ABSTRACT
Stalin built up a mechanism for the supervision of cinema that outlasted him and was abolished finally along with the Soviet Union. Stalin was always extensively involved in movie production, and he considered the control of films to be one of the main goals of the party and state apparatus. Even during the terrible war with Germany, Stalin deemed it important to instruct film directors on how to make specific movies. In January 1944, when the outcome of the war was still unclear, Stalin put Dovzhenko’s script on the Politburo’s meeting agenda, as if it were a vital issue for the country. By the 1930s, several filmmakers attempted to find some humanistic interpretations of crude Soviet propaganda. For the most part, such attempts were rejected by the Soviet leadership, as was the case for Eisenstein’s movie Bezhin Meadow. In this movie Eisenstein attempted to address an ideologically important issue: the superiority of class values over humanistic values.
