The Soviet Documentary and Cold War Propaganda

Denise J. Youngblood, University of Vermont

Introduction

Cinema, which Vladimir Lenin famously dubbed the “most important of the arts,” played a major role in the USSR since the film industry was nationalized in 1919. Its impact on world cinema is also noteworthy; Soviet avant-garde filmmaking and film theory in the 1920s – especially the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Alexander Dovzhenko – influenced European and American cinema in myriad ways and resulted in numerous books and articles in many languages. Scholarly attention to the rest of Soviet cinema has, however, been intermittent, especially for the documentary, where full-length studies are almost non-existent, even in Russia.

There are a few exceptions. Dziga Vertov’s non-fiction feature films have garnered considerable notice from scholars for their artistic significance, and there are a few more general works on early Soviet documentaries. However, apart from Erik Barnouw’s brief acknowledgement of a few Soviet wartime documentaries in his classic history of the documentary, there is almost nothing else. Given the well-known interest in Soviet cinema by pioneering Western documentarists like John Grierson, Joris Ivens, and Walter Ruttman, as well as the political importance of the documentary in the USSR, this gap is more than a a bit odd.

Therefore, despite the importance of documentary film propaganda to the Cold War, there is nothing to read in English about Soviet documentaries and their contributions to reinforcing ideology in the expanding communist world. This makes the Socialism on Film series, which emphasizes documentaries, invaluable. The series provides a treasure trove of research material to scholars and students with important research material on the Soviet exercise of “soft power” during the Cold War that is virtually unknown outside the former USSR and its satellite states. In the following pages, I shall first provide a brief historical survey of the Soviet documentary through World War II, followed by an overview of the Cold War context and its effects on Soviet documentary production, and finally, a short analysis of the films and themes in the series and what they reveal about communist propaganda in the Cold War world.

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