‘Imperium’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa Brings Together Nearly Three Hours of Italian Footage From the Early 1970s Covering the Vastness of the USSR — SkimNews
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- Sergei Loznitsa edited 60 hours of 16mm film into the nearly three-hour 'Imperium,' organizing the journey geographically from Moscow eastward through Siberia, the Central Asian 'Stans,' and the Baltic republics, ending in Leningrad.
- Italian TV crews shot the original footage in the early 1970s with official Soviet permission for a planned multi-chapter series; only a few episodes aired once on Italian television before the project was forgotten in archives.
- 'Imperium' captures persistent traditions the Soviet push for uniformity failed to erase — mosques still active in Bukhara, churches in Etchmiadzin, Bactrian camel races near the Mongolian border, and reindeer sleds in the Sakha Republic.
- The footage includes a Red Square parade for the 24th Congress of the Communist Party, GUM department store luxury goods, and a thriving trade in Christmas decorations despite the state's official atheism policy.
- In the Siberian segment, young Caucasian Russians play guitar and sing Russian songs while local Yakut residents look on from the sidelines — a scene the review characterizes as 'not-so-subtle colonialism' slyly captured by the Italian cameramen.
- Loznitsa argues that rampant capitalism and the internet have transformed Russia's social landscape far more than anything Lenin or Brezhnev imposed, turning once-stubbornly multicultural populations into consumers looking westward.
- The review cites Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini's 2013 documentary 'The Train to Moscow: A Journey to Utopia' as a natural companion piece, documenting an earlier Italian whose reports of Soviet reality were censored by his own communist-leaning colleagues.
Why it matters: Loznitsa has resurrected a visual record that was nearly lost — a pre-internet, pre-corporate-Russia survey of Soviet life that shows how regional traditions outlasted decades of centralization, giving viewers a rare look at the USSR's internal diversity that the 'Evil Empire' Cold War framing obscured in the West.
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