Not long after brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière projected moving pictures on a screen for their fellow Parisians in 1895 cinema became one of the most important and one of the most dominant art forms shaping much of popular culture in the twentieth century. Among the first to recognize the power of cinema both as an art form and as a tool of political propaganda was none other than the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Vladimir Lenin. His famous quip to the People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1922 that “of all the arts for us cinema is the most important” would go on to become a policy cornerstone resulting in the proliferation of cinema halls throughout the Soviet Union.

The attendance in these halls would remain one of the highest anywhere in the world up until the collapse of the USSR. With masses of captivated and quite literally captive audiences, cinema and the cinematic vocabulary would become weaponized as potent new vehicles of propaganda and messaging, shaping the population’s perception of the social, political, and cultural realities. Virtually every Soviet citizen, regardless of his or her educational background or social status, would be susceptible to the allure of the moving images on the screen.

Aside from the propaganda aspects, early Soviet cinema was truly pioneering, even revolutionary. Some of the most influential film directors and theorists in world cinema operated in the Soviet Union, laying out the foundations of modern cinema and creating some of the most lasting cinematic masterpieces in history. East View’s Early Soviet Cinema Collection contains 116 books published between 1928-1948, the Golden Age of Soviet cinema. They contain works by such renowned film theorists as Lev Kuleshov, Bela Balash, Rudolf Garms, Efraim Lemberg, Natan Zarkhi and others, covering a slew of topics that range from the role of women in cinema to the role of cinema in the creation of a communist society.

The Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics offers the most comprehensive reference work on Slavic languages ever published, with some 400 articles. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the Slavic language family from its Indo-European origins to the present day, as well as consideration of the interaction of Slavic with other languages.

East View has assembled a selection of e-books on hundreds of topics from premier scholarly publishers in Russia, Ukraine, and more. Users can search within individual works or whole collections and can cross-search between collections. Within the Slavic and Judaica E-book Collection, the Library of Congress has access to thousands of e-books from Russia spanning several decades, subject areas, and publishers. This collection also includes e-books from Belarus and Ukraine.

Some of the earliest casualties of revolutions are the ideological and institutional foundations of the political order that legitimated the ancien régime, the old form of government with its established political and socio-economic power relations. Identified by Bolshevik revolutionaries as enablers of centuries-long Tsarist malfeasance, religion and religious institutions were additionally considered to be obstructionists of scientific progress, veritable peddlers of ancient superstitions. Thus, the eradication of religion would be elevated into policy shortly after the 1917 Revolution. Although the destruction of churches, mosques, and synagogues would in practical terms curtail public religiosity, it did not guarantee neither radical nor wholesale change in people’s perceptions of the world in which they lived. The matter of changing people’s worldviews, therefore, was left to propagandists and the radically rethought educational system. The result of these policy and educational changes was the launching of the vicious anti-religious propaganda campaigns of the early 1920s and 1930s, which saw the publication of hundreds of books, newspapers, and popular magazines aimed at the complete ideological overhaul of the USSR. Comprised of nearly 281 books, East View’s Russian Anti-Religious Books After the Revolution Digital Archive is a treasure trove of these early propaganda efforts, containing some of the most important and influential works of anti-religious literature. Full-text searchable and cross-searchable with other e-content from East View the collection is a valuable resource for historians of the Soviet Union, religious studies, and secularization.