Notes on the Soviet Nationalisation of the Film Industry in Ukraine (1919-21)

Author

Ivan Kozlenko

Abstract

The article uncovers the process of Soviet nationalisation of the film industry in Ukraine during 1919-1921, unfolding against the backdrop of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. Exploring the confusing legislation on film nationalisation adopted by local Bolshevik authorities, the author argues that the process of putting the Ukrainian film industry under state control had its local specifics that reflected the challenges of gaining power by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine. The decree “On the Nationalisation of the Cinema Industry”, previously considered to be a starting point for Soviet film history, proved to be irrelevant for Ukraine. The nationalisation process took years to legislate and implement, and even despite that, some part of the Ukrainian film exhibition remained in private hands up to 1928.

Keywords

Aleksandr Khanzhonkov, Joseph Ermolieff, Pavlo Nechesa, Mykhailo Kapchyns’kyi, Ukraine, Ukrainian People’s Republic, Russian Empire, VUFKU, Mirograph, cinema, nationalisation, expropriation, confiscation, early cinema, production studies.

Introduction

For decades, the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, "On the Nationalisation of the Cinema Industry" (dated August 27, 1919), was designated in Soviet historiography as the starting point of Soviet film history.¹ Appropriated by Western academia, this narrative has been mechanically extended to all Soviet republics, even though before the signing of the Union Treaty on December 29, 1922, the Ukrainian SSR de jure was an independent socialist state with its own legislation.

This was a continuation of nationalisation policies in different spheres that the Bolsheviks had launched in Russia immediately after seizing power: finance (December 1917), maritime trade (January 1918), foreign trade (April 1918), railroads (April 1918) and ultimately, large industry (June 1918). While the banking system and railways were declared state monopolies, the Decree on the Nationalisation of Large Industry prescribed that nationalised enterprises "are recognised as being in rent-free use of the previous owners” (Dekrety 1959: 502-503). The same approach was partly applied to the soon-to-be-nationalised film industry in Ukraine.

The process of the transfer of film production and distribution to the ownership of the state or its executive bodies in Ukraine took place in a specific way, different from what happened in Russia and, therefore, should be studied separately.

The question of the nationalisation of film production on the territory of Ukraine,² where in the big cities – the key film production centres³ – the authorities changed at least ten times during the period 1918-1920 alone, cannot be considered separately from the history of the Ukrainian War of Independence and what has traditionally been called the ‘Russian Civil War’. Unlike European Russia, where Bolshevik power lasted continuously from 1918 onwards, in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks succeeded in installing their control only on the third attempt and in the form of a de jure independent Soviet state, meeting the expectations of the local political and cultural elites, who did not want to accept the restoration of empire in any form. The successive Ukrainian Soviet puppet governments,⁴ the majority of whose members were not even from Ukraine,⁵ did not have time to gain a foothold in the occupied territories before they were immediately expelled by either German-Austrian, Ukrainian, or Denikin’s armies.

The first two iterations of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic were so short-lived that they could not pursue any durable state policies, serving de facto as the coordination centres of the scattered Bolshevik insurgent committees. The third Bolshevik government, known as the Council of People’s Commissars, proclaimed an independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in March 1919 and entered into a military-economic interstate union with the RSFSR on December 28, 1920.⁶ Both states became the founding members of the USSR on December 29, 1922.

In 1919, chaos and the erosion of power reached their climax in Ukraine. During the German-Austrian occupation, grass-root rebel militias emerged. Led by local commanders, these militias undermined any efforts by the newly established regular armies of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Armed Forces of South Russia to ultimately seize power in Ukraine, control over which was alternately switching from one side to the other. The front sometimes arose not as a result of military offensives but due to crossovers of the commanders, who alternately attached the territories under their control to the newly proclaimed states.

Nevertheless, in 1919, the active process of establishing Soviet policies in Ukraine began, including the policy of nationalisation of private property. Although the Kharkiv government of the Ukrainian SSR issued a number of decrees on the handover of various segments of the film and photo industry to state control, through most of 1919, its power did not extend to the major film production centres (Odesa and Crimea).

In practice, the process of ‘nationalisation’ was carried out on the ground by temporary Bolshevik military administrations in the form of requisition or expropriation⁷ as they captured the cities during hostilities or due to the Bolshevik-backed uprisings. Thus, for example, the Odesa-based Mirograph film studio was, surprisingly, brought under the control of the Southern-Western Railway Revolutionary Committee’s Culture and Education Department.

