Since the turn of the twentieth century, art and politics have been uniquely intertwined in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and its successor states. In the first decades of the century, across these territories, radical artistic movements such as suprematist abstraction, productivism, constructivist architecture, Bauhaus modernism, and, finally, Stalinist socialist realism sought to support revolutionary social transformation by literally reshaping the social world and human perception. Cinema, too, played its part—Vladimir Lenin, the Communist revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union, famously said that “of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.” Propelled by this vision, the early USSR became a laboratory for cutting-edge film that sought to transform viewers into a new kind of person. Yet as the century wore on and Soviet socialism gave way first to state terror and then to moribund bureaucratism and cultural conservatism, it was non-comformist underground artists who took the lead in experimental and politically radical art in the region. Finally, in the post-Soviet era, art and cinema in these territories embraced democratic freedoms and market institutions, before finally, in some quarters, returning to revolutionary roots in response to rising authoritarianism. In this broad survey course, we will trace the history of art and film of the region through a series of case studies, including: Erik Bulatov, Sergei Eisenstein, Miloš Forman, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Oleg Kulik, Emir Kusturica, El Lilzitsky, Kazimir Malevich, Jiří Menzel, Kira Muratova, Pussy Riot, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, Andrzej Wajda, and others.