At the tail end of the 2022/23 academic year, we were able to buy access to East View’s Early Soviet Cinema Collection, which provides digitised copies of 119 books published between 1897 and 1948.  At the moment, there are only very brief author/title records for most of these but current University members can browse them all directly on the East View platform.

“Soviet” can often mean Russian, rather than anything more representative of the Soviet Union; that’s largely the case here.  But while the collection is fully russophone, there is at least some diversity in terms of subject matter, as an examination of the collection’s contents show when looking in particular for coverage of the hugely important Ukrainian film industry.

The 1926 Sovetskoe kino na pod”eme, for example, has a chapter on VUFKU (the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration) and also others on Georgian and Azerbaijani cinema.  After dipping into a few individual titles, I realised that their contents had been OCR-ed which means that text searching is a possibility.  That said, it’s important to note that some of the digitisations themselves are not in great shape and hard even for the human eye to read comfortably, meaning that the OCR software would really struggle with them.

Bearing in mind, then, the limitations, it is certainly worth trying the search function.  I found that searching for украинс (the first letters of the word Ukrainian in Russian) within a single book would work, but came up with no results when looking across the whole collection.  Thankfully, I discovered that adding an askerisk at the end, ie украинс*,  did work.

This search done across the collection came up with 26 books.  I’ve given them their direct links (via Cambridge authentication) to the East View platform.

• Kino-spravochnik / Boltianskii, Grigorii Moiseevich (Tea-Kino-Pechat’ 1929)
• Iskusstvo oktiabr’skoi epokhi / Tugendkhol’d, IAkov Aleksandrovich (Academia 1930)
• Sovetskoe kino na pod”eme / Syrtsov, S.; Kurs, A. (Kinopechat’ 1926)
• Piat’ let Vserabisa : istoricheskii ocherk : 1919-1924 (Izdanie “Vestnika rabotnikov iskusstv” 1924)
• Lenin, Stalin, partiia o kino / Lebedev, N. (Iskusstvo 1938)
• Kino-khronika i kak ee snimat’ / Boltianskii, Grigorii Moiseevich (Kinopechat’ 1926)
• Dukh fil’my / Balash, Bela (Goslitizdat, Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1935)
• Dramaturgiia : kino : stsenarii / Zarkhi, Natan Abramovich (Iskusstvo 1937)
• Grafika M. A. Kirnarskogo / Gollerbakh, Erikh Fedorovich (Vremia 1928)
• Molodezh’ sovetskogo kino (Goskinoizdat 1938)
• Kino-rabota v derevne / Katsigras, Aleksandr Ivanovich (Kinopechat’ 1926)
• Kino na kul’turnom fronte / Trainin, Il’ia Pavlovich (Tea-Kino-Pechat’ 1928)
• Kino i kommunisticheskoe vospitanie molodezhi / Balandin, V.; Davydkin, N. (Izdatel’stvo Upravleniia kinofikatsii RSFSR 1933)
• Puti kino : pervoe vsesoiuznoe partiinoe soveshchanie po kinematografii / Ol’khovyi, B. S. (Tea-Kino-Pechat’ 1929)
• Praktika kinorezhissury / Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich (Goslitizdat, Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1935)
• Pervye gody russkoi kinopromyshlennosti : vospominaniia / Khanzhonkov, Aleksandr Alekseevich (Iskusstvo 1937)
• Obshchii kurs kinematografii : rukovodstvo kinoliubitelia. Tom III . Anoshchenko, Nikolai Dmitrievich (Teakinopechat’ 1930)
• Sovetskoe kino pered litsom obshchestvennosti : sbornik diskussionnykh statei / Mal’tsev, K. (Tea-Kino-Pechat’ 1928)
• Sovetskii istoricheskii fil’m : sbornik statei / Veisman, E. (Goskinoizdat 1939)
• Puti masterstva : stat’i i doklady / Shumiatskii, Boris Zakharovich (Kinofotoizdat 1935)

I’ll be working on the records for the collection over the next month and will concentrate on these 26 first.  The ones I’ll leave to the end are books about non-Soviet film-makers and stars, which number quite a remarkable few.  Across the whole collection, there will be occasional overlaps with our existing physical holdings, thanks in particular to the wonderful Catherine Cooke collection, but the East View purchase should definitely be a boon to Film Studies students and researchers.

Mel Bach