In most of these cities, however, by the time of the Bolshevik seizure, only the walls of the abandoned film studio pavilions and cinemas could be subject to nationalisation since the film companies took most of the movable film equipment with them when they fled West.

Thus, it is no wonder that the first decrees of the Ukrainian Soviet government on the ‘nationalisation’ of the film industry were aimed at major cinemas, in which projection equipment was unlikely to have survived. The Bolsheviks needed these premises to hold propaganda meetings, temporarily accommodate Soviet institutions, and so on.

Resolutions of the local authorities requiring the ‘registration’ of films and film equipment appeared later. But they did not include any mention of ‘nationalisation’ or even ‘requisition’. The resolutions mostly regulated the ‘handover’ of film facilities to the new Bolshevik authorities.

Each time the Bolsheviks were expelled from the occupied territories, the ‘nationalised’ film facilities were regained by their former owners, and some of them, such as the Odesa-based Kharitonov, Borisov and Mirograph studios, even resumed film production as late as autumn 1919 (Myslavs’kyi 2018: 197).

There was, therefore, no centralised, systematic process of bringing the film industry under state control in Ukraine until 1920, unlike in the Bolshevik-controlled territories of Russia. The ‘nationalisation’ process was chaotic, interrupted, carried out by various Soviet bodies, and often disregarded if they were even aware of each other’s existence. It was legislated by dozens of different documents,⁸ most of which could not even be implemented, given both the Bolsheviks’ inability to control the territories they claimed and the weakness of the newly established Soviet institutions.

When exploring the history of the nationalisation of film production in Ukraine, one must therefore distinguish between the processes of chaotic expropriations of private property, apparently carried out on the ground by different Bolshevik local authorities (sometimes legally justified but in some cases not), and nationalisation as targeted policy. It is also important to emphasise the massive resistance to such a policy, which doomed it to failure until Soviet power was ultimately and reliably established in mainland Ukraine in mid-1920 and Crimea in November 1920.

Historical Context

After the withdrawal of the German and Austro-Hungarian Armies from Ukraine in late November–December 1918, the Pavlo Skoropads’kyi monarchical Hetmanate Government was overturned by the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s (UPR) revolt (November 13–December 14, 1918).

Taking advantage of the unrest, on November 28, 1918, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine was proclaimed by Russian Bolsheviks in Kursk, over 150 km from the Ukrainian border. Its ‘Ukrainian Soviet Army’ entered Ukraine from the Northeast. Squeezing out Ukrainian forces from Left Bank Ukraine,⁹ the Bolsheviks occupied Kharkiv and Kyiv in January–February 1919, while Entente forces established themselves in Odesa. On April 7, 1919, the Entente contingent fled Odesa under attack by the troops of the Ukrainian ataman Nykyfor Hryhor'iev / Grigoriev, a UPR officer turned Bolshevik. 

On January 29, 1919, the Bolsheviks reorganised the Provisional Government into the Council of People’s Commissars of Ukraine. On March 10, 1919, the puppet Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed an independent state with the capital in Kharkiv. It held power over Left Bank Ukraine and its four major cities (and film production centres) Kyiv, Kharkiv, Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) and Odesa through the summer of 1919.

In the late summer of 1919, the Bolsheviks were ousted from Left Bank Ukraine by Denikin, while the UPR forces expanded their controlled territory on the Right Bank, reaching Kyiv on the same date as the Denikin Army (August 30, 1919). Therefore, in 1919, the Bolsheviks ruled Left Bank Ukraine and the Odesa region for only five to eight months: from January 3 to June 22 in Kharkiv, from February 5 to August 30 in Kyiv, and from April 7 to August 24 in Odesa. 

The Bolsheviks ultimately regained most of the territory of Ukraine during the winter of 1920,¹⁰ and entered Crimea in November 1920.

Legislation

Although Boris Shumiatskii declared in his 1934 article “The Soviet Cinematography Reports” (Shumiatskii 1934: 1) that the nationalisation of the film industry was completed by the end of December 1919, one should remember that by autumn 1919, the Bolsheviks controlled only Moscow, Petrograd and part of European Russia along the Volga river. By the time of the publication of Lenin’s decree on film industry nationalisation on September 2, 1919, the Bolsheviks had already withdrawn from Ukraine.

