Labor Pains

A Soviet photographer's long-lost modernist glimpse of an experimental Siberian homeland

By David Shneer

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Semyon Fridlyand was born in Kiev in 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution. At 20, he moved to Moscow to become a staff photographer for Ogonek (The Little Flame), the Soviet Union's most important photographic magazine, which was founded in 1923 by his cousin Mikhail Fridlyand. Semyon Fridlyand spent the 1920s at Ogonek, training alongside those who would become the country's leading photojournalists and modernist photographers, many of whom were also young Jews from the provinces—Mark Markov-Grinberg, Max Alpert, Georgy Zelma.

In the early 1930s, Fridlyand went on to photograph for Pravda, USSR in Construction, and other periodicals, while taking part in the battle over aesthetics in Soviet photography. Fridlyand helped establish Socialist Realism, a straightforward, "accessible" approach that turned everyday workers into iconic heroes and made agricultural labor look easy. Socialist Realism displaced the modernist aesthetic prevalent in the 1920s—odd angles, cropped bodies, turning the everyday into something unusual. Fridlyand covered the war against Hitler, endured Stalin's "anti-cosmopolitanism" campaign, and continued his career after Stalin's death, documenting industrial construction and Soviet scientific achievements until his death in 1964, most likely of cancer.

In 1934, the magazine Our Achievements sent Fridlyand to photograph Birobidzhan, an autonomous region in the Far East that, according to official rhetoric, would turn Jews from the shtetl into manual-laboring members of the Soviet Jewish nation. Jews had been considered a religious group under the Tsars, but during the atheistic Soviet period, Jews were recast as a nationality with its own language (Yiddish), culture, and territory—hence Birobidzhan.

Our Achievements published a celebratory article, accompanied by nine Fridlyand images, each a Socialist Realist celebration of the new Soviet Jew. But the Birobidzhan experiment never worked out as its planners envisioned. It languished for decades and in the late 1980s, many Birobidzhaners migrated to Israel. Some have returned in recent years seeking work, less violence, and a cheaper standard of living. And Yiddish is still its official language.

Last year, Fridlyand's private archive, which his family had stored for decades in its Moscow apartment, came to the United States, and I had the opportunity to go through his negatives, prints, and other ephemera. I found a packet of negatives that I quickly recognized as images of Birobidzhan. The ten images here, which reflect a more modernist aesthetic than those that ran in Our Achievements, have never been published or exhibited before.