As I hope the Azerbaijani case study has shown, the nationalities themselves did not always believe these staged cinematic productions to be a fair and true representation of their homelands. They tried to Jib rate the "national" as an expression of their own collective memory and character. But Moscow confined it to an expression of its own stale orientalist forms. Native protests against Russian ethnic prejudices over the years testify to a resilient national awareness and pride. Yet those very protests were always muted or ignored. The experience in national filmmaking spoke less about the resilience of nativization and nation building, more about the creative power of the Soviet propaganda state to manipulate and generalize national images, to teach a lesson about "eastern backwardness" and the "fraternal friendship and unbreakable unity of the Soviet peoples".82
