This engrossing book explores the important role played by Stalinist cinema in legitimizing Stalinism and producing a new Soviet identity.

Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading scholar of Soviet cultural history, asserts that both Lenin and Stalin valued cinema as the most effective form of propaganda and “organization of the masses.” Dobrenko looks at Stalinist historical films and the novels from which they drew and shows that they transformed the experience and trauma of the past into a legitimizing historical narrative—the basis of a new mythology. He examines the works of the great film directors of the revolutionary period in Stalinist cinema—including Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigorii Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Fridrikh Ermler, Mark Donskoi, and Mikhail Romm—and explains how they worked with time, the past, and memory to construct the Soviet political imagination.