REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 2(2): 201–20, 2013. Speaking for Those “Backward”: Gender and Ethnic Minorities in Soviet Silent Films Yulia Gradskova The article is dedicated to the study of the cinematographic representations of two early Soviet emancipation projects: the emancipation of women and the emancipation of national minorities. In what ways did these two emancipa‑ tion projects intersect? How were women of the “dominated” nations ad‑ dressed and treated in the post‑revolutionary years? In order to answer these questions I analyze three newsreels and six thematic films connected to the mentioned topics and produced between the mid‑1920s and 1931. Films dealing with the “emancipation” of women not infrequently showed women from different regions, but, in addition to this intra‑Soviet perspective on an all‑Soviet dimension, I focus on several films dealing with the Volga‑Ural re‑ gion in particular. Soviet films from 1920 to the early 1930s give us more complex and multilateral information about both “emancipations” than do other Soviet documents. At the same time, they show that racialized images of “other” women were frequently used by Soviet filmmakers in order to em‑ phasize the progress of the Soviet modernizing project. When taking power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolsheviks expected revolutions in other countries to follow soon after. But at the same time, they were eager to preserve the territory of the former Russian Empire under their “revolution‑ ary” control. The Bolshevik leaders wanted to gain support for their policies from those local intellectuals who had pronounced against Russification and Christianization during the postrevolutionary years. Indeed, the Bolsheviks hoped to attract at least some ethnic minorities through their anti‑colonial slogans. 1 The new revolutionary leaders presented themselves as obvious ideologues of social transformation, while the “dominated [ugnetennye] peo‑ ple” of the former empire were expected to learn the way to “emancipation” from the programs elaborated at the center of the new proletarian state. The new rhetoric of culture and learning, in spite of all its anti‑colonial elements (for example, ideas of destroying the “prison for people” created by 1 See, for example, Imanutdin Sulaev, ”Musul´manskie s″ezdy Povolzh´ia i Kav‑ kaza v 1920‑kh gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 9 ( 2007): 141.