Abstract
Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the United Kingdom witnessed a dramatic surge in support of and interest in its new Soviet ally against the Nazis. The British government began to help the Soviets, but was widely perceived to be doing too little. The Ministry of Information attempted to counter this impression, showing the government’s support for Russia, while at the same time trying to ensure that this support remained under governmental control and did not fall into the hands of British Communists. While scholarship has devoted a great deal of attention to the diplomatic dimension of Anglo-Soviet wartime relations, there has been little written about issues of culture and propaganda, which played a crucial role; likewise studies of cinema in wartime Britain have paid scant attention to the British wartime reception of Soviet film. During the first years of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, however, short films in particular proved an especially important medium for the communication of the British government’s complex policy on Soviet Russia: it was attractive with audiences for its combination of immediacy with authenticity, but also attractive to governments as a reliable transmission belt for a carefully calibrated message. As such, analysis of shorts with specific analysis of the key films: Salute to the Soviet, 100 Million Women enables us to reassess the claim that the Ministry of Information really succeeded in stealing the thunder of the Left, and reconsider the effects this policy had on British society.
Highlights
When the Soviet Union entered the war against Nazi Germany, following the 22 June 1941 invasion, it and Great Britain unexpectedly found themselves on the same side facing a common foe
People are anxious to show their appreciation of what Russia has done and are whole hearted
Just as Churchill made no mention of the Soviet Union, and did not
Summary
By 1943 Soviet footage amounting to 40,000 feet had been included in British commercial newsreels shown to weekly audiences of 24 million in public cinema from the very first weeks of June 1941.12 Soviet features, both documentary and fiction, soon followed onto British screens, and were by far the most widely consumed expressions of Soviet cinema, but British commercial filmmakers were very conservative when it came to the Soviet subject matter, despite one or two efforts (Chapman 1998: 220). By early 1942, the Ministry estimated that 3,000,000 had seen these shows at some time.13 While this dimension of wartime British propaganda film consumption was long held to have little value by historians compared to more celebrated features, and it has been estimated that whereas the cinemas reached 24 million a week, the non-theatrical distribution reached 0.36 million a week at its peak in 1943-1944 (Thorpe, Pronay, and Coultass 1980: 37-38), James Chapman, has persuasively made the case that the short documentary films “were no less important than commercial feature films; they just served a different purpose.”. It possessed topical qualities that enabled it to be shown theatrically as well as part of the “Celluloid Circus.”
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