Lenin nationalised film, then Eisenstein reinvented montage
On 17 January 1922 Lenin ordered the Commissariat for Education to register, tax, and censor every screening in Soviet Russia—calling cinema the key school for the masses. War had wrecked studios and power grids. Out of that ruin came agitki, Kino-Pravda, and Battleship Potemkin.
After November 1917 the new state treated film as propaganda first. August 1919 nationalisation handed control to the People's Commissariat of Education; the First State School of Cinematography opened the same year. Early screens showed recycled imperial imports plus Father Sergius (shot under the old regime, released 1918). Short agitki rode trains and boats with lecturers; Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda newsreel ran twenty-three issues from 1922 to 1925. Moscow had no working cinema until late 1921, then eighty-nine more by 1923.
Sovkino's 1925 merger won tax breaks and an export-import monopoly. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) fictionalised mutiny into proletarian myth and became a montage textbook. Stalin-era socialist realism narrowed tone, yet Circus delighted 1930s crowds and postwar colour titles such as The Stone Flower (1946) appeared. Ivan the Terrible Part II, finished in 1946, sat on a shelf until 1958; Alexander Nevsky was suppressed then revived when German armies invaded.
De-Stalinisation loosened subjects: Ballad of a Soldier took a 1961 BAFTA, The Cranes Are Flying travelled widely, and fiction output jumped from six films in 1951 to 125 in 1965. An Experimental Studio (1965) hired artists per project and paid from profits. By 1964 average Soviet viewers saw 18.3 films a year versus 12 in the USA. The 1980s finally aired repressed themes in works such as Repentance and Kin-dza-dza!, proving how tightly politics had always framed the reels. Planners even set a target in 1967 for new filmmakers to direct 30% of fresh releases, and The Height, a 1950s favourite, helped launch the bard song movement.
Source: Cinema of the Soviet Union
