Why do people think that the early cinema in the Soviet Union was laced with propaganda towards totalitarianism? In the early 1900’s, the Soviet Union was a very strict nation that was very controlling over what information their people gather from the government and from the rest of the outside world. The leaders of the Soviet Union had to find every way in which they could get out government information in the citizen’s every day lives. At first, the government would use basic newspaper articles to brainwash their minds. The written word was the only media in which the government could get out their specific agenda. Then they needed to step it up and try a new tactic. Radio was another outlet but lacked visual content. Movies had just started being developed and were a great way to get to peoples thoughts and minds because so many people are enthralled with them. The nation’s film industry was mostly nationalized through most of the countries history with philosophies and laws created by the Soviet Communist Party. Because of the depletion of resources from World War I, Russian film schools would take copies of other films and re-cut them with what they call meaning, but is really propaganda. When the new communist rulers took over the nation, they cut off all of the other movies from the outside world to keep people focused and involved with Russia and Russia only. This is because there was a concern that foreign films exposed people to capitalist ideologies. Some western movies depicted the Soviet Union in a negative light. Thus putting these ideas into the minds of the viewers. Soon the Soviet Film Industry stopped relying on foreign technologies. During its industrial effort in the early 1930s, the USSR manufactured factories to supply the nation with its own cinema technologies. This movement gave Russia the opportunity to put what ever they wanted into their films because they do not need to have licenses from the west telling them what they can and can not put in their films, so propaganda was very common. Stalin believed that film would be the best form of propaganda for the Soviet Union because of the mass popularity among the citizens. Stalin even used film to change the nation’s history. If something embarrassing happened with Russia’s history, the filmmakers and producers could easily pretend that none of that ever happened. They would make up their own story and call it history. Sergei Eisenstein made a movie called; Ivan the Terrible Part II and was completed in 1945 but was not released until 1958 due to political censorship. This was 5 years after Stalin's death because Stalin was very strict about what was shown to his people. This movie described Ivan as less of a hero than the people were originally told. After the death of Stalin, Soviet filmmakers were somewhat free to film what they believed audiences would want to see, but the industry still remained part of the government, and any material found politically offensive was either removed, edited, re-shot, or shelved. 513