Owen Hatherley, Ghost World — Sidecar

Soviet architecture generally only had ‘stars’ in its first and last years. At the start, the utopian generation of Melnikov, Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers, with their workers’ clubs and palaces of labour; at the end, the dystopian ‘paper architects’ like Brodsky and Utkin, who created Borgesian paradoxes about failure and confusion. Research in the last couple of decades has complicated this considerably, foregrounding major architects, especially in the non-Russian republics, working doggedly in the Brezhnev years, like Raine Karp in Estonia or George Chakhava in Georgia; but only the Ukrainian modernist Florian Yuriev has been the star of a film. In Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity According to Florian (2022), the octogenarian Yuriev – who died the year before the documentary’s release – and a group of young supporters attempt to resist the diminution of his greatest building, the Institute of Information in Kyiv, into a bauble at the front of a shopping mall. In this struggle, elements of Yuriev’s life emerge obliquely – his time in the Gulag in his youth; his stint as a modernist painter during the ‘Thaw’; his brief success as an architect; and his long, obscure retirement as a nonconformist Marxist in post-Soviet Ukraine. Throughout, he’s a captivating presence, a modest, quiet but passionate utopian, a living embodiment of a future that never came to pass.

The film’s director has staked out a similarly nonconformist position. Infinity According to Florian is the only feature to date by the Ukrainian critic and filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski, who has been perhaps the most eloquent Anglophone exponent of what could be called a left-populist or left-patriotic politics in Ukraine. His writing and filmmaking refused to avoid the difficulties and complexities of Ukrainian politics – a country which has been a cold house for the left for many decades – while still coming down firmly in favour of, for instance, the insurrection against Viktor Yanukovych and against the ‘pro-Russian’ unrest that followed. In this, his work is in explicit dialogue with earlier examples of theoretical, politicised filmmaking from well-known directors like Dziga Vertov – as a student, Radynski wrote his thesis on Vertov’s early sound film Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas – to more obscure late Soviet figures such as the scientific documentarian Felix Sobolev. In terms of international affiliations, his films might be placed in the Western Marxist tradition of Kluge, Straub-Huillet and especially, Harun Farocki: deadpan, dialectical, sometimes slightly forbidding, with a grim sense of humour.

Before turning to directing, Radynski was a theorist and writer on film, politics and architecture; talking to me remotely at an event this spring at Factory International in Manchester, he reflected that ‘trying to put two images together’ was an experimental outgrowth of his criticism, which took on its own momentum. His first sketches were part of what was, in his words, ‘rather naively called “video activism” at the time’, when it was still widely believed on the left that ‘platforms like YouTube could be tools for progressive politics, rather than algorithmic behemoths eating away people’s attention and lives’. This early work emerged out of his involvement as an activist with Right to the City campaigns in Kyiv circa 2009-10, and as a writer and editor in the Ukrainian branch of the Polish left-liberal journal and publisher Krytyka Polityczna and a member of the Visual Culture Research Centre, a left-leaning collective-cum-think-tank in Kyiv.

It developed into more concerted, planned filmmaking during the events of 2013, with Radynski creating short online video reports ‘which me and my comrades at the time regarded as counter-information activism’. Radynski made agitational work on the protests – such as the pithy Kyiv: Why Violence? (2013) – and as a writer, published perhaps the most convincing Anglophone defence of them in his usual English-language outlet, e-flux, in a multi-part, labyrinthine essay, ‘Maidan and Beyond’. But the films that stood out were more about the other side. Incident at the Museum (2013) came out of a project on censorship in Ukraine, which brought Radynski and his colleagues to an art museum in the second city, Kharkiv. An interview with a ‘very conservative museum director’ is suddenly interrupted as the director has to meet and escort a luxuriantly bearded Russian priest, rumoured to be Putin’s confessor; for Radynski, the short stands today as a tale about ‘how the notion of “Russian culture” metastasises in politics’, with Orthodoxy and Russian patriotism married to artistic conservatism and institutional corruption. The People Who Came to Power (2015), made just after the overthrow of Yanukovych, was the result of spending several weeks in Donbas as local protests were fanned and militarised by Russian forces led by the far-right adventurer Igor Strelkov. The contrast between the small, paranoid, armed groups documented in this film and the street protests captured in the shorts from Maidan is hard to miss.

