Abstract
The leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union accepted as a truism that the cinema was a, if not the, most powerful propaganda weapon. They had also found it most difficult to utilize and dangerously subtle and complex. Thus they, and in particular Stalin, came to believe that cinema must be kept simple in content and under tight control. This suspicious approach to the medium was to be the most important factor in the development of Soviet cinema in the postwar era.
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Notes
Lunarcharsky’s reminiscences in G. Boltyanskii Lenin i kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1925), p. 19.
Leon Trotsky, ‘Vodka, the church and the cinema’, Pravda, 12 July 1923, p. 4.
See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), The Film Factory (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 111.
R. Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
V. Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive (London: Harvill, 1995), p. 52.
See J. Leyda, Kino (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) p. 383; also
Mariamov, Kremlevskii Tsentsor (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1992) which by the collection and recounting of personal reminiscences maps the mechanism of Stalin’s ‘court’ of cinema, pp. 80–94.
S. M. Eisenstein (trans. H. Marshall), Immoral Memories (London: Owen, 1985), p. 261.
The letter is in Bolshakov’s personal archive and was published by Leonid Kozlov in ‘The artist in the shadow of Ivan’, in R. Taylor and D. Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993).
E. Radzinsky, Stalin (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 505.
Editorial trans. P. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 219.
G. V. Alexandrov, Epokha i kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1983), pp. 297–8.
S. V. Drobashenko, Istoriya sovetskogo dokumental’nogo kino (Moscow: MGU, 1980), p. 62.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Roberts, G. (1999). A Cinema of Suspicion or a Suspicion of Cinema: Soviet Film 1945–53. In: Rawnsley, G.D. (eds) Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27082-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27082-8_7
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