Kuz’mina, Elena

b. 17 February 1909, Tbilisi, Georgia, Russian Empire
d. 15 October 1979, Moscow

From FEKScentric Actress to Bolshevik Heroine

Elena Kuz’mina (1909-1979) is relatively unknown outside her national cinema. Born in the then Tsarist Empire province of Tbilisi (now Georgia) in 1909, this 1950 People’s Artist of the R.F.S.R. delivered several notable performances during the 1930s and 1940s, and ironically gained her award at a time when her screen career began to decline through no fault of her own. Although she delivered some notable film performances during the 1940s and early ’50s, roles became scarce due to an unofficial 1954 Party edict against actresses appearing in films directed by their husbands.¹ Stars known for their prominent roles in Stalin-era cinema also faced similar treatment, despite the fact that they may not have liked the Great Leader and avoided all but the most necessary attendance at an official event. The cases of popular Stalin-era actresses – such as Liubov’ Orlova (1902-1975), wife of Grigori Aleksandrov (1903-1983), and five-time Stalin Prize-winner Marina Ladynina (1908-2003), married to Stalinist director Ivan Pyr’ev (1901-1968) during the period of her greatest successes until 1954 – are other parallels. Kuz’mina had a versatile talent that could have easily adapted to the challenges of the post-Stalin era as her different performances in the 1940s reveal. Changing times and audience tastes reacted against her political celebrity roles as did the process of ageing that turned her from proto-Bolshevik heroine to babushka in her later work. Yet, though never glamorous in the Hollywood sense of the word, she was an extremely handsome actress but one whose facial features reflected the turmoil in her society and the changing (mostly negative) historical challenges it faced, especially in the 1930s as the looming spectre of another World War arose. Kuz’mina’s performances expressed a resilience and desire to overcome all odds no matter how challenging they were. Even though she died in some films, her death represented a sacrifice for the cause of solidarity and victory over adverse forces. 

Apart from her diaries published in Russian, very little information exists in English about her early life, but we can assume that following her marriage to future director Boris Barnet, who worked in the Kuleshov group as actor in Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Lev Kuleshov, 1924) and Pudovkin’s Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm over Asia, 1928), she belonged to that experimental group of creative actors in the pre-Stalinist period associated with the Kuleshov group and FEKS – the Factory of the Eccentric Actor – that G.M. Kozintsev (1905-1973) co-founded with Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990). It shaped the early careers of actors and directors such as Sergei Gerasimov (1906-1985), Oleg Zhakov (1905-1988), Sergei Martinson (1899-1984), Ianina Zheimo (1909-1987) and Kuz’mina herself who would star in FEKS’s feature The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon, 1929) before graduating from the Leningrad Institute of Stage Arts in 1930. As its name denoted, FEKS expressed a particular version of thespian eccentricity.² It was a movement in which “anything goes,” whether in excessive acting, editing, or cinematic technique, a movement to which the actress devoted all her youthful energies. 

These dynamic elements characterised Kuz’mina’s electrifying performance in The New Babylon, combining elements from Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) and La Débâcle (1892) with a depiction of the influential Paris Commune movement of 1870-1871 that ended in tragedy, something the future Bolsheviks learned from. Lenin must have felt relieved when his New Society outlived the ten-week period of existence of the Paris Commune. The directors “aimed at a mode of creative irreverence designed to relate Zola to the exuberant world of the Soviet avant-garde and show his revolutionary relationship to the present. By taking individual components and characters from the Zola text away from their original interrelationships, the FEKS group aimed to construct a new revolutionary artistic jigsaw. They treated Zola elements like individual shots on editing table and brought them into new relationships in a similar manner to Eisenstein’s early montage theories.”³ The Eisenstein association is not accidental since he had worked with the group during their second theatrical season in 1922. This also conditioned performances since they worked as dialectically composed compositions, functioning both as forces of socially constructed relationships as well as dialectical contradictions to an oppressively violent world, rather than as traditional thespian displays.

The New Babylon

Based on Zola’s moralistic shopgirl in Au Bonheur des Dames, Kuz’mina’s Louise begins the film as an oppressed worker but ends up embodying the dynamic forces of revolution when she joins the Commune, combining Zola’s original character with Communard fighter and future anarchist Louise Michel (1830-1905) functioning as an elemental force of revolutionary opposition by the excessive use of facial expression and body language. She opposes both the sexual advances of her boss in the beginning and an officer offering to save her life for sexual favours when she faces execution. Louise is committed to the cause like a future Bolshevik, trying in vain to enlist a weak soldier to the cause, fighting to the bitter end against the invading French forces, and facing execution defiantly. She expresses her contempt for the passive soldier (Pyotr Sobolevsky), based on Jean Macquart of La Débâcle, preferring death, consciously aware that the present Commune sacrifices will achieve their eventual goal in the future. As she later wrote: “While working on The New Babylon it was Zola who gave us the most. All of us read his works.”⁴ 

By “all of us,” she obviously includes directors, technical staff and fellow FEKS actors such as Gerasimov, Zhakov, Sobolevsky (1904-1977), Lyudmila Semyonova (1899-1990) playing a thinly disguised version of Zola’s Nana, Zheimo, and Pudovkin in the minor role of a police official. Kuz’mina was never a glamorous actress, her thin, pinched features associating her with the everyday world cinematically expressed in a socialist orientated cinema, though she could perform comedy as her next two (inaccessible) films show.

