Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History : Museum of the Revolution

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 narrativethe basis of a new mythology. He examines the works of the great film directors of the revolutionary period in Stalinist cinemaincluding Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigorii Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Fridrikh Ermler, Mark Donskoi, and Mikhail Rommand explains how they worked with time, the past, and memory to construct the Soviet political imagination.

Evgeny Dobrenko is professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Political Economy of Socialist Realism and co-editor with Katerina Clark of Soviet Culture and Power, both published by Yale University Press. He lives in Sheffield, UK.