In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. The task of the new regime, and of the media that served it, was to reshape the old world in revolutionary form, to transform the vast, "ungraspable" space of the Russian Empire into the mapped territ...

Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953) was one of the leading Soviet film directors in the "golden age" of silent cinema in the 1920s. His films – especially "The Mother", "The End of St Petersburg" and "Storm over Asia" – are classics of silent cinema. Li...