The anti-religious struggle of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s-1930s through the cinema

The study described the outreach activities of the Bolsheviks through the cinema as a specific technology of the God denunciation. Antireligious films, which were a part of the comprehensive atheistic activities of the League of Militant Atheists, propagandized the trumped-up negative images of religion, the church and the clergy. Anticlerical movies contributed to the destruction of the traditional way of life of people replacing the traditional religious beliefs with the religiosity of the Bolsheviks. The paper considered both the content of the Bolshevik film propaganda and the formal techniques of the red cinema art. The cinema is regarded as a special aesthetic mode that generates the decline of the aura according to the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. The Bolsheviks used this capacity, i.e. the cinema art became not only a tool of atheistic propaganda but also the atheistic art par excellence.