Page 87 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

68 THE ORIGINS OF SOVIET CINEMA: A STUDY IN INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
construction projects. Low-cost portable cinemas provided the answer. The agit-
train, that ingenious Bolshevik institution for taking cinema and revolutionary
culture into the countryside, owed much to economic necessity. The strategy of
equipping trains with portable projectors and generators pre-dated the October
Revolution, but it was also consistent with the War Communism practice of
making maximum use of inherited resources. The Russian rail system had been
considerably expanded by the last tsars and proved central to the Bolshevik
exercise of power. Lenin put high priority on maintaining the rail system, partly out
of military necessity (since the Red Army used trains to move troops to strategic
locations). The same rail system also allowed the government to take propaganda
into areas where popular support was deemed crucial. Trains equipped with old
projectors carried Soviet-made documentaries and Bolshevik spokesmen into such
regions and served the regime’s propaganda needs without requiring substantial
new capital. 20
The strategy adhered to throughout War Communism–if one could call such
hasty, reactive measures a strategy–was to locate and gain control over whatever
assets were available and to use them as efficiently as possible. The liquidity of the
film industry and the limitations of Bolshevik power complicated such efforts. As
with many other industries, sustained expansion would have to wait until the Red
Army had finished its work.

NEP AND CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
With the end of the Civil War and the subsequent consolidation of Bolshevik
power, the pragmatic tactics of War Communism gave way to the systematic
recovery efforts of the early NEP period. Sometimes mistakenly characterised as
a retreat from socialism, NEP’s market economy was recognised by Party officials
as a necessary transitional phase of economic development, one that would lead to
considerable capital accumulation.
NEP returned many previously nationalised enterprises to the private sector
and encouraged competition. The government retained crucial industries such as
transportation and mining and leased other concerns back to private
entrepreneurs; in fact, many of those nationalised facilities had remained idle or
operated below capacity and thus represented a drain on public funds. The
government counted on private enterprise to revive such operations; by 1923 it had
permitted 75 per cent of the nation’s trade to revert to private hands. 21
One method the government developed to retain some influence in this
expanded private sector was the industry ‘trust’ system. One or more government
trusts, large semi-private companies, were organised in each industry in such a
way that they tended to dominate without monopolising the industry’s market.
They were designed to wield sufficient financial power to set standards of
production, wages and prices that other firms would follow. The trusts represented
a compromise between public and private commerce: the government oversaw their
operation, but the trusts had to operate on a self-sustaining basis, generating