Boris Shumyatsky

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Zakharovich and the family name is Shumyatsky.
Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky
Борис Захарович Шумяцкий
Boris Shumyatsky in 1924
Born16 November [O.S. 4 November] 1886
Verkhneudinsk, Verkhneudinsky Uyezd [ru], Transbaikal Oblast, Russian Empire
(now Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation)
DiedJuly 29, 1937(1937-07-29) (aged 50)
Kommunarka shooting ground, Leninsky District, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
(now Novomoskovsky Administrative Okrug, Moscow, Russian Federation)
Citizenship Russian Empire
 Far Eastern Republic
 Soviet Union
AwardsOrder of Lenin
Several others (see below)

Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky (

Soviet film industry, and much information about him was expunged from the public record as a consequence.[1]

Early life and career

Shumyatsky's father worked as a bookbinder in St Petersburg. After the assassination of the

1905 revolution, Shumyatsky led a combat unit of about 800 who barricaded themselves in the railways workshops.[2] He was arrested in January 1906, as the revolt was suppressed, but escaped and worked underground in Verkhneudinsk, Chita, and in Vladivostok, where he took part in an armed uprising in 1907. When that failed, he escaped to Argentina.[3] He returned to Russia by 1913, but was arrested and deported to Turukhansk, where Joseph Stalin was also exiled,[4] and was there at the start of World War I, during which he was drafted into the Russian army, and organised a secret Bolshevik group within the Krasnoyarsk garrison.[3]

After the

Comintern[5] He is credited with being one of the Comintern agents behind the creation of the Mongolian People's Party, founded in Irkutsk in 1920, which went on to form the first communist government of Outer Mongolia. Mongolia's revolutionary hero, Suke Bator reputed adopted Shumyatsky as his twin brother.[2] From 1923 to 1925, he represented Soviet interests in Iran, and after that was in charge of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and then a member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Party Central Committee
back in Siberia.

Head of the Film Industry

In none of these capacities did he evidently have anything to do with film-making. Nonetheless, following a reorganization of the Soviet film industry he was selected by Stalin to become the head of Soyuzkino in December 1930. When Soyuzkino was dissolved and replaced by GUKF on 11 February 1933, he remained in charge and even with expanded powers over all matters of production, import/export, distribution and exhibition.

He took over the film industry at a time when it was going through major technological changes, and rapid expansion. The number of cinemas in the USSR almost quadrupled under his supervision, to around 30,000, and silent movies were supplanted by 'talkies'. The first Soviet film with a full sound track was released in October 1931. He was also expected to end import of foreign equipment, and blank film when Soviet factories were not well equipped to supply demand, and he had to contend with tightening censorship and Stalin's personal obsession with cinema, which made it expedient to show new films to Stalin before they went on release, and in many cases to submit scripts to Stalin before shooting began.

After visiting Hollywood, he also conceived the idea of creating a similar centre for the film industry at a spot near

feature films
, only 45 were completed; in 1936, only 46 of 165; in 1937— his final year— only 24 of 62.

This may have been because he was operating under impossible conditions.

Alexander Barmine, who worked with Shumyatsky in Tehran, found him "gifted with astounding energy, capable of working all day and all night, eager and uncompromising... the stuff of which leaders are made" and believed that his job as head of the film industry was made impossible by the political demands made on him. By contrast, Jay Leyda, an American student who worked with Sergei Eisenstein, claimed that on the day Shumyatsky was eventually sacked "all of Moscow's film makers gave parties" to celebrate.[6]

