The documentary by Victor Turin The Steel Way. Turksib (1929)is analyzed in this essay from the perspective of interaction between nature andsociety. The essay compares Turksib with the avant-garde films of Dziga Vertovand analyzes the language, editing system and poetics of intertitles characteristicof Turin’s film. It is noted that in the visual structure of Turksib images of the“sculpting in time” (according to Andrei Tarkovsky) allocate a significant role tothe ethnographic pictures of local people’s life, virgin landscapes and wild anddomestic animals. The accent is put on the emphatic rhythm of the intertitles,which actualizes the problems of interaction between nature and society. Theconstruction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway through the Kazakh steppeand the Siberian forests demonstrates the advancement of scientism whoseproponents are convinced of the inevitability of scientific and technologicalprogress. The essay shows how the attitudes of the representatives of power, thetransformers of the region lead to a change in value priorities - in particular,towards “the pacifying of the stubborn nature” with the aim of putting it at theservice of man. The essay ends with an analysis of Turksib’s significance as anecological message and concludes that if the ideas and artistic techniques ofTurin’s film were developed further, the history of documentary cinema in thefollowing decades could include ecology as one of its major directions.