Doing Film History in the Soviet Union: A Research Note

Abstract

I recently spent three months each in Moscow and Leningrad viewing movies and finishing a book on Soviet popular culture, including cinema, fiction, music, and stage entertainment since 1900. Through the good offices of IREX, I was able to use my Academy of Sciences exchange status to study at the All-Union Research Institute for Film Studies (VNIIKI) in Moscow, even though there is no affiliation between the two Soviet institutions. What follows is a note about the practical aspects of movie-viewing in the USSR for historians, based on my experiences. In Moscow, I watched movies in four places. The first and most important was VNIIKI, located at Degtiarnyi Pereulok, 5, not far from the Rossiia movie theater. The building is under construction and the amenities are few, but they include what is important: a filmography reading room, a small reference library, a projection room, and a theater. Since my interests ranged over the whole history of Soviet cinematography from 1908 to the present, I submitted a list of the films I wanted to see, with dates, grouped chronologically so that I could take account of the context of each era. The organizer of showings, Anatolii Shumlianskii, ordered these from Gosfilmofond, the film depository at Belye Stolby in the suburbs of Moscow and the most complete collection of Russian-Soviet films in the world. Gosfilmofond sent five or six films a week to the Institute, and they usually were shown on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. My films often had to be sandwiched between the Institute's own showings of new films, Soviet and foreign. This was no inconvenience, for I wanted to see recent films as well and this saved me time in trying to catch them in local theaters.