Journal of azerbaijani studies

⁸⁰ Maksim Gor'kii's cynical lament to the world at the dawn of the film age in 1896 seems equally relevant for the eastern nationalities half a century later. To the inexperienced audiences who first saw films like In the Name of God and SeviV in the 1920s on the movie screens of their dusty towns or villages, pictures certainly did speak louder than words. Film told its make-believe stories with a powerful effect, mixing reality and imagination, fact and illusion, life and its gray shadows. Film served the higher purpose that the Bolshevik party had first set for it, to propagate Soviet values in an imagery and language appropriate for the time and place, if always within a strict narrative uniformity. The party reached the distant eastern peoples with images of themselves encapsulated in messages from the future. As local settings gave way to socialist plots, national facts transformed into revolutionary fictions. Moscow could not look upon the borderlands of the east except from its own European center, its own forward position in the moving drama and progress of Marxist history. The more stylized films from the 1930s and 1940s - be they adventures like They Came from Baku, or historical dramas like Sabukhi, or musical comedies like A Measure of Cloth - were even simpler and more direct in their messages. By then, Azerbaijan and its neighbors could not make their own way in the world without Russian guidance. Films created not just new knowledge or fun entertainment, but, through a set of "ideological fictions," a whole new reality for the east. By inventing national history on film, the Soviet regime reinvented the history of the nation writ large. Cinema helps us to see just how much of a subjective, ideological construct the "nation" can be, made all the more believable by the objective facts marshaled to serve its creation. For under Soviet sponsorship, national traditions became symbols of

obedience and authority. The once backward borderlands became the