THE SOVIET CINEMA
43
richness of this period's production. Perhaps the most indicative is
that at the beginning of 1925 only 14% of the films being exhibited
in the Soviet Union were native products. A year later, 50% were
Soviet-made.
14
Some of the major productions may also be mentioned.
Eisenstein in 1925 released
Potemkin,
in 1927
October
(released in
this country as
Ten Days that Shook the World),
in 1929
The Gen–
eral Line (Old and New).
Pudovkin in 1926 released
Mother;
in 1927
St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad (The End of St. Petersburg),
in
1928 The Heir of Ghengis Khan (Storm Over Asia).
Kozintsev and
Trauberg in 1927 released
The Union of the Great Cause,
in 1929
The
New Babylon.
Vertov in 1926 released
One Sixth of the Earth,
in 1928
The Eleventh Year
and
The Man with a Camera.
A.
Dovzhenko, the
Ukrainian director, entering the movies late (1925) won a place beside
Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In 1927 he released
,(venigora,
in 1929
The
Only Arsenal (Arsenal).
Besides the work of these masters, there were
many single films of the greatest interest, such as: Esther Shub's
The Downfall of the Romanov Dynasty,
Alexander Room's
Three
in a Basement (Bed and Sofa)
and
The Ghost That Never Returns,
Victor Turin's
Turksib,
Ermler's
Fragment of an Empire,
Protazanov's
The White Ea[!.le (The Lash of the Czar),
and Ilya Trauberg's
The
Blue Express (China Express) .
For most of this period, the NEP was in force, and the domi–
nance of the Stalin group was still contested by the other Bolshevik
leaders. In this temporary relaxation of political and economic pres–
sure, with War Communism over and the Stalin dictatorship still to
begin,
the cinema had its brief but intense flowering. Even after the
Stalin clique liquidated the opposition and seized complete control of
the State apparatus in 1928, the effects were not immediately felt in
the cinema. The great silent directors were in the middle of some of
their most important films and their international prestige was so
enormous that even the bureaucracy trod warily- at first. And so,
although literature was handed over to RAPP in 1928, not until the
spring of 1930 was any systematic attempt made to bring the cinema
to heel.
The Iron Age
If
1925-1929 was the Golden Age of the Russian cinema, 1930-
1932 was its Iron Age. This was the period of "Military Stalinism,"
so to speak, when all the nation's resources, human and material, were
conscripted to be hurled against the one great objective: fulfillment of
the first Five Year Plan. There was forcible collectivization in agri–
culture and forcible proletarianization in the arts. The movies were
speedily harnessed to the wheels of the Plan. The bureaucracy requi-
