The American Who Electrified Russia

THE AMERICAN WHO ELECTRIFIED RUSSIA is a project exploring the relationship between biography and history in the twentieth century through the discovery of an individual life / the real person behind a fictional character in a documentary novel of the 1930s. It takes the form of a documentary video-film supported by a website with background material, and is designed for both academic and aficionado audiences.
The book is Little Golden America, by the Russian satirists Ilf & Petrov, which is nowadays read in schools and colleges in the USA because it recounts a road trip across the country from New York to California and back. Their guide and interpreter on the trip, Mr Adams, is described as an engineer who had spent several years in the Soviet Union. The historical person on whom this character is based is Solomon Trone (1872-1969), Managing Director of General Electric Russia before the 1917 Revolution and then a leading figure in the electrification of the USSR / a name unrecorded in the history books whose biography, as the film discovers, was nonetheless intertwined with history. Indeed his life traversed major developments in Russia, Japan, Germany, China, India, and Israel. In 1918 he was in Siberia, dodging back and forth between the battling reds and whites. In 1932, he sat in the press gallery at the first of Stalin's show trials. In 1939 he helped arrange for the last boat of Jewish refugees to escape from Germany. In 1945 he attended the Potsdam Conference as a member of the Allied Reparations Committee. But the title of the film will reveal itself as ironic, since Trone was actually born in a small town in Latvia.
The film explores the vivid contrast between public imagery and private memory. The public imagery of the events and places are drawn from archives, while the private memories and photos are those of his family. Mediating between these two strands are two more threads. The first is the research of a Canadian university librarian, David Evans, following a trail which began when he discovered, from reading the letters of Ilf & Petrov, that Mr Adams was real. Evans writes that researching Solomon Trone 'is a delight':
He becomes more and more remarkable as a guide through so much of history that
we had thought we had known. That so much of history now turns out to be a fiction,
because of uncovering the life of a man we had previously thought of as fictitious, is
of course ironic. Contrasting Solomon Trone's life between 1905 and 1953 and the
known history of this period there are many inconsistencies that suggest a different
version of events. Some of those differences, if they hold up to scrutiny, do not
appear to be minor.
But the result is that Mr Evans is now searching for material in archives in various countries across the globe.
The final thread is a series of comments from a range of scholars, professionals, archivists etc., which address the wider questions which the film raises about public and private versions of history.