Cinema theatres for the "new man": leisure and cinema in the USSR in the 1920s

In the 1920s, there existed a conception of new proletarian viewers who needed a different kind of cinemas and leisure than the pre-revolutionary public. The article is devoted to the image of the "new soviet viewer" in the wider context of a utopian project about the "new man" and the "new everyday life". It considers a correlation between the "new viewers" imagined by ideologists and the interests attributed to them and the demands of the real audience of the city cinemas of the NEP period. The conceptual gap between the project of Soviet cinema as part of the Cultural Revolution and the leisure practices of the first post-revolutionary decade is highlighted through the prism of this ideological construct.