The recovery of Russia's film industry after the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by a strengthening of patriotic and nationalist tendencies. Adapting Hollywood methods to Russian history, by the mid-2000s, the cinema of the new Russia began producing historical blockbusters. These films were subordinated to the main goal of creating the image of a strong country that needed to be revived in order to be proud of it again. This book examines the Russian blockbuster as a holistic cultural phenomenon and simultaneously a point where politics, economics, history, and ideology intersect. Historian Stephen M. Norris, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, aims to look at the history of 21st-century Russia through the prism of cinema and understand how the state used it to construct a new national identity.