Cinema of the Russian Empire

In the same month, the first film was shot in Russia, by Lumière cameraman Camille Cerf, a record of the coronation of Nicholas II at the Kremlin in Moscow.

After the Lumières came representatives from Pathé and Gaumont to open offices, after the turn of the century, to make motion pictures on location for Russian audiences.

Theatres were already built, and film renting distributors had already replaced direct sales to exhibitors, when, in 1908, Alexander Drankov produced the first Russian narrative film, Stenka Razin, based on events told in a popular folk song and directed by Vladimir Romashkov.

At the same time as Drankov was making his film, the Moscow cinema entrepreneur Alexander Khanzhonkov began to operate.

Tsar Nicholas himself made some home movies and appointed an official Court Cinematographer, although he is purported to have written in 1913 that film was "an empty matter...even something harmful...silliness...we should not attribute any significance to such trifles".

Tsar Nicholas gave some special assistance to the makers of "The Defence of Sevastopol" and a few similar films, but the industry was not nationalized nor governmentally subsidized or otherwise controlled.

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.