As the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was declared an independent Soviet state with its own Constitution, it had its own legislation system, not always replicating the Russian system. Thus, during the short period of Bolshevik control over Left Bank Ukraine and the Odesa region in 1919, their central (Kharkiv) and local governing bodies issued a series of decrees and resolutions on maintaining the different segments of film production and distribution. These included:

The Decrees of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine:

a) On the handover of all theatres and cinemas under the control of the Department of People’s Enlightenment from January 15;

The decree did not specify the list of properties or define the word “control” [ведение], which could mean both management and jurisdiction.

b) On the electric theatres from February 25, which declared Kharkiv’s three major cinemas – Ampir, Modern and Michel (including their equipment) – and all educational and kulturfilms the property of the Ukrainian SSR.

It is significant that the Decree of the Government claiming rights over the entire territory of mainland Ukraine was aimed at three specific cinemas in only one city, the capital. This reflects the actual scope of Bolshevik power in Ukraine in early 1919, which did not extend far beyond the Kharkiv region. As the text of the decree makes clear, the remaining Kharkiv cinemas, numbering several dozen, were not nationalised at this point.

On January 9, 1919, the Film Committee in charge of the ‘administration, management and supervision of the entire photo and film industry, film business and film art in the territory

of Ukraine’ was established as a body of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment’s Arts Department in Kharkiv.¹¹ In March, it was moved to Kyiv.¹²

The Resolutions of the Committee were:

a) On the recording and registration of the film and photo producing companies and their production means from March 28, which prescribed all film producers, film laboratories, studios, equipment and cinema owners to register their property at the Committee. It also obliged the owners of film stock to sell it to the state at a fixed price and to receive censorship approval for any film demonstration.

Although this Resolution included a detailed summary of film property to be handed over into the control [в веденье] of the Committee, it did not declare its ownership over it, while the requirement to sell the film stock to the state (i.e., requisition) obviously contradicted the policy of expropriation, which usually means the confiscation of property without any compensation. The owners did not seem to lose their property rights at this point (although they were now significantly limited) but were required to register their business and to manage it according to the new rules: “[the owners] are obliged to contact the All-Ukrainian Film Committee within two days to receive instructions on registering their equipment, further rental, sale and usage of it”.

b) On the prohibition of requisitioning the premises of electric theatres and other premises related to cinema and photography business from April 1.

The fact that some theatres and cinemas were subject to requisition supposedly in favour of other Soviet government entities (which follows from the text of the decree) shows that the Committee’s authority was questioned even by fellow Bolshevik governmental institutions.

c) On the prohibition of private filming of outdoor events, demonstrations, troop movement etc. from April 2.

The decree did not prohibit indoor filming, however, which enables us to assume that it was issued and applied for military censorship purposes.

Other Soviet agencies:

1. Film historian Volodymyr Myslavs’kyi (2018: 279) also mentions the Resolution on the prohibition of operation of private cinemas issued by the Ukrainian Soviet Economic Committee (Укрсовнархоз) on March 31, 1919.

2. The Odesa film studio¹³ today officially claims May 23, 1919, as its foundation date according to the Resolution of the regional Odesa Executive Committee that declared the ‘nationalisation’ of Kharitonov’s studios.¹⁴

3. The Resolution of the short-lived Crimea’s People Socialist Soviet Republic’s Council of Economy from April 1919 claimed the Khanzhonkov, Ermol’ev and Rus’ film factories in Yalta as the property of the Crimean SSR. It does not seem, however, that the resolution came into force. In his memoirs, Khanzhonkov does not reveal whether the brief Bolshevik rule in Yalta affected the working process of his studio, nor does he mention any attempts at ‘nationalisation’. On the contrary, he defines mid-1919 as the “heyday of the Yalta [private] film industry” (Khanzhonkov 1937: 123-124).

Although Myslavs’kyi (2018: 281) states that the nationalisation of the film industry in Ukraine was enforced even earlier than in Russia, the analysis of the cited documents does not suggest that the nationalisation went further than the confiscation of the premises of some major cinemas in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odesa, and the declaration to confiscate “all scientific, cultural and educational, kulturfilms [видовые] and fairy tales” from their owners, as most of the orders issued by the Soviet authorities in 1919 did not come into force. What is clear from these documents is that most of them did not even mention ‘nationalisation’ but rather suggested new regulations, registration, and permission rules, in some cases, recognising film property as belonging to its actual private owners.

