The public release of these trophy films seems contradictory in the context of the 1940s Soviet Union. The Soviet government allowed the exhibition of foreign films which contained far more subversive ideas than any a Soviet director would have ever attempted putting in a film at a time when Soviet artists found themselves unemployed because of censorship laws. Historians hypothesize many possible reasons why the Soviet government showed such seemingly inexplicable leniency toward the foreign films. The government may have granted cinemas the right to show the films so they could stay in business after the domestic film industry had declined. A second hypothesis speculates that the government saw the films as an easy source of money to help rebuild the nation after the war. The minutes of the CPSU Central Committee meeting seem to support the latter idea with instructions that the films are to bring in a net income of at least 750 million rubles to the State coffers over the course of a year from public and private screenings, and 250 million rubles of this were supposed to come from rentals to the trade union camera network.