The Fate of Soviet Popular Cinema during the Stalin Revolution

Abstract

In March 1928, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its first all-union conference on cinema affairs. The minutes were published in a hefty volume of more than 450 closely set pages.1 What strikes the reader of these pages more than sixty years later, even one familiar with the institutional and theoretical evolution of Soviet cinema in its first decade, is the obscurity of the debates and their rancorous tone. But what is equally surprising about the discussions is that most conferees evinced little interest in movies. Cinema for them was a lifeless abstraction. That