One can assume that the different Soviet local bodies that claimed control over the film industry were either not aware of the ‘central’ government’s new decrees or just ignored them; the same content was issued multiple times in different decrees and often duplicated the rules and laws de-jure previously (or even simultaneously) ratified by other authorities. Some resolutions were intended to reinforce those that had been issued previously but which were largely ignored or sabotaged by the population. The fact that the authorities issued multiple and partially overlapping resolutions on the same subject proves that most orders were not implemented.

In any case, the nationalisation process – where it was unfolding – was soon interrupted in the late summer of 1919 after the Bolsheviks withdrew from Ukraine.

Film Production

The modest 1919 Ukrainian Soviet film output was released by different newly established entities: the All-Ukrainian Film Committee, Film bureaus of different Red Army units (responsible for the occupied regions) or the Culture and Education / Enlightenment Departments of different local Soviet bodies. Despite the Committee’s claims that it controlled the film sphere, in reality, it proved incapable of enforcing its own orders, while the representatives of the army were much more successful in ensuring their own ‘nationalisation’ with weapons.

According to Myslavs’kyi (2018: 268), 45 films (mostly newsreels and agitprop shorts) were filmed in 1919–1920 in Ukraine under the Bolsheviks (35 in 1919 and 10 in 1920), mainly in Odesa and Kyiv.

Due to turmoil in Russia, in 1918, the major Russian film producers moved their production from Moscow to Yalta (Iosif Ermol’ev/Joseph Ermolieff and Aleksandr Khanzhonkov) and Odesa (Dmitrii Kharitonov), where three local studios – Mirograph, Mizrakh, and Borisov’s – remained active. In 1918–1919, these privately owned exiled Russian and domestic Ukrainian companies produced 97 films in Ukraine.¹⁵ It was only in 1920 that the film production significantly decreased: according to Myslavs’kyi (2005: 515), only seven films were produced this year. After the fall of Odesa, the Russian exiled film production moved to Crimea, which for a short while remained the refuge both for Ermol’ev’s La Société Ermolieff-Cinéma (until February 1920) and for Khanzhonkov’s La Société Khanjonkoff & Co (until October 1920).

Therefore, in Ukraine in 1919-1920 both private and state film production existed interchangeably in the same territories, often using the same facilities and equipment, which changed hands.

Film Distribution and Exhibition

While Ermol’ev, Kharitonov and Khanzhonkov, along with their companies and staff, fled the Bolshevik-threatened territories and moved deeper into the South, and others sold or abandoned their business, smaller local film distributors stayed put in the hope that the anti-Bolshevik powers would return. They largely sabotaged the resolutions of the Soviet authorities and simply hid the equipment and film stock they owned in order to avoid having to hand them over. While the luxury cinemas and film studio premises abandoned by the former owners could instantly be expropriated, it was not easy to convince the smaller business owners to give up their movable film property hidden elsewhere.

After the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces throughout the territory of Ukraine in mid-1920 and in Crimea in November 1920, however, Soviet power was restored, and private film production ultimately ceased. On June 23, 1920, the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR issued a resolution on the nationalisation of motion pictures, which partly duplicated the government resolution from February 25, 1919,¹⁶ according to which motion pictures were to be transferred to the state’s property. That indicates that the previous governmental decisions on the handover of motion pictures under the state’s control were not implemented.

It seems that it was only with the issuance of the resolution from June 23, 1920 – even though this was technically aimed only at film distribution and exhibition – that the practical process of the systematic and centralised nationalisation of the entire film industry began in Ukraine. The head of the Odesa Regional Film Committee at this time, Mykhailo Kapchyns’kyi (2003: 87), interpreted its meaning this way: “the nationalisation of the film industry in Ukraine – as known – happened in June 1920”.

Similar to Kapchyns’kyi, the authors of the Ukrainian official film magazine Kino also defined late 1920 as the de facto year of bringing the Ukrainian film industry under state's control: “The history of Ukrainian cinema begins in 1919, when the nationalisation of films and cinemas was announced, but the governing of the film industry de-facto began only in 1920/21, when Photo-Cinema Committees were organised on the ground as well as in the centre” (Koval’ and Sheliuvskyi 1931: 7).

