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.

Cinefication peaked during the era of “stagnation.” By the end of the 1960s, feature films, documentaries and newsreels were disseminated to the entire country, to every town and village, to the most remote corners of the Soviet Union, using trains, trucks, boats, and other means of transportation. Soviet newsreels show projectionists on sledges heading toward villages drowning in deep snow, on a camel in the midst of a Central-Asian desert, and even parachuted from airplanes to bring the movies to reindeer herders. One of the most telling images of Joris Ivens’s documentary Song of the Rivers (1953) is a scene showing Soviet fishermen of the Caspian Sea watching newsreels projected during the evening hours on the sails of their boat by a projectionist of the local committee of “cinefication.” Ivens’s scene was perhaps constructed, but archival footage shows the very real bedsheet screen hanging in the belly of a Soviet submarine.

Like so many other branches of Soviet economy, cinefication was slow in reaching its initial goals. Despite the celebrated “agit” trains or boats of the early Soviet years, film distribution and exhibition was limited to the principal cities of the Soviet Union during the 1920s. The NEP years saw film dessimination mainly run by a joint-stock company (Sovkino), increasingly criticized by bureaucrats and avant-garde artists alike. It is only in the late 1920s and early 1930s that cinefication became a massive, state-run, and centrally-planned entreprise. Soviet statistical sources list 868 urban and 187 rural film stations (cinemas or mobile units) in 1923 for the whole Soviet Union. In 1928, these numbers had grown to 9700 and 4100 respectively. In 1933 they reached 27,578, of which 17,584 stations were rural. By the late 1950s, in the Russian Federation alone, 2202.6 million movie tickets were sold, four times more viewers were present at paid screenings than in 1940, two and a half more than in 1950. In 1940, on average, the rural viewer in the Russian Federation went to the movies twice a year; in 1959, this amount went up to 14, i.e., increased 7 times. In 1995, that is, four years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the national average in the Russian Federation was below one ticket.

Like other Soviet institutional histories, the history of Soviet film distribution and exhibition has only been treated by general presentations, limited in time, mostly to the 1920s and 1930s. The history of Soviet cinefication is a scholarly frontier, not counting a few articles from Soviet sources and a very few Western publications, limited to a few articles and pages in book chapters. In other words, the fascinating story of Soviet cinefication has still to be written, with its central and peripheral organs, from the Main Film Distribution Administration and the Main Administration of Cinefication of the State Committee (Ministery) for Cinematography (Goskino) to republican committees and its regional and local subdivisions. By focusing on all levels of the cinefication process, from center to periphery and from top to bottom, the difficult question of audience reception can be addressed. When a letter written by Stalin himself in 1947 to his minister of cinematography of the USSR defends the use of “trophy films” (brought back by the Red Army from Berlin) for general distribution among the Soviet public, we learn not only about Stalin’s own taste as a film connaisseur, but also about his concerns regarding the poor finances of the Soviet film industry, a taste – and concern – that the “masses” did not necessarily share with the leader. On the one hand, “trophy films,” such as the Tarzan hits (with Johnny Weissmuller in the lead), or the 1949 blockbuster The Girl of My Dreams (a German film of 1944, starring Marika Rökk) drove up box-office receipts, on the other hand, many letters to the minister and other organs complained about these screenings, judged immoral and out of place. When a Riazan regional newspaper published in the late 1950s the collective letter of lumberjacks in a remote logging camp, complaining about the fact that their film projector was seized by the local distribution agency to be used elsewhere, we cannot only measure the popularity of film viewing, but also the endemic contradiction between film distribution and exhibition, and their material and technical limitations. A paper trail of considerable size, well-preserved in the central and regional archives, gives us a detailed picture of these two rival institutions, caught in-between the imperatives of the planned economy and the necessity of functioning as self-supporting organisms. If we consider the example above, even Stalin was caught in this eternal Soviet dilemma.

During 3 two-month research trips to Russia made between 2003 and 2006, I have researched the history of film distribution and exhibition through a detailed study of their central, mainly Moscow-based institutions, such as the Committee on Cinematography of the Peoples Commissariat of the USSR, the Ministery of Cinematography of the USSR and Goskino, the administrations of Film Distribution and Cinefication at the All-Union level and the level of the Russian SFSR. I have gathered material stored at the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). I also worked at the (former) Lenin Library in Moscow to consult published sources on my topic. To study cinefication at the lower administrative levels, I chose the example of Riazan Administrative Region (oblast). In June 2003, May 2004, and November 2003, I worked at the Riazan State Archive (GARO) and the former Riazan Party archive, where I was able to consult and make copies of many records of the Riazan Oblast Administration of Cinefication from the late 1920s to the late 1980s. I also consulted Riazan central and regional newspapers of the 1920s through the 1960s to get further information on film exhibition and audience reaction.

In order to explore the cinefication of Riazan oblast from the point of view of its reception, I organized a one-week research trip in the Riazan countryside in the summer of 2004 to gather information on the memory of cinefication and film viewing in this province. The research team was composed of Dr. Tracy McDonald, a specialist of the Soviet peasantry and Riazan region in particular (McMaster University), journalist and cameraman Alexander Gershtein (Toronto), Riazan local historian Alexander Nikitin and the late deputy head of the Riazan State Archive, Andrei Mel’nik. About 12 hours of filmed interviews were then used in the making of a documentary film, entitled The Province of Lost Film. A first cut of the film was completed in 2005 and premiered at a film festival in Riazan. A definitive version was completed in 2008 and screened at film festivals and other venues in Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Central Asia.

To expand the study of Soviet cinefication beyond European Russia, I have started a project on film distribution and exhibition in the Central-Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. The fact that Kyrgyzstan is a multi-ethnic state, in which the Kyrgyz represent less than 70 percent of the population and whose semi-nomadic heritage is part of its socio-political profile until the present day, makes it a microcosm of (former Soviet) Central Asia. The material and technical difficulties that cinefication had to overcome is exemplified by the specific conditions in which it had to be conducted: to bring Soviet “civilization” to Kyrgyzstan, celluloid had to tread along the tortuous paths of the ancient silk road, over a rugged terrain covered by about 95 percent of the Tian Shan mountain range. Thanks to a team of archival researchers that I have been able to organize in Bishkek, I have identified the presence of a wealth of archival files regarding the cinefication of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. I will organize my research on the same two-pronged model of the Riazan part of my project by adding oral interviews to the archival findings and producing a documentary. By integrating documentary film making into an archive-based history, my project aims at bringing this history alive and at making it relevant for scholars and the general public, including those viewers who continue to live within the legacy of “cinefication.”