Visions of a New Land

Drawing on an enormous range of littleknown cultural texts, including documentary and features films, adolescents travel journals, school primers, maps, and city plans, Emma Widdis offers a unique cultural history of the early Soviet period. She explains how the machinery of the Soviet cultural system was put to work on a single propaganda campaign: to create a context for citizenship and to unite the individual and the collective within conception of time and space. Demonstrating that film (Lenin´s most valued art) offered both visions of the utopia and models of how to live in it, Widdis reveals how the new Soviet map was projected onto the great shared screen of the popular imagination.