Soviet Hollywood: The Culture Industry That Wasn’t

<jats:p xml:lang="en"> This article details the history of a project to reform the Soviet film industry based on the Hollywood model and to construct a “cine-city,” a Soviet Hollywood, in Soviet Russia in the mid-1930s. It argues that with the project’s abandonment, the Soviets missed an opportunity to create a culture industry. Instead of a Hollywood-style production machine, they ended up with an exclusive, event-based cinema in which every film was distributed in hundreds of prints, but in which filmmaking was never routine enough to effect a subjectifying mass culture. </jats:p>