direction of Soiuzkino (Ail-Union Soviet Film Trust). Its chief apparatchik, Boris Shumiatsky, became the ultimate authority in the world of Soviet cinema (until his own arrest and execution as a 'Trotskyite' in 1938), although Stalin, who loved the cinema and frequently watched movies in his Kremlin cinema, kept a beady eye on the latest films and often intervened in their production.* Shumiatsky ran a sort of 'Soviet Hollywood', with huge production studios in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Minsk reeling off a succession of smash-hit Soviet musicals, romantic comedies, war adventures and Western-modelled frontier films ('Easterns') like Chapaev (1934), Stalin's favourite film.+ Shumiatsky drew up a Five-year Plan for the cinema which called for no less than 500 films to be made in 193 2 alone. All of them were to conform to the new ideological directives, which demanded optimistic pictures about Soviet life with positive individual heroes drawn from the ranks of the proletariat. Party-controlled producers and script departments were placed in charge of the production to ensure that all this entertainment was politically correct. 'Life is getting gayer, comrades,' Stalin famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. For the previous three years he had been abroad - a semi-dissident ambassador of the Soviet cinema. He travelled to Europe and on to Hollywood to learn about the new techniques of sound, signing up for several films he never made. He enjoyed the freedom of the West, and he was no doubt fearful of going back to Russia, where Shumiatsky's attacks on the 'formalists' were at their most extreme when directed against him. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother into begging Eisenstein to return home, threatening her with some form of punishment if he failed to do so. In the first two years after his return Eisenstein had several film proposals turned
* In 1938, in the final stages of the editing of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Stalin asked to see the rough cuts. The film-maker hurried to the Kremlin and, in his haste, left behind one reel. Stalin loved the film but, since no one dared to inform him that it was incomplete, it was released without the missing reel (J. Goodwin. Eisenstein, Cinema and History (Urbana, 1993), p. 162).
+ Stalin could apparently recite long passages of the dialogue by heart. See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896- 1939 (London, 1994), p. SX4.
down for production by Soiuzkino. He withdrew to a teaching post at the State Film School and, although he lavished praise (in his public statements) on the mediocre films that were churned out at that time, he stood firm by the films which he had made, courageously refusing to denounce himself, as he was called upon to do, at the Party's Second Conference on Cinema in 1935.103
Under pressure to produce a film which conformed to the Socialist Realist mould, Eisenstein accepted a commission from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in 1935. He was to realize a film scenario that took its title, although not much else, from Turgenev's 'Bezhin Meadow', a story about peasant boys discussing supernatural signs of death which formed one of the Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The film was actually inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the 'kulaks' of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father, the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet campaign for collectivization.* By 1935, the Morozov cult was at its height: songs and poems, even a cantata with full orchestra and chorus, had been written about him. This no doubt persuaded Eisenstein that it was safe to make a film about him. But his conception of the film was deemed unacceptable. He turned it from a story about individuals to a conflict between types, between old and new, and, in a scene that showed the communists dismantling a church to break the resistance of the kulak saboteurs, he came dangerously close to suggesting that collectivization had been something destructive. In August 1936, with most of the film already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script. With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the autumn. The church scene was cut and a speech in tribute to Stalin was added. But then, in March 1937, Shumiatsky ordered all work on the film stopped. In an article in Pravda he accused Eisenstein of depicting collectivization as an elemental conflict between good and evil, and
