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This article examines the exhibition and reception of Kinemacolor in Russia from 1910 to 1916. Kinemacolor was a British method of filming and projecting in natural color invented by George Albert Smith and financed by Charles Urban, a US-born entrepreneur; film historians generally regard it as the most commercially viable color process before the outbreak of war in 1914. The article investigates Urban's interest in Russia as a potential market for Kinemacolor and as a source of interesting filmic material. In addition to identifying the extent of Kinemacolor's exhibition and distribution in Russia between 1910 and 1916, it also examines the Russian subjects filmed by Urban's companies in black and white and color, and identifies two occasions (1909 and 1913) on which Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna were filmed in Kinemacolor. The article argues that the reception of Kinemacolor was widespread and diverse, and included members of the Russian imperial family and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. It references the specialist film-trade press in Britain, Russia, Europe, and North America; theater listings in Britain and Russia; and contemporary reports on Kinemacolor exhibitions in the British and Russian media. The article also draws upon the extensive archive of Urban's private papers, which is currently preserved in Bradford's National Science and Media Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1920, Vladimir Lenin defined "imperialism" as national exploitation, which raises the question of how nations exploited other nations throughout history. This article will argue that answering this question requires introducing new concepts into Marxist discourse that can capture competition among multiple states and currencies, namely the "hegemon-rival" dialectic between the "currency hegemon" and the "mercantile rivals." Focussing on the British empire, this article will show that British currency hegemony based on the gold standard functioned by a system that can be called "bimetallic apartheid," which involved arbitraging the value of gold against silver in order to facilitate the plundering of India and China, however, as other states began to industrially "catch up" with Britain (i.e., the "mercantile rivals"), the credibility of the British gold standard was undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on British press reports on Lenin in the ten days or so after his death on 21 January 1924 and shows how the texts—almost universally hostile in their appraisals—are saturated with gender, class and power distinctions and tropes of race, class, family, climate and geography. These are deployed to explain character or advanced as causative agents. In addition, physiognomic explanations predominate, and supposed binary opposites of mind/body, self/others, emotion/intellect and personal/political inform the ways in which journalists and pundits construct Lenin. The press advances a narrative of Revolution and Soviet power, which suggests that communism has already failed in Russia and that capitalism is being restored. Most writers predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. But the purpose of the article is not to explain or examine these representations in a conventional manner. It is to conduct an experiment in getting to grips with the problem of how to engage with past moments by recycling and reordering material from the press with a minimum of authorial comment, analysis and contextualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]