constantly jeering Polish and East German competitors. Since 1952, when the USSR first participated in the Olympic games, government officials recognized how gold, silver, and bronze medals
The Olympic flag is carried out of the Lenin Stadium at the closing ceremony of the 1980 summer Olympic Games. © BETTMANN/CORBIS might be translated into propaganda achievements for the nation.
Some of the notable individual achievements of the games included gymnast Nadia Comaneci of Romania winning two medals; Soviet swimmer Vladimir Salnikov becoming the first to break fifteen minutes in the 1,500 meters; Teofilo Stevenson, a Cuban boxer, becoming the first boxer to win three gold medals in his division; Soviet gymnast Alexander Dityatin winning eight medals; Miruts Yifter of Ethiopia winning the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs in track; and Britain’s Sebastian Coe outkicking countryman Steve Ovett in the 1,500 run. At the closing ceremony, it was said that the mascot of the Moscow Olympics, Misha the Bear, had a tear in his eye. See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH; SPORTS POLICY; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
971
Hulme, Derick L. (1990). The Political Olympics: Moscow, Afghanistan, and the 1980 U.S. Boycott. New York: Praeger.
Lenin. This statement, whether apocryphal or not, became the motto of the Soviet motion picture industry. Because of the central part the movies played in Soviet propaganda, the motion picture industry had an enormous impact on culture, society, and politics.
Seventeenth-century Cossack and explorer of Russia’s Pacific coast.
The Cossack adventurer Ivan Yurievich Mosk-vitin was one of the many explorers and frontiersmen who took part in the great push eastward that transformed Siberia during the reigns of tsars Mikhail (1613-1645) and Alexei (1645-1676).
In 1639 Moskvitin left Yakutsk at the head of a squadron of twenty Cossacks, seeking to confirm the existence of what local natives called the “great sea-ocean.” Proceeding east, then southward, Moskvitin encountered the mountains of the Jug-Jur Range, which forms a barrier separating the Siberian interior from the Pacific coastline. Moskvitin threaded his way through the mountains by following the Maya, Yudoma, and Ulya river basins.
Tracing the Ulya to its mouth brought Moskvitin to the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. He and his men were therefore the first Russians to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. The party also built a fortress at the mouth of the Ulya, Russia’s first Pacific outpost. Until 1641, Moskvitin charted much of the Okhotsk shoreline. Mapping an overland route to the eastern coast and establishing a presence there were key moments in Russia’s expansion into Siberia and Asia. See also: EXPLORATION; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.
The statement “Cinema is for us the most important of all arts” has been attributed to Vladimir
The moving picture age began in Russia on May 6, 1896, at the Aquarium amusement park in St. Petersburg. By summer of that year, the novelty was a featured attraction at the popular provincial trading fairs. Until 1908, however, the vast majority of movies shown in Russia were French. That year, Alexander Drankov (1880-1945), a portrait photographer and entrepreneur, opened the first Russian owned and operated studio, in St. Petersburg. His inaugural picture, Stenka Razin, was a great success and inspired other Russians to open studios.
By 1913, Drankov had been overshadowed by two Russian-owned production companies, Khan-zhonkov and Thiemann amp; Reinhardt. These were located in Moscow, the empire’s Hollywood. The outbreak of war in 1914 proved an enormous boon to the fledgling Russian film industry, since distribution paths were cut, making popular French movies hard to come by. (German films were forbidden altogether.) By 1916 Russia boasted more than one hundred studios that produced five hundred pictures. The country’s four thousand movie theaters entertained an estimated 2 million spectators daily.
Until 1913 most Russian films were newsreels and travelogues. The few fiction films were mainly adaptations of literary classics, with some historical costume dramas. The turning point in the development of early Russian cinema was The Keys to Happiness (1913), directed by Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) and Vladimir Gardin (1881- 1945) for the Thiemann amp; Reinhardt studio. This full-length melodrama, based on a popular novel, was the legendary blockbuster of the time.
Although adaptations of literary classics remained popular with Russian audiences, the contemporary melodrama was favored during the war years. The master of the genre was Yevgeny Bauer (1865-1917). Bauer’s complex psychological portraits, technical innovations, and painterly cinematic style raised Russian cinema to new levels of artistry. Bauer worked particularly well with actresses and made Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919) a legend. Bauer’s surviving films-which include
MOTION PICTURES
Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), Child of the Big City (1914), Silent Witnesses (1914), Children of the Age (1915), The Dying Swan (1916), and To Happiness (1917)-provide a vivid picture of a lost Russia.
The revolutionary year 1917 brought joy and misgiving to filmmakers. Political, economic, and social instability shuttered most theaters by the beginning of 1918. Studios began packing up and moving south to Yalta, to escape Bolshevik control. By 1920, Russia’s filmmakers were on the move again, to Paris, Berlin, and Prague. Russia’s great actor Ivan Mozzhukhin (1890-1939, known in France as “Mosjoukine”) was one of few who enjoyed as much success abroad as at home.
The first revolutionary film committees formed in 1918, and on August 27, 1919, the Bolshevik government nationalized the film industry, placing it under the control of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. Nationalization represented wishful thinking at best, since Moscow’s movie companies had already decamped, dismantling everything that could be carried.
Filmmaking during the Civil War of 1917-1922 took place under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Lenin was acutely aware of the importance of disseminating the Bolshevik message to a largely illiterate audience as quickly as possible, yet film stock and trained cameramen were in short supply- not to mention projectors and projectionists. Apart from newsreels, the early Bolshevik repertory consisted of “agit-films,” short, schematic, but exciting political messages. Films were brought to the provinces on colorfully decorated agit-trains, which carried an electrical generator to enable the agitki to be projected on a sheet. Innovations like these enabled Soviet cinema to rise from the ashes of the former Russian film industry, leading eventually to the formation of Goskino, the state film trust, in 1922 (reorganized as Sovkino in 1924).
Since most established directors, producers, and actors had already fled central Russia for territories controlled by the White armies, young men and women found themselves rapidly rising to positions of prominence in the revolutionary cinema. They were drawn to film as “the art of the future.” Many of them had some experience in theater production, but Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), who had begun his cinematic career with the great prerevo- lutionary director Bauer, led the way, though he was still a teenager.
Poster advertising the 1925 Soviet film Strike. © SWIM INK/ CORBIS
By the end of the civil war, most of Soviet Russia’s future filmmakers had converged on Moscow. Many of them (Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and their “collectives”) were connected to the Proletkult theater, where they debated and dreamed.
Because film stock was carefully rationed until the economy recovered in 1924, young would-be directors had to content themselves with rehearsing the experiments they hoped to film and writing combative theoretical essays
