Cine-atlas of the USSR": the history of the project

The article explores the project "Cine-atlas of the USSR" unprecedented in Soviet history - the creation of a series of documentary films about the peoples and territories of the country for use in the education system. Initiated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party as a visual construct of a new country on the screen, the project was carried out by the combined forces of scientists and filmmakers. At the turn of the 1920's - 1930's. Soviet film production was actively associated with the design of visual images of regions that allowed viewers to make a movie tour of their "own" and "foreign" territory. Working on the "sixth part of the land", the Soviet cinematographers created memorable images of a huge country, characterized by regional and ethnic diversity. Their activities were also connected with the "popularization" of remote and unknown territories in the mass consciousness of Soviet citizens. The series "Cine-Atlas" were designed to be an effective tool for attracting labor from the whole of the USSR in order to develop its remote regions. Realizing the analysis of archival data, the author of the article reveals parallels in cinematography and Soviet national policy of the designated period. Based on the illustrative example of the work of director A. Litvinov, who played a significant role in the production of Soviet film culture films, the article deals with the construction of the image of the Soviet Chukotka on the screen. A meaningful analysis of the film shows that A. Litvinov, shot in the framework of the "Cinema Atlas of the USSR" project, creates an image of the bordering north-eastern region undergoing socialist transformations in the "Off the Shores of the Chukchi Sea" A. Litvinov. In fact, Chukotka in the film appears as a territory organically included in the Soviet cultural space. Creativity A. Litvinov, thus, clearly demonstrates that the task of Soviet cinema in the 1930s. was associated with the conceptual and discursive development of frontier territories and the imaginative "construction" of a new Soviet state in the public consciousness. However, despite the external interest of the scientific and cinematographic workshops in the creation of the "Cine-Atlas of the USSR", in practice everything did not look so synchronous. The experience of real production of films for the project "Cine-Atlas of the USSR", as the aforementioned example of Litvinov's work, was isolated. By the early 1930's. the declared interdepartmental party-scientific-cinematographic production scheme was never established, which critically affected the viability of the current project "Cine-Atlas of the USSR". In addition to production difficulties, one of the main reasons for the collapse of the "Cine-Atlas" was the fact that such a heavy project, designed for many years of implementation, could not keep up with the zigzags of the national policy of the USSR.

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