Towards a History of Soviet Film Records (Kinoletopis’) and Their Subsequent Uses

This article looks at the specific features of Soviet audiovisual archives showing traces of the Holocaust. The aim is to retrace the history of the archival project behind this collection, from its creation in the 1920s, showing the different types of intervention carried out on the material, in order to understand the consequences on the elements currently preserved in the former USSR. This allows to underline the limits inherent in the interpretation of these images by researchers. Finally, the article looks critically at some examples of how these archives have been used in the past and more recently.