Hollywood Once Helped Win Russian Hearts And Minds. It Still Could.

When Vladimir Putin’s government re-invaded neighboring Ukraine in February of 2022, it prompted a veritable exodus of Western companies and capital from Russia. By late 2023, nearly 10,000 firms with foreign affiliates or involvement had exited the country.

Hollywood mostly went with them. Driven by moral outrage and worries about reputational risk, top conglomerates like Netflix suspended services and halted new projects and acquisitions in Russia, while all of America’s major movie studios paused film releases and distribution there.

The effect on the Russian film industry was devastating. Only just recovering from a pandemic-era slowdown, it suddenly found itself isolated. Movies made by Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, Sony and Paramount “had previously accounted for up to 75% of the Russian box office,” noted one assessment. Without them, revenue constricted, theaters closed and staff were laid off.

But if Hollywood’s departure hit Russia’s film industry hard, it proved to be a boon for Russian propaganda. Predictably, the void left by the absence of Western content was quickly filled by state-aligned media output. In mid-2022, the Kremlin created the Military-Patriotic Film Support Foundation (Voenkino), tasked with financing productions that promote heroism, national unity and loyalty to the armed forces. Thereafter, movies like 2023’s Witness (a Kremlin-endorsed film about the Ukraine conflict highlighting Ukrainian atrocities) and 2024’s Defenders of the Donbas (an ode to the Russian fight for eastern Ukraine) began to fill the country’s remaining screens.

All this was part of a broader propaganda push on the part of the Kremlin. “The Ministry of Culture, the Cinema Fund, and the Internet Development Institute are 1758050721 the primary sources of funding for Russian cinema,” one 2024 analysis noted. Russia’s film industry, in other words, had been turned into a soft power tool by the Putin government.

At the same time, the Kremlin tightened its grip on what domestic audiences were allowed to see. By 2024, Russia’s rubber-stamp legislature had proposed expanding rules to block any film deemed to “discredit traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” The result is a cultural marketplace where state-subsidized patriotism and officially approved morality crowd out dissenting voices.

Ironically, Hollywood’s boycott has helped reinforce this state of affairs. By vacating the Russian market, American studios have ceded its screens to Kremlin-funded producers and the state’s reinvigorated censorship apparatus. In other words, instead of undermining Putin’s government, the absence of Western blockbusters has made it easier for the Kremlin to monopolize the cultural space and weaponize it against the West.

It doesn’t have to be this way. During the decades of the Cold War, foreign cinema and Western pop culture played a crucial role behind the “Iron Curtain,” providing the Soviet Union’s captive population with a glimpse into the West – and showing them that life under communism wasn’t their only option. Though officially prohibited, Western movies, music and television circulated widely as contraband and highlighted themes like resistance to tyranny and the moral superiority of the West.

Their impact was immense. In his 1978 memoir To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, famed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky detailed the importance of such Western materials in sustaining the morale of opponents of communism and exposing the bankruptcy of Soviet ideology.

The same sort of role is still possible today, provided Russians are exposed once more to American media.

Admittedly, that’s now harder to do. Hollywood may still dominate the global marketplace with its blockbuster movies, but in terms of sheer output it is increasingly being outpaced by rivals with overt political agendas. Once responsible for a quarter of the world’s films, America now contributes barely a tenth. That shrinking market share has given authoritarians in places like Moscow more latitude to project their own “soft power” through cinema.

But Hollywood still retains massive global cachet, including in Russia if it decides to make its way back there. Of course, the Kremlin may seek to bar such a reentry. But given the ailing state of the national economy and persistent elite worries about domestic discontent, Putin’s government is liable to tread lightly. That, in turn, will give Hollywood the opening it needs to once again become a player in Russia. It will also provide it with the opportunity to help contest the Kremlin’s preferred narrative among the audience that matters most: the Russian people.