About the book: 2024 / The restoration of the Russian film industry after the collapse of the USSR and the further crisis in the economy and culture was accompanied by an increase in patriotic and nationalist tendencies. Having adapted Hollywood methods to the material of Russian history, by the mid-2000s the cinema of new Russia began producing historical blockbusters. These paintings were subordinated to the main task - creating the image of a strong country that needs to be revived in order to be proud of it again. The book examines the Russian blockbuster as an integral cultural phenomenon and at the same time a point where politics, economics, history and ideology intersect. Historian Stephen M. Norris, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, sets out to look at the history of 21st-century Russia through the prism of films and understand how the state, with their help, constructed a new national identity.