Leyda's hostility to Shumyatsky resulted from what he saw as the systematic persecution of Eisenstein, who was prevented from completing a film for the entire time that Shumyatsky headed the film industry. Shumyatsky had a role in the suppression of Eisenstein's unfinished film Bezhin Meadow in 1937, though in the end it was Stalin's decision to ban it. On 18 March 1937 Shumyatsky delivered the opening speech at a three-day conference on cinema, which consisted mainly of an attack on Eisenstein, and on 28 March wrote a letter to Molotov denouncing seven people by name for conspiring to rescue the banned film and "discredit me as the stifler of the 'brilliant work of S. Eisenstein'". Four of those he named were arrested and shot. On 16 April, he sent Stalin a note suggesting that Eisenstein should never be allowed to make another film.[7] He was, if anything, even more hostile to the innovative director, Lev Kuleshov, whom he accused of not understanding the importance of a strong story line in films. He wrote that "a plotless form for a work of art is powerless to express an idea of any significance".[8] He claimed that this and other important lessons for film directors could be learnt by studying the works of Stalin, because "If only we were to collect all the theoretical riches of Joseph Vissarionovich's remarks on cinema, what a critical weapon we would have."[9]

Arrest and Death

On 31 December 1937, Shumyatsky and his wife were summoned to celebrate the New Year at Stalin's dacha, where guests were required to drink a toast to Stalin's health. Shumyatsky, who was teetotal and was repelled by the smell of alcohol, took only a small sip, upon which Stalin demanded to know why a subordinate would not drink to his health. According to his wife, Shumyatsky went home fearing the worst.

saboteurs
within the film industry. On 28 June 1938 he was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad.

Honours and awards

Family

Shumyatsky married Liya Isaevna Pandra (1889-1957), who took her husband's surname, a student of a paramedic school, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from the Siberian city of Kansk.[2] She joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. She was arrested on the same night as her husband, but was released late in 1939, because she was then dangerously ill, though unexpectedly, she recovered.[11]

They had two daughters, Yekaterina and Nora. Yekaterina was arrested with her parents on 17 January 1938.[12]

Nora Shumyatskaya (1909-1985) married Lazar Shapiro, (1903-1943), the Chairman of the Fire Brigade Union, who was arrested in September 1937, released in 1940.[11] He became an army captain who was killed in action in October 1943.[13] Their son, Boris Lazarevich Shumyatsky became a prominent art critic, and author of 200 works.[14] She was raped by a colleague while her husband was in prison, and conceived a second son, Andrei, in February 1940, whom she raised with her other son.[11]

Shumyatsky was posthumously rehabilitated, along with his widow and daughter Yekaterina Shumyatskaya in 1956.

References

  1. ISBN 978-1442268425
    .
  2. ^ a b c d "Шумяцкий Борис Захарович (1886-1938)". Мемориальний Музей "следственнаяя тюрьма НКВД" (Memorial Museum "The NKVD House of Interrogation"). M.B.Shatipov Museum, Tomsk. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  3. ^ a b c "Шумяцкий Борис Захарович". Сибирь и Дальний Восток в огне револоций и Гражданскойж бойны 1917-1922 (Siberia and the Far East in the flames of revolution and civil war, 1917-1922). V.D.Fedorova State Scientific Library, Kuzbass. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  4. ^ Trotsky, Leon (1969). Stalin. Panther. p. 255.
  5. ISBN 0-8179-1211-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  6. ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6
    .
  7. ^ McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse Kept Watch. pp. 165–166.
  8. ISBN 0-415-11595-7
    .
  9. ^ Taylor, and Christie. Inside the Film Factory. p. 208.
  10. ^ Bernstein, Arkady. ""Народный комиссар кинематографии" ("People's Commissar for Cinematography"". МызейЦСДФ (MuseumTSSDF). Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  11. ^ a b c Shumyatsky, Boris (grandson). "Нора Борисовна Шумяцкая (1909-1985)". Музей "Дом на Набережной". Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  12. ^ "Борис ШУМЯЦКИЙ журналист, организатор кинопроизводства, партийный деятель, политический деятель". МызейЦСДФ. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  13. ^ "Донесения о потерях, Шапиро Лазарь Матвеевич". Память народа 1941-1945. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
  14. ^ "Шумяцкий Борис Лазаревич (1937-2013)". Российская Академия Художесть (Russian Academy of Arts. Retrieved 3 November 2022.

Literature

Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East 1920-1927: A Documentary Survey, Stanford U.P., 1964 Richard Taylor, "Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s", in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, (eds.), Inside the Film Factory, Routledge Ltd., 1991.

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