ABSTRACT
Among scholars in the field of cinema who do not study the Soviet film specifically, a myth seems to persist. Many still believe that the Soviet government’s 1919 decree nationalizing the cinema industry automatically meant that the Government undertook to subsidize film production fully. Lunacharsky’s universally quoted attribution to Lenin of the comment that the cinema was, for the Soviets, the most important of the arts has come to imply that the State put a high priority on supplying the industry’s needs. In this view, the slow recovery of the industry after the Revolution, and even the existence of the montage movement, become attributable primarily to the lack of raw stock and equipment caused by the flight of pre-revolutionary producers and to the hardships of the Civil War period.
