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The folks over in the Columbia Pictures marketing department obviously know how to key the opening of a movie to an Earth-shattering news event. As the Soviet Union officially came to an end and Mikhail S. Gorbachev was cleaning out his office, Columbia was releasing Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s “The Inner Circle.”

Though the film is set in Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1939, Columbia marketing executives wasted no time connecting the film’s subject matter to what’s happening in the former U.S.S.R. right now. “The whole concept of the marketing of this film was to take it out of entertainment and put it into news,” says Paula Silver, Columbia’s marketing president. “We wanted it to have social and historical relevance to today’s headlines.”

Most of the television ads for the film have been running during network news programs, and the studio is running review quotes in their ads that reflect the newsworthiness of “The Inner Circle.” For example, one quote featured prominently claims: “At last, we can see why communism was doomed.” “Those kind of quotes make people see that this film has relevance because you can see where it all began,” says Silver.

Director Konchalovsky is glad Columbia is capitalizing on the situation. “The studio has been constantly adjusting their campaign tied in to the events of the past several months,” says Konchalovsky.

Although Konchalovsky refers to his film as “a love story,” he admits that filmgoers might be more interested in the film’s backdrop of Russian society. “People are more interested in seeing a film about life in Russia than a love story between Tom Hulce and Lolita Davidovich,” he says.

While “The Inner Circle” seems to have a bit of good timing behind its release, other Russian-themed movies, most notably 1990’s “The Russia House,” with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, failed at the box office. “That movie didn’t do well because it was about the Cold War and there was no more Cold War,” says Columbia’s Silver. “That was unfortunate timing.”