With three fine Russian films in recent months on World War 2, -- `` The House I Live In '', `` The Cranes Are Flying '' and `` Ballad Of A Soldier '' -- we had every right to expect a real Soviet block-buster in `` The Day The War Ended ''.

Fear of a nuclear war spurred the production of public safety films by the United States federal government's Civil Defense branch that demonstrated ways on protecting oneself from a Soviet nuclear attack.

This revival of Vertov's legacy included rehabilitation of his reputation in the Soviet Union, with retrospectives of his films, biographical works and writings.

The cinema of the Soviet Union, not to be confused with " Cinema of Russia " despite Russian language films being predominant in both genres, includes several film contributions of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, although sometimes censored by the Central Government.

As this amounted mostly to cinema houses, the first Soviet films consisted of recycled films of the Russian Empire and its imports, to the extent that these were not determined to be offensive to the new Soviet ideology.

Beyond this, the government was principally able to fund only short, educational films, the most notorious of which were the agitki-propaganda films intended to " agitate ", or energize and enthuse, the masses to participate fully in approved Soviet activities, and deal effectively with those who remained in opposition to the new order.

A genre known as " chernukha " ( from the Russian word for " black "), including films such as Little Vera, portrayed the harsh realities of Soviet life.

* Little Vera ( 1988 ) notable as one of the first Soviet films with sexually explicit scenes

* White Sun of the Desert, one of the best loved Soviet films of all time.

In addition to serious explorations of the Soviet past and present situation relaxation of censorship resulted in an explosion of popular culture including popular Western literature and films and books on astrology, religion, and flying saucers, in short, anything official Soviet publishers had not deemed worth publishing.

Unlike the musical films of Hollywood and Bollywood, popularly identified with escapism, the Soviet musical was first and foremost a form of propaganda.

The success of The Jolly Fellows ensured a place in Soviet cinema for the musical format, but immediately Shumyatsky set up strict guidelines to make sure the films promoted Communist values.

The titles of the films are Levsha: The Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea, Obshee Delo: The Common Task, and Bol ' shoe Sovietskaia Zatmenie: The Great Soviet Eclipse.

In the years following the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government sponsored the Russian film industry with the purpose of making propaganda films.

Another of Eisenstein's films, 1927's October, depicted the Bolshevik perspective on the October Revolution, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace which provided Soviet viewers with the victory that the workers and peasants lacked in Battleship Potemkin, ending with Lenin ( as played by an unknown worker ) declaring that the government is overthrown.

Guy Maddin won awards for his homage to Soviet era silent films with his short The Heart of the World after which he made a feature-length silent, Brand Upon the Brain!

The critics of the outside world praised them, but at home, Eisenstein's focus in these films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded others, such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko, under fire from the Soviet film community, forcing him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism.

The Soviet film industry was solving the sound-film issue without him and his films, techniques, and theories were becoming increasingly attacked as ' ideological failures ' and prime examples of formalism.

The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis.

Soviet massed military bands in the 1930s and 1940s tend to have a drum major, a conductor and an optional two to three deputy conductors in the front of the band.

Stalin was determined to punish those peoples he saw as collaborating with Germany during the war and to deal with the problem of nationalism, which would tend to pull the Soviet Union apart.

Those Trotskyist currents that split from the Fourth International before 1948 over differences with Trotsky on the Soviet Union tend to disagree with this interpretation and have adopted theories describing the post-war Stalinist states as being state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist.

The Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin commented on the incident, blaming " counter-revolutionaries " for atrocities in Alagir, which Georgians tend to attribute to the Ossetian radicals.

However, the casualty statistics of the Eastern war tend to lend credence to many of the claims made by the former general as to the tactical superiority of the German army during the period 1939 – 1944, especially over its Soviet counterpart.

European lines, particularly those from the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union, tend to be larger than those in North America.

As things turned out, however, we have not profited greatly from the lesson: instead of persistently following a national program of our own we have often been satisfied to be against whatever Soviet policy seemed to be at the moment.

Though Walter Ulbricht, by grace of Soviet tanks, may be head man in East Germany, that does not give him any right to usurp the government of East Berlin or to absorb that semi-city into the Soviet zone.

But because of the peculiar nature of the military situation in Laos, the Soviet leader must be tempted to let things ride -- a course that would appear to cost him little on the spot, but would bog Washington in a tactical mess.

The Free Democrats ( 12 per cent of the vote ) believe a nuclear war can be avoided by negotiating with the Soviet Union, and more dealings with the Communist bloc.

And there must be many Soviet citizens who know what is going on and who realize that before they can hope to enjoy the full life promised for 1980 they and their children must first survive.

Morrison points out that since our country is more urbanized than the Soviet Union or Red China, it is the most vulnerable of the great powers -- Europe of course must be written off out of hand.

The Macmillan government might be willing to let him go, but he has been dead seventy-eight years and even the Soviet morticians could not make him look presentable.

Since he has just shown who is top dog, he may not be ready to receive this highest honor in the gift of the Soviet people.

A naval blockade would be thoroughly in line with the Monroe Doctrine, would be a relatively simple operation to carry out, and would bring an abrupt end to Soviet penetration of our hemisphere ''.

At Yalta the West still believed that Eastern Europe could be kept in its orbit, in spite of the onrushing Soviet armies.

In other words, the Soviet Union was determined to create a Poland so strong as to be a powerful bulwark against Germany and so closely tied to Russia that there would never be any question of her serving as a cordon sanitaire against the Soviets or posing as an independent, balancing power in between Russia and Germany.

We expected, in short, that most of the world would make itself over in our image and that it would be relatively simple, from such a position, to deal with the localized aberrations of the Soviet Union ''.

It cannot be said that our very first day in the Soviet Union turned out to be an ordinary one.

Communist target areas can be assumed, but there is no certainty that such assumptions coincide with Soviet intentions.

my point is that where conflicts arise they must always be resolved in favor of achieving the indispensable condition for a tolerant world -- the absence of Soviet Communist power.

You may have misgivings about certain aspects of our military establishment -- I certainly do -- but you know any comparison of over-all American strength with over-all Soviet strength finds the United States not only superior, but so superior both in present weapons and in the development of new ones that our advantage promises to be a permanent feature of U.S.-Soviet relations for the foreseeable future.

Suppose, he says, that the tables were turned, and we were in the Soviets' position: `` There would be more than 2,000 modern Soviet fighters, all better than ours, stationed at 250 bases in Mexico and the Caribbean.

To the extent, then, that declining U.S. prestige means that other nations will be tempted to place their bets on an ultimate American defeat, and will thus be more vulnerable to Soviet intimidation, there is reason for concern.

Still, these guesses about the outcome of the struggle cannot be as important as the actual power relationship between the Soviet Union and ourselves.