In the interregnum between the annexation of Crimea and the incursions into the Eastern Donbas and the invasion of 2022, Radynski’s lens began to settle on infrastructure, architecture, and on his native Kyiv and its highly publicised process of ‘decommunisation’. For Radynski, this ‘foolish and problematic’ state-mandated iconoclasm is fundamentally a ‘smokescreen’ for the neoliberal redevelopment of the city, with public spaces being eaten up by opaque private interests and infrastructure pushed to the point of collapse, all smoothed over by a consensus nationalism: processes ‘which were ongoing long before Maidan, but intensified by the governments who have misused it to their advantage’. Infinity was preceded by the multi-part The Film of Kyiv (2017), which counterposes the planned destruction of Yuriev’s building with the perpetually unfinished Podilsky Bridge in Kyiv, a metro and road bridge begun in 1993. In the process, Radynski had to come to some kind of terms with the Soviet legacy: though he firmly rejects any nostalgia, the USSR is ‘a constant presence’ in his work, having been, as he puts it, ‘brought up in the “ghost world” of post-socialism’ (he was born in Kyiv in 1984). Soviet history, for Radynski, was ‘anything but one monolithic thing’, with ‘every decade not only different from the previous decade, but also a rejection of the previous decade’.

The discovery of Yuriev, alive and still in Kyiv, during the 2010s, was thanks to Radynski’s fascination with his one realised major building, the Institute of Information. It stands at the point where the historic city gives way to a modernist zone of giant public buildings, wide roads and housing estates, next to a Metro station originally named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, and facing a square which, until recently, featured an exceptionally aggressive monument to the Cheka. Yuriev’s loose tongue and politically undesirable family connections saw him spend time in the Gulag, but upon release, he became one of several figures trying to revive the pre-Stalin avant-garde, working on synaesthetic abstract painting and devising his own colour theory. To his great surprise, his 1960s sketch of a building in the shape of a ‘flying saucer’ flanked by rectilinear volumes – a reach back to the Constructivist drama of 1920s paper architects like Ivan Leonidov – was discovered by a Kyiv bureaucrat and developed into a permanent building, which was eventually completed in 1971.

Meeting Yuriev, Radynski says, ‘helped me nuance and complicate my view of what Soviet culture was or could be’. In Infinity, Yuriev stands in the company of Ilya Budraitskis’s ‘Dissidents among Dissidents’, those unusual figures opposed to the Soviet system while retaining their socialist or communist commitments, in an anti-Soviet milieu that was generally liberal or conservative. Appalled by post-Soviet Kyiv and its embrace of capitalism – for Yuriev, an unaccountable historical ‘step backwards’ – the architect joins with youthful enthusiasts to try and preserve the building, if possible as something close to the function he envisaged in his original sketches: an auditorium and museum devoted to the ‘synthesis of the arts’. Radynski then juxtaposes this with the processes of capitalist development. After the building was listed in 2020, its Russian-Ukrainian developers could no longer, as planned, simply demolish it – instead, it is to be swamped in a galumphing glass structure housing a shopping mall, losing any coherence and all of its original clarity. Yuriev is evidently disgusted but unsurprised that the capitalist turn backwards would create something so grotesque.

By the time the film was released, Kyiv was under siege. Radynski has remained in the city during the war, and his activities since have, unsurprisingly, revolved around it. One example is the short Chornobyl 22, on the brief Russian occupation of the decommissioned nuclear power station and its poisoned Exclusion Zone; another is Intervention, made with the British artist-filmmaker Phil Collins, which responded to Tory politicians trying to use the war as a pretext for removing the Ukrainian statue of Engels in Manchester. In this collaboration, Ukrainian accounts of the war and Ukrainian texts on Russian imperialism – a subject upon which Engels’s opinions were forthright – are presented on LED panels. In e-flux, Radynski published an ambitious essay setting out ‘The Case Against the Russian Federation’, in which he attempted to make a more serious argument than most for the notion of the Ukrainian struggle as a ‘decolonial’ endeavour.

