Page 83 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

64 THE ORIGINS OF SOVIET CINEMA: A STUDY IN INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
importation of new industrial items and requiring Russia to survive on its economic
inheritance from the pre-Revolutionary era. Although some industrialisation had
taken place under the last tsars, many vital factories and railways suffered damage
during the Civil War and production dropped to less than half the levels before the
First World War. The only course available to the new government was to ration
resources during the crisis and to postpone any sustained rebuilding effort until
such time as the political situation stabilised. But even rationing efforts suffered
from the government’s limited authority. Many regions remained under the control
of the White Guards and even areas under Red Army occupation answered more
to local Party and military units than to the Kremlin. During the period of political
chaos, most working decisions were made at the local level by the various Soviets
of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the local governing bodies which
derived from the Party’s old cellular organisation and which often operated without
orders from Moscow. 7
These conditions prevented Lenin from establishing any integrated, national
economic plan. He resorted to pragmatic emergency measures grouped under the
umbrella term ‘nationalisation’, although, as practised, this term represented
something of a misnomer. The term applied to any public takeover of private
assets, whether at the national or local level. Usually, in fact, the initiatives were
taken by local officials, often the local Soviets of Deputies, and Moscow only
ratified the expropriations after the fact. Nationalisation often resulted from
accusations of sabotage, from the refusal of particular capitalists to co-operate with
the local Soviet of Deputies, or from a desire to let public authorities manage
limited resources as a means of preventing hoarding and waste. The policy
remained one of reaction rather than systematic action and betrayed the regime’s
lack of power. 8
Such pragmatism obtained in early efforts to manage the film industry.
Bolshevik leaders agreed that cinema could prove a useful propaganda and
educational tool, a conviction that Lenin, for example, developed during his exile in
the West. But the Party established no clear, long-range agenda on how to develop
the film industry; nor was the integration of cinema into the national education
system sufficiently outlined. The film industry that had been inherited from the
tsarist period showed little promise of renewal as a national institution. Its
production activity was centred almost entirely in Moscow, and distribution and
exhibition facilities extended barely beyond the urban centres of European Russia.
Lenin hoped that cinema would have its greatest utility in remote rural areas where
literacy levels were lowest, but few villages contained exhibition facilities or any
tradition of cinema. More ominous was the fact that no factories survived for the
manufacture of cameras, projectors, printers, or film stock. Pre-Revolutionary film
companies had simply relied on importation of materials through Western Europe,
and heavy French and German investment in tsarist Russia encouraged such
dependency. But the severing of trade routes, first by the World War and then by
the anti-Soviet blockade, cut off the supply. As the Russian movie industry