Putting the Red in Soviet Color Film

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union used captured German film stock and Agfacolor patents to add color to their movies for the first time—or so goes the usual story. But the Soviet experience with color film turns out to be more complicated than this, explains historian Philip Cavendish in his exploration of the Soviet Union’s “political imperative of color.”

People in the USSR were actually experimenting with color film processes as early as the mid-1920s. After a quartet of Technicolor...