My paper deals with dance in the Soviet cinema of the 1930s. I focus on the period of formation of the socialist realist canon the beginning of which roughly coincides, as it is believed, with the coming of sound in the Soviet film industry. By discussing such popular films as Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life, Grigori Aleksandrov’s comedies Jolly Fellows, Circus, Volga-Volga, and several others, I seek to reconstruct a “choreographic master plot” characteristic of Soviet cultural production of this type under Joseph Stalin. I see the dance in films as a part of the plot and a rhetorical device but also as a special attraction and in many cases a guilty pleasure. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.