Concept
The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union. Upon the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) on November 7, 1917 (although the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did not officially come into existence until December 30, 1922), what had formerly been the Russian Empire began quickly to come under the domination of a Soviet reorganization of all its institutions. From the outset, the leaders of this new state held that film would be the most ideal propaganda tool for the Soviet Union because of its widespread popularity among the established citizenry of the new land. Vladimir Lenin viewed film as the most important medium for educating the masses in the ways, means and successes of communism. As a consequence Lenin issued the "Directives on the Film Business" on January 17, 1922, which instructed the People's Commissariat for Education to systemise the film business, registering and numbering all films shown in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, extracting rent from all privately owned cinemas and subject them to censorship. Joseph Stalin later also regarded cinema as of the prime importance. However, between World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Russian film industry and the infrastructure needed to support it (e.g.