This feature appears in her next film, Odna (Alone, 1931). The film – again co-directed by Kozintsev and Trauberg, photographed by Andrei Moskvin (1901-1961), co-starring Gerasimov, Sobolevsky, and Zheimo – begun as a silent and was later re-edited to be one of Russian cinema’s first partial sound films. It again features an avant-garde musical score by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) but also one experimentally integrated with acting, sound effects, and agrarian and urban landscape.⁵ Kuz’mina plays recently graduated Leningrad teacher Elena Kuz’mina, the self-reflexive use of her actual name perhaps trying to retain some of the eccentricity of the FEKS school in an era when it was coming into disfavour in a narrative that is depicted more sparsely than its predecessor. Naively expecting a romantic life with boyfriend Sobolevsky in the big city, her dreams demolish when the Party sends her to the Altai region of Siberia. Kuz’mina’s acting style changes from naïve enthusiasm to grim realisation of her duty after Lenin’s widow Krupskaya (seen from behind) grants her request. In one of the few dubbed lines in the film, she erupts “I’m going anyway” against the temptations of an obviously pre-Bolshevik type who supports her first decision. Her acting here changes from the excessiveness of her previous film towards a more minimal performance.

Shostakovich’s score emphasises the naïve nature of her urban dreams, her belief about life being beautiful undermined by the composer using an excessively lyrical song as if subtly satirising one of Stalin’s optimistic lines before she arrives in the desolate rural area. Confronting corrupt kulaks exploiting the local people and a complicit Party chief (Gerasimov), Kuz’mina becomes more resolute in standing up for the children’s right to an education and exposing local corruption. The villains aim at her death by exposure when she tries to travel to the local Party headquarters in missing scenes that captions substitute for. When the images return, Kuz’mina appears very weakened, but her pupils surround her, one giving her a doll which the weak woman cherishes. While the villagers confront the Party boss and his kulak associates, a plane arrives to take the dangerously ill woman back to civilisation. Glancing at the children through the window, she promises to return. The plane flies over a flayed cow skin on a pole, the symbol of rection that the recent technologies of aviation and education will overcome.

Though less excessive than New Babylon, her acting style complements the film’s spartan direction and experimental score, showing early problems within the new Soviet society that resulted in the film’s withdrawal despite its early popularity. Despite its different nature, Kuz’mina’s performance is no less integrated, changing from naïve youthful dreamer in the earlier scenes that Shostakovich satirises to a more resolute Bolshevik heroine standing up for the values of education and justice in a new environment, but not falling into the role of sacrificial victim as her earlier heroine did in New Babylon.⁶ 

Kuz’mina’s next film was Gorizont (Horizon, 1932), directed by Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970). She played a minor role as Rose, the daughter of New York Russian Jewish immigrant Isaak, whom the Jewish character Horizon (Nikolai Batalov) encounters when he first moves to the United States. Horizon soon experiences the harsh realities of capitalism when he finds that Isaak’s business has collapsed. Kuz’mina first appears in close-up 30 minutes into the film, suggesting her sympathetic character. But she rebuffs Horizon’s first romantic gestures, preferring instead the materialistic offerings of Mr. Smith also favoured by her father. Rose abandons both Horizon and her father. Though portraying a woman from a different class and ethnic background, Kuz’mina’s role predicts her more mature American material girl role as Jessie West in Russkiy vopros (The Russian Question, Mikhail Romm, 1947) where consumer affluence overrules honesty and justice. In her last scene, Rose exhibits in close-up a moment of confusion and shame when comparing two non-affluent suitors with the Rolls-Royce holding the capitalist who has bought her body and soul.

