The precise numbers are difficult to establish, given that the city remains under occupation. Based on satellite image analysis, Human Rights Watch reports approximately 10,300 graves that appeared in Mariupol between February and March 2022. As many of these are likely collective burials, the number of casualties may be significantly higher: Human Rights Watch, “Documenting Devastation and Loss in Mariupol,” Russia-Ukraine War Feature, February 8, 2024 →.
Ksenia Rybak, “With Bricks, Not Bombs,” trans. Mariia Kozenko, Mariupol Memory Park →.
As Rybak notes, this fusion of propaganda and commercial imagery—often circulated in vlog-like formats—establishes continuities with earlier Russian colonial projects, from the settlement of Siberia to the reconstruction of Grozny after the erasure of this North Caucasian city in the Second Chechen War (1999–2009).
Rafeef Ziadah, “Development as Erasure: Palestine, Genocide and ‘Reconstruction,’” Development and Change 56, no. 4–5 (July–September 2025). See also Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso, 2025).
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko find the early accounts on this in Marx’s Grundrisse, and elaborate on the intensification of such a fusion of warfare and civil technologies with the development of cybernetics throughout the twentieth century. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko, Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 34–37.
Harun Farocki, “Cross Influence/Soft Montage,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (Walter König, 2009), 71.
Volker Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 47.
Harun Farocki, intertitle in Inextinguishable Fire, 1969.
A translation of “to scientize agitation and politicize science” appears in this issue. On the genealogy of Farocki’s thinking on operativism see Tom Holert, “Beneath the Information, the Operation: Harun Farocki and the Work of Images,” also in this issue.
See Alla Vronskaya, “Fact and Fetish,” in this issue.
One of the period’s most influential economists of the CPSU, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, conceptualized this process as “primitive socialist accumulation.” While acknowledging “inevitably non-equivalent exchange with the countryside”—that is, the exploitation of the peasantry—as its condition, he rejected “looting” as a practice alien to it. By defining looting as characteristic exclusively of the primitive accumulation of capital, Preobrazhensky thus opposed the program of forced collectivization. He was subsequently accused of Trotskyism during the Stalin era. See Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, trans. Brian Pearce (Clarendon Press, 1965), 5.
During the grain crisis, the Soviet state failed to obtain sufficient grain from peasants to supply urban centers, placing severe strain on the economy. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (Allen & Unwin, 1968), 46–63.
Alvin W. Gouldner, “Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,” Telos, no. 34 (1977): 28. Although the historical and material conditions of enslaved labor on plantations and those in Soviet collective farms differ significantly, Gouldner employs the analogy to underscore the compulsory attachment of the peasantry to the territory. This aspect of collectivization became particularly decisive with the introduction of the Soviet passport system in 1931–32, which prevented rural populations from obtaining documents required for internal migration within the USSR. Only from 1975 onwards were rural inhabitants gradually integrated into the passport system. Gouldner, “Stalinism,” 14.
Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 428–29, 437.
Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Revolts (Oxford University Press, 1996), 183. Disregarding the devastating conditions faced by rural populations, the Party leaders dismissed the rebels in primitivist and misogynist terms: the low level of political education among peasants and women’s “irrational fears” were defined as the main causes. Viola, Peasant Rebels, 184.
Sergei Tretyakov, Ot Pekina do Pragi: Putevaia proza 1925–1937 godov (From Beijing to Prague: Travel prose, 1925–1937), ed. Tatiana Hofmann and Susanne Strätling (Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo Universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2020), 237.
Vroskaya, “Fact and Fetish.”
Sergei Tretyakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” trans. Davin Fore, October, no. 118 (Fall 2006): 69. The full version of the text was published in German as “Der Schriftsteller und das sozialistische Dorf,” Das neue Russland 7, no. 2 (1931).
See Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006); and Fore, Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024). On Tretyakov’s operativist aesthetic in relation to his travels, see Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006); and Sergei Tretjakow, Fakten / Räume: Reiseskizzen 1925–1937, ed. Tatjana Hofmann and Susanne Strätling, trans. Tatjana Hofmann (Spector Books, 2021).
Tretyakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” 69.
Gough, “Radical Tourism,” 169.
