«At evening cinema show in a small town...»: cinema in the context of the Great Patriotic War, according to the memoirs and letters of Ural people

The paper examines the memories and letters containing information about the role of cinema in extraordinary conditions of the Great Patriotic War. Through interpretation of individual cases of cinema's presence in the Soviet everyday life during the war, the author shows how cinema was represented and perceived in the published ego-documents. The paper explores sources of personal origin written by ordinary people from different categories of belligerent society and somehow related to the Urals during the war. The paper also reveals significant features and functions of "the most important art" in everyday life of "an ordinary man". In the context of everyday life, burnt by the war, the value of a movie as a method of therapy and communication came to the fore. The paper also shows the tastes of Ural people in cinema and, in particular, a great demand of the audience for satirical movies of foreign and domestic production as well as their demand for the pre-war movies of a social genre describing everyday life. The author identifies the major factors affecting the frequency and regularity of Ural people's film-going. The author makes the conclusion about the importance of film-going in the structure of military reality. According to the author's opinion, leisure activities depended on the combination of many factors, such as gender, age, place of residence, type of activity, involvement in the specific field of social interaction, etc.