai Batalov). This had been the organizer of the first educational communities (Makarenko having in fact lower resposibilities in the system).

Фабрика людей
source: sarpust
no copyright infringement intended

Pogrebinsky was higly appreciated by Yagoda, the NKVD boss of that time. When Yagoda was demoted, declared ennemy of the party and killed, Pogrebinsky realized that he would have the same fate and committed suicide. Then his name was erased from the official Soviet history of education (and replaced with Makarenko). So it goes with the official histories.

As for the educational system created by them for the street children, it would be later used as a sinister tool against political prisoners (for instance by the Communist regime installed in the 40s in Romania): a heinous machine of destroying human dignity - the Road to Life ultimately becoming the Road to Communist Hell.

• А. С. Макаренко и Болшевская коммуна
• Болшевская трудовая коммуна ОГПУ
• Болшевская трудовая коммуна (или Трудовая коммуна ОГПУ № 1 им. Г. Г. Ягоды)
• Сказка для беспризорников: Болшевская трудовая коммуна ОГПУ
• Болшевская Трудовая Коммуна
• Василий Маслов

(Nikolai Ekk)