Ukrainian Anglophone writers and, especially, social media influencers, can tend to flit unblinking between evocations of anti-imperial, anti-colonial struggle and invocations of the defence of Western civilisation against Eastern barbarians. Radynski’s essay takes the claim seriously. It is dialectical and sometimes derisive, and often very funny, particularly in his account of how he, ‘ethnically’ half-Russian and half-Jewish, ‘became a Ukrainian’. The essay roots Russian hostility to Ukraine not in racial difference but as a response to Ukrainian traditions of anarchism and insurrection; that’s as may be. It is notable for, first, seeing Russia as a fundamentally ‘Western’ polity, and its expansion into Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus as a settler-colonial project with significant input from Germany, Scandinavia, France and Britain – and, more controversially, for conceding Ukraine’s complicity in this, with, as any historian knows, Ukrainians having been as implicated in the Russian push into Asia in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as Scots were in the British Empire. Russian historiography credits Kyiv with the creation of the Russian State, in the form of Kyivan Rus. Radynski, ever the dialectician, does not dispute this. The war, for him, gives Ukrainians the possibility of repentance for having helped create a monster.

His most recent short film, Where Russia Ends (2024), is a typically oblique attempt to make these arguments in cinematic form. Formally, it is a sharp departure from his long-take documentary style, an essay film based on found footage. It is, according to Radynski, partly a response to his disappointment with TraumaZone (2023), Adam Curtis’s montage of BBC archival footage on the collapse of the USSR, which presented the region as a monolithic ‘Russia’. Curtis’s film did, however, suggest to Radynski the possible use of vintage material he had himself been working with for over a decade: that of the ‘immense and abandoned archive’ of Kyivnaukfilm, an acronym for the Science Film Studio in Kyiv, which between the 1940s and 1990s made documentaries and animations on everything from the lives of animals to psychoanalysis, the roots of fascism to urbanism and environmentalism (these have seldom been seen in the West, except for a few documentaries by the studio’s artistic director, Felix Sobolev). Radynski has worked for years on digitising Kyivnaukfilm’s completed work, and on cataloguing its raw footage and rushes.

The material Radynski employs in Where Russia Ends focuses on Siberia and northeastern Asia – the Khanty, Nenets and Sakha autonomous republics and autonomous okrugs, all still within the Russian Federation – filmed during the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a Brezhnev-era grand project supplementing the Tsarist Trans-Siberian Railway, and the oil and gas pipelines that conveyed fossil capital from the ‘east’ to European Russia (and, as Radynski is keen to point out, to West Germany). Ukraine, he states, was ‘very much at the forefront of the industrial colonisation’ of northeastern Asia; ‘the filmmakers were essentially colonisers’ in the region, settling in the new industrial towns and cities and presenting the extraction of local resources as part of an uncritically depicted process of development. Industrial expansion is, in the original films, interspersed, as in the works of the British directors of the Empire Marketing Board, with images of untouched landscapes and picturesque natives.

For all his palpable love of this moment in Soviet Ukrainian filmmaking, Radynski sees it as another example of Ukrainian complicity with Russian imperialism. The fictional narrative he appends to this – stunningly beautiful – footage adds an anti-imperialist voice, one that imagines a solidarity between these Asian victims of Russian – European – imperialism and the Ukrainians whose own language and political rights have been periodically stamped upon by the Russian state with similar violence. Where Russia Ends concludes with a list of the republics of the Russian Federation that declared ‘sovereignty’ with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a sovereignty which would be brutally repressed in the Caucasus and gradually watered down into nothingness elsewhere. The film is a dream of a solidarity that was rare at the time, but which he argues can be revived in the present day. Like the work of Florian Yuriev, it is another of Radynski’s futures past that have not, yet, become a reality.

Read on: Volodymyr Ischchenko, ‘Ukrainian Voices?’, NLR 138.