Tretyakov, Ot Pekina do Pragi, 231–34.
The notion of metabolism was first introduced in Marx’s Grundrisse, where he suggests understanding labor as “the metabolism between human and nature.” The related “metabolic rift”—the destructive rupture of metabolic chains by capitalism—became foundational for the discourse of Marxist ecology (John Bellamy-Forster, Jason Moore, Andreas Malm), while Marx’s broader account on metabolism was taken up by ecofeminist critique (Ariel Salleh, Stefania Barca). Tretyakov, however, does not explicitly use the notion of social metabolism.
Tretyakov, “The Writer and the Socialist Village,” 69.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Belknap Press), 81.
Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (University of California Press, 2012), 181, 183.
Benjamin, The Work of Art, 26.
As the editors of a 2005 English-language anthology note: “Since August 1991, state and Communist Party archives have opened their doors to … scholars, declassifying and making available formerly inaccessible materials on collectivization.” The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, trans. Steven Shabad, ed. Lynne Viola et al. (Yale University Press, 2005), 1.
See Gough’s account of this image in “Radical Tourism,” 172–73.
On the Cold War development of operations research across both Western military-industrial contexts and Soviet planning sciences, see Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (MIT Press, 1951); and Elena S. Venttsel, Vvedenie v issledovanie operatsii (Introduction to Operations Research) (Sovetskoe Radio, 1964). We thank Tom Holert for pointing us to this important genealogy.
Farocki, “to scientize agitation.”
See Nora M. Alter, Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence (Columbia University Press, 2024), 149.
Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. T. Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 17–18; Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard, 59–60; Georges Didi-Huberman, “How to Open Your Eyes,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, 44; Alter, Harun Farocki, 146–47.
John Lewallen, Ecology of Devastation: Indochina (Penguin Books, 1971), 61–63.
Lewallen, Ecology of Devastation, 65.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1976), 495.
Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023), 108.
Farocki, “to scientize agitation.”
Farocki, “to scientize agitation.”
Harun Farocki, “Vacuum Cleaner or Submachine Gun: A Traveling Cinema for Engineers,” Grey Room, no. 79 (Spring 2020): 94–95, translation modified. This text was published in Volker Pantenburg’s selection of Farocki’s early articles for Grey Room, translated by Ted Fendt. Original available as Farocki, “Staubsauger oder Maschinenpistolen: Ein Wanderkino für Technologen,” in Meine Nächte mit den Linken: Texte 1964–1975, Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Volker Pantenburg (Walther König, 2017), 59–60.
Farocki, “to scientize agitation.” See also Tom Holert, “Tabulatorische Bilder: Zu ‘Die Teilung aller Tage’ (1970) und ‘Eine Sache, die sich versteht’ (15 mal) (1971),” Harun Farocki Institut, May 2, 2023 →; a shortened version appeared in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?. Our translation from Holert’s German-language essay differs in parts from the latter edition.
Holert, “Tabulatorische Bilder.”
Harun Farocki, “Kapital im Klassenzimmer,” in Meine Nächte mit den Linken: Texte 1964–1975, Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Volker Pantenburg (Walther König, 2017), 117, our translation. See also Holert, “Tabulatorische Bilder.”
Harun Farocki, “War Always Finds a Way,” in HF | RG (Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham), ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Jeu de Paume / Blackjack éditions 2009), 107. See also Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public, no. 29 (2004). The literature on operative images in Farocki and beyond is extensive. Only a few key sources can be cited here: Christa Blümlinger, Harun Farocki, du cinéma au musée (P.O.L., 2022); Volker Pantenburg, “Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester University Press, 2017); Aud Sissel Hoel, “Operative Images: Inroads to a New Paradigm of Media Theory,” in Image—Action—Space, ed. Luisa Feiersinger, Kathrin Friedrich, and Moritz Queisner (De Gruyter, 2018); Antonio Somaini, “Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture,” Grey Room, no. 93 (Fall 2023); and Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
Harun Farocki, “Cross Influence/Soft Montage,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?
Carles Guerra, “Expanded soft montage,” in Harun Farocki: Another Kind of Empathy, ed. Antje Ehmann and Carles Guerra (Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 2016), 44–45.
