“Give the worker a rest at the cinema”: understanding leisure in the 1920s

The paper examines the emergence of discussions about urban leisure culture in the USSR and its purpose in the context of a new ideology in the first post-revolutionary decade. Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of the very ideas about the concepts of rest, leisure and entertainment, and the use of free time in the context of ideas about control over working time and experiments with the calendar. What is a worker’s leisure time and why is rest needed? The free time of the so-called new Soviet man was understood through the dichotomy of leisure time and work time. Criteria for “correct”, socially approved leisure appeared, such as: usefulness, collectivity, classism, rationality, and organization. In accordance with them, cinema in the system of cultural hierarchy of the 1920s is defined in the paper as a popular place for urban entertainment and as the most important ideological tool. If we consider going to the cinema as a social phenomenon, then in the early Soviet discourse, cinema is a “wrong” leisure activity. The gradual study of the value of cinema for viewers through questionnaires, various levels of discussions about the “new Soviet spectator”, the nature of competition between workers’ clubs and cinemas, and the acceptance of the need for “unprincipled” leisure led to a softening of the assessment of cinema as a form of leisure.