Mind-Munitions

The Bolshevik Revolution and the War of Ideologies
203
that Soviet films earned more at the box-office than imported products.
Lenin had nationalized the Russian film industry in August
1919 but, starved of film stock and equipment from abroad, not to
mention the shortages of electricity and of those many technicians,
actors, and directors who had fled the revolution, it was unlikely
that film propaganda itself played a significant role in determining
the final outcome of the revolution. What the available films did in
the countryside was to attract a curious audience, whereupon the
officials from the agit-trains would disembark to deliver their
message using classic techniques of crowd manipulation.
From this disastrous beginning, however, the Soviet film industry
soon began to produce one of the most acclaimed bodies of work
in the history of world cinema. A national production company,
Sovkino, was established in 1925 and new studios were set up in
Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa; thirteen were functioning
across the nation by 1928 producing 123 films in that year, each
reaching an average audience of 2 1 /2 million people. Virtually all
the films were made to serve the State. Battleship Potemkin (1926),
made by Sergei Eisenstein, portrayed the 1905 mutiny at Odessa
but its message had more to do with propaganda than with history.
Eisenstein’s next film, October ( 1927), made to commemorate the
tenth anniversary of the revolution, fell into a similar category.
They had the feel of documentaries but concentrated on events
rather than individuals. As a result, they are often mistaken even
today as being film ‘records’ of what actually happened in the
1905 and 1917 revolutions rather than re-enactments designed to
serve the interests of the Soviet state in the 1920s. Pudovkin’s End
of St Petersburg (1927), another anniversary classic, paid more
attention to the human elements of the revolutionary struggle, but
here again its message was symbolic and propagandistic rather
than historical. Such films legitimized the revolution and thereby
the regime that inherited it. They appear, however, to have created
a greater impression abroad than they did at home.
Although the Soviets pioneered new methods of domestic propaganda
that were watched with great interest by other countries, it
was their foreign propaganda that caused most concern abroad.
The Bolshevik leadership was certainly quick to appreciate the role
propaganda could play in undermining the position of the ‘capitalistimperialist’
powers and spreading its ideas about world revolution.
In October 1917, for example, the Bolsheviks published various