Her next two films were directed by husband Boris Barnet (1902-1965). He is now recognised as one of the main talents of Soviet cinema. Featuring fellow Kuleshov Group alumnus Sergei Komarov (1891-1957) and Barnet himself in an uncredited role, Okraina (Outskirts, 1933) allowed the actress to deliver another performance as Manka, the daughter of Komarov’s character. Set in the pre-WWI and wartime era during 1914-1917, she portrays a local girl who forms a relationship with a German P.O.W. set to work in her village. Kuz’mina convincingly depicts a naïve young girl living in a village where her father plays checkers with a German until the war divides them. Later when a German P.O.W. is allowed liberty to seek work in the village, Kuz’mina appears a gawky adolescent wishing for friendship with the young man, revealing her knowledge of the German her father’s former friend has taught her. Okraina promotes international proletarian solidarity seen in other contemporary works such as Pudovkin’s Dezertir (The Deserter, 1933). The gawky young adolescent retreats to her room, applying amateur make-up to her lips making her look older. An attempt to find him work with her father fails. Although another villager employs him, the brief attempt at proletarian solidarity fails when other villagers beat him up because of his nationality. Towards the end of the film with the victorious October Revolution, Kuz’mina refuses to continue playing checkers with her bullying father, upsets the board, and is last seen marching in joyful solidarity with the Bolsheviks, evoking her New Babylon role. Historical circumstances see her developing maturity during the film. Some sublimated elements of FEKS performance style influence her performance as well as certain sequences earlier in the film, though not as much to attract official disapproval.

Outskirts

U samogo sinego morya (By the Bluest of Seas, 1936) is an unusual lyrical film for the grim years of Stalinist oppression and got Barnet in trouble for its departure from official Social Realist depictions. Two stranded sailors, Yussuf and Alyosha, are rescued after their boat capsizes and taken to an island on Soviet Azerbaijan. There they meet a young woman Mariya (Kuz’mina) filmed in lyrical cinematography like a force of nature who acknowledges their greeting by sticking out her tongue at them, then walking along the beach singing a song. This is the most glamorous image of the actress seen so far, but placed within the everyday world of work as she is directing a duck hunting expedition. When Alyosha (Nikolai Kryuchkov) gazes at her romantically during their second meeting, he discovers she is the collective farm director. Learning of the two men’s mechanical background, she invites them to help with the fishing since all the island mechanics are now serving with the Pacific Fleet. This leads to an unusual eternal triangle situation in which both men compete for her affections, something very unusual in this form of cinema. Wearing no artificial make-up, Kuz’mina resembles a “genius loci” of the community, shot against the elements that highlight her attractiveness, even resorting to the grotesque ordinary when she eats a fruit offered to her by Yussuf in one scene. The duo eventually discover that Masha already has a fiancé. Though disappointed, they re-unite signing a song celebrating a woman awaiting the return of her lover while Masha waves them goodbye, joyful in recognition of their restored friendship. Kuz’mina is the main star of this film, presenting a glamour associated with everyday life and devotion to the cause she serves as well as the community. Sincerity and love for humanity embody her persona.

Trinadtsat (The Thirteen, 1936) experienced its own version of a romantic triangle but this time off-set, leading to the end of Barnet’s marriage, with director Mikhail Romm encountering the woman of his life whom he would soon marry.⁷ Influenced by John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934) and set in the Civil War era of early Soviet society, the film deals with the plight of ten demobilised Red Army soldiers, Frontier commander Zhuravlev, his wife Maria, and an elderly scientist returning home. They become trapped in the desert by Basmachi bandits fighting for a limited water supply. Though billed as a supporting star, Kuz’mina’s role is less glamorous than in her preceding film. She works as part of a team, willingly submits to drill, supports her husband and men until he is killed, then takes up arms until her eventual death an hour into the film. Eventually, the last survivor is rescued by the Red Army riding in like the 7th Cavalry from Hollywood Westerns. Although a minor part of this film, Kuz’mina portrays the non-glamorous role of a Soviet heroine in a minimal manner, hiding her grief from the audience as she weeps over the body of her deceased husband, and dies heroically in battle as part of a threatened team. Although ideological, emphasising the collective as opposed to the individual, the actress shows that she can deliver qualities of independent fortitude and resilience to her role in the same way as her more overtly dramatic performances in The New Babylon and By the Bluest of Seas, via a necessary subordination of charismatic aspects of screen performance to the context of the film in which she appears.

She later appears in Ukrainian populist Igor Savchenko’s propagandist pre-Hitler/Stalin Pact Vsadniki (Riders, 1939), re-edited for 1944 American distribution as Guerilla Brigade. Set in 1918, Kuz’mina does not appear until 54 minutes into the film, working in the field and singing a traditional song, her demeanour revealing she will take no nonsense from any man, whether friend or foe. She portrays Ukrainian patriot Oxana, later forced to function as a decoy with fellow villagers to trap the Red guerilla force. Dressed in national costume, she begins to sing a different song from that of her fellow victims, rushing ahead to perform a traditional dance. While engaging in pirouettes, she manages to oppose her controller dressed in national costume, dances forