Cinema has been the predominant popular art-form of the first half of the
twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America. Nowhere was this
more apparent than in the former Soviet Union, where Lenin’s remark that ‘of
all the arts for us cinema is the most important’ became a cliché and where
cinema attendances were until recently still among the highest in the world. In
the age of mass politics Soviet cinema developed from a fragile but effective
tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in
the Civil War that followed the October 1917 Revolution, through a welter of
experimentation, into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment
that shaped the public image of the Soviet Union—both at home and abroad
and for both elite and mass audiences—and latterly into an instrument to
expose the weaknesses of the past and present in the twin processes of
glasnost and perestroika. Now the national cinemas of the successor republics
to the old USSR are encountering the same bewildering array of problems,
from the trivial to the terminal, as are all the other ex-Soviet institutions.