V. I.

Lenin

The People’s Commissariat for Education should organise the supervision of
all film showings and systematise this business. All films shown in the
R.S.F.S.R. should be registered and numbered at the Commissariat for
Education. A definite proportion should be fixed for every film-showing
programme:

a) entertainment films, specially for advertisement or income (of
course, without obscenity and counter-revolution) and

b) under the heading “From the life of peoples of all
countries”—pictures with a special propaganda message, such as:
Britain’s colonial policy in India, the work of the League of Nations, the
starving Berliners, etc., etc. Besides films, photographs of propaganda interest
should be shown with appropriate subtitles. The privately owned cinemas should
be made to yield a sufficient return to the state in the form of rent, the
owners to be allowed to increase the number of films and present new ones
subject to censor ship by the Commissariat for Education and provided the proper
proportion is maintained between entertainment films and propaganda films coming
under the heading of films “From the life of peoples of all
countries”, in order that film-makers should have an incentive for
producing new pictures. They should be allowed wide initiative within these
limits. Pictures of a propaganda and educative nature should be checked by old
Marxists and writers, to avoid a repetition of the many sad instances when
propaganda with us defeated its own purpose. Special attention should be given to
organising film showings in the villages and in the East, where they are
novelties and where our propaganda, therefore, will be all the more effective. [1]

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Notes:
[1]
The Managing Department of the C.P.C. forwarded this document to the
Commissariat for Education on January 27, 1922, with the following
covering letter: “I am sending you for guidance Vladimir Ilyich’s
directives on the film business.” The Commissariat for Education was
instructed:

“1) On the basis of these directives to draw up a programme of action and
forward it immediately to the Managing Department of the C.P.C. for report
to Vladimir Ilyich.

2) To submit to the Managing Department of the C.P.C. within one month a
report on what has actually been done in pursuance of these directives and
what results have been achieved.

3) To immediately report what functions have been retained by the
Commissariat for Education after the promulgation of the last decision of
the Council of Labour and Defence on the film business and who is directly
in charge of the performance of these functions” (Central Party Archives,
Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C. of the C.P.S.U.).

In a conversation, with A. V. Lunacharsky in February 1922 Lenin “once
more stressed the necessity of establishing a definite proportion between
entertainment films and scientific films”. Vladimir Ilyich, Lunacharsky
writes in his reminiscences, said that the production of new films imbued
with communist ideas and reflecting Soviet realities should be started with
newsreel, since, in his opinion, the time had not yet come for the production of such
films. “If you have a good newsreel, serious and enlightening pictures, it
doesn’t really matter if you show some worthless film with them of a more
or less usual type to attract the public. A censorship, of course, will be
needed. Counter-revolutionary and immoral films should be barred.” To this
Lenin added: “As you find your feet, what with proper handling of the
business, and receive certain loans to carry on, depending on the general
improvement in the country’s position, you will have to expand production,
and particularly make headway with useful films among the masses in the
cities, and still more in the countryside.... You must remember always that
of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema” ( Sovietskoye Kino No. 1-2, 1933, p. 10).