From the very first days of their existence, the Bolshevik authorities were confronted with the question of how the new state was to represent itself and its objectives to a population, the majority of whom lived in a time and space separated from urban industrialization and modernization. Film, which, according to the legend, had been qualified by Lenin as “the most important of all the arts,” was to become one of the key mediums of self identification and propaganda. By the mid-1920s the central government had defined a project of film distribution and exhibition, dubbed “cinefication,” under the auspices of a State Committee for Cinematography and its regional branch offices. Derived from the famous 1920 slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” cinefication was invested with the same utopian message of progress and enlightenment. Its implementation followed the same path as many Soviet programs and institutions: it was caught between the demands of central control and regional manifestations of independence, of political propaganda and profitability, and the imperatives of the plan and the necessity of cost accounting. However, the Soviet effort of cinefication, despite abysmal failures, remains an unprecedented example of cultural dissemination, where every citizen was targeted, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder, including more than 150 distinct ethnic groups spread out across the 11 time zones of the Soviet empire.
