June 13: Establishment of Sovkino, the Soviet film monopoly
On June 13, 1924, the Soviet authorities established the Sovkino joint-stock company, a state-owned entity that, within a few months, transformed cinema from a market with private players into a centralized monopoly. It controlled everything from filming to distribution, from script censorship to the import of foreign films.
The Private Film Market and Why Sovkino Was Needed
By 1924, the Soviet film market was saturated with private cinemas and distributors. Goskino, Sovkino's predecessor, had little to offer: it had nationalized archival film stock (of which no more than a dozen films were released), defunct film studios, and a single cinema.
Monopoly in six months
Initially, Sovkino competed with private enterprises, but within six months it had secured a monopoly. It controlled four film factories and 22 production units, including film and photo equipment manufacturers, movie theaters, mobile film projectors, and photo studios. Private capital was driven out of the industry by high taxes and limited access to film.
Sovkino also absorbed the former Goskino, becoming both a state-owned company and a state governing body. Its responsibilities include pre-screening of scripts and a monopoly on the import of foreign films. Shareholders include the Supreme Council of the National Economy (15%), the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade (30%), and the People's Commissariat of Education and the Leningrad and Moscow Provincial Executive Committees (55%).
Cinema as a propaganda tool
In its first nine months of operation, Sovkino earned a million rubles in profit. However, the party leadership was dissatisfied with the quality of its films from the very beginning. In 1928–1929 alone, Sovkino released 70 full-length feature films, plus 66 "political-educational" shorts and 97 newsreels.
Among them was the documentary "Solovki," which became Soviet propaganda's response to the Western publication of memoirs by former prisoners. The Sovkino brochure for the film stated:
The film is the first to depict the entirely new forms of "punishment" for criminals employed by the Soviet government, which so astonish foreigners. It vividly demonstrates that even counterrevolutionaries and bandits find themselves in conditions that so-called "political" prisoners could not even dream of in Tsarist times.
The Sovkino era also saw the release of Abram Room's "Jews on Earth" (scripted by Vladimir Mayakovsky, among others) as a response to the first wave of anti-Semitism, as well as the first Soviet full-length animated film, "China on Fire" (1925). Other famous films include "The Palace and the Fortress," "House in the Snowdrifts," and "October" ("Ten Days That Shook the World") by Sergei Eisenstein.
Sunset and the Heirs
Sovkino existed for exactly six years, until June 1930. Its closure marked the transition from NEP policies to strict state planning. Party leaders were dissatisfied with the low quality of films, the large percentage of banned films (according to reports, up to 50%), and the failure of the "filmification of the village."
The story of Eisenstein's film "The General Line" is indicative: it documented the poverty and backwardness of the village, was censored, renamed "Old and New" on Stalin's personal orders, and in 1930 was removed from the screen as "ideologically erroneous."
After the liquidation of Sovkino, its successors were the First State Film Factory (later Mosfilm) and the Soyuzkino factory (later Lenfilm).
