In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. The task of the new regime, and of the media that served it, was to reshape the old world in revolutionary form, to transform the vast, "ungraspable" space of the Russian Empire into the mapped territory of the Soviet Union. This book shows how Soviet cinema encouraged popular support for state initiatives in the years between the revolution and the Second World War, helping to create a new Russian identity and territory—an "imaginary geography" of Sovietness.

Drawing on a vast range of little-known texts, Emma Widdis offers a unique cultural history of the early Soviet period. In particular, she shows how films projected the new Soviet map onto the great shared screen of the popular imagination.