The year 1921 was one of total decay, severe famine, and economic blockade, making it impossible to shoot films or even buy film stock from abroad.

As Mykhailo Kapchyns’kyi recalled, most of the remaining private distributors did not begin to reveal their hidden film equipment and film libraries until the launch of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 that protected private property¹⁷ and allowed them to legally distribute films, as well as rent and operate the cinemas which some of them had owned or managed before nationalisation.¹⁸ Even though de jure, they were no longer the owners of the property, some of them subsequently operated second-run facilities during the entire NEP period.

This is clearly shown in Grigorii Boltianskii’s Film Directory (Kino-spravochnik). There he mentions the Conference on Film Distribution “with the participation of Moscow-based state and private film distribution companies”' (Boltianskii 1929: 49, emphasis added) organised on December 1, 1922.

According to the early Ukrainian Soviet film theatre manager Pavlo Nechesa (1970: 165), in 1922, only five cinemas were directly operated by the newly established state film monopoly VUFKU,¹⁹ with the rest leased to private owners. Even the Yalta film studio was leased to the private distribution company Yelin, Zadorozhnyi & Co. between October 1923 and May 1924. But by the end of 1924, most of the private distributors and cinema exhibitors who had previously operated 98 rented cinemas had been expelled from the market (Nechesa 1970: 185).

Nevertheless, a few theatres remained on private leases even through 1928 (“Pryvatnyk” 1928: 15, Rosliak 2018: 640).

Conclusion

When writing about the nationalisation of the film industry in Ukraine, it is important to define the scope of this term’s application – both geographical and economic. Although de jure, the process of the nationalisation, by different Soviet local authorities, of different segments of the previously privately-owned exiled Russian and domestic Ukrainian film industry was largely legislated in 1919, the regulations did not, in fact, come into force until at least mid-/late 1920, when Bolsheviks ultimately regained power in Ukraine. While film production and exhibition facilities – film studios and theatres – were expropriated little by little from 1919 on, the film stock and copies were mostly requisitioned, that is, de facto bought from the owners who kept them intact throughout the revolution.

Given the specific historical context, it is more accurate to describe the period of 1919 to mid-1920 in Ukraine as characterised by an intermittent and unsystematic process of partial and multiple (but failed) attempts to expropriate / requisition / confiscate the remaining privately owned film facilities and equipment, rather than a centralised and state-controlled nationalisation policy. The practical process of the nationalisation of the Ukrainian film industry began only in June 1920.

Largely completed de jure in late 1920-1921, the nationalisation of film production in Ukraine was implemented by VUFKU only in 1922, when film production resumed, while some part of the film exhibition market remained on leases in private hands until 1928 when the new economic policy was abolished and Stalin's cultural revolution began in earnest.

Ivan Kozlenko
University of Cambridge
ik451@cam.ac.uk

Bio

Ivan Kozlenko is a film scholar, curator and cultural administrator. He founded the esteemed Mute Nights silent film festival and transformed the Dovzhenko Center, Ukraine's primary film archive, into a leading cultural attraction in Kyiv. Over the course of a decade, he oversaw the restoration of over 70 Ukrainian films and their reintroduction to global audiences. Kozlenko has curated significant film retrospectives, including In Transition: Ukrainische Träume (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Germany, 2023), Kira Muratova (Seoul Cinematheque, South Korea, 2019), Odessa in fiamme: occupation / liberation (Odesa IFF, 2015), Ukraine: The Great Experiment (Pordenone Silent Film Festival, Italy, 2013). He has also edited authoritative texts and catalogues on Ukrainian cinema, published by Dovzhenko Center Publishing: Flights in Dreams and Reality (2020), Ivan Kavaleridze. Memoirs, Drama, Journalism (2017), Ukrainian Film Posters of the 1920s: VUFKU (2015), Dovzhenko’s EARTH Framed by Borys Kosarev (2013), Ukrainian Re-vision. The Film Collection Book (2012). His 2017 novel Tangier was a contender for the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year, reflecting his influential role in Ukrainian cultural discourse.

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Suggested Citation

Kozlenko, Ivan. 2024. Groundworks: “Notes on the Soviet Nationalisation of the Film Industry in Ukraine (1919-21)”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 19. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2024.00019.376.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms