along with the usual retinue of detective films and melodramas, filled theaters when the streets were not filled with revolutionaries. However, the destruction of the infrastructure in the major cities, the failing war-drained economy, the takeover of rural cinemas by local Soviets, and the aversion of some in the film industry to communism, caused the Russian film industry per se to effectively die out by the time Lenin on November 8, 1917 proclaimed a new country, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Ironically, the last significant Russian film completed, in 1917, Father Sergius would become the first new film release a year later, in the new country of the Soviets. See also Cinema of the Soviet Union Cinema of Russia Readings Yana Hashamova, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (Intellect Books, 2007) External links Russian Empire and the Royal Family // Net-Film Newsreels and Documentary Films Archive Early Russian Cinema, 1907-1918 (PDF) Russian Nights Film Festival Art of the Russian Empire