ABSTRACT
The last years of Stalin’s regime were no less painful for Soviet cinema than previous periods and definitely much worse than the war years. While promoting Russian nationalism, Stalin did not want to totally abandon socialist elements of his ideology, and he restored to some extent their role after their oblivion during the war. The commendation of patriotism and the condemnation of traitors was the theme of several movies. The most notorious of them was Abram Room’s The Court of Honor. With the start of the cold war, Soviet film directors began to create anti-Western movies as never before. Romm was the champion of these films, which misrepresented the present and the past in glaring ways. One example is his The Russian Question, based on the play of Konstantin Simonov, Stalin’s pet writer. One of the first war movies venerating Stalin was Igor Savchenko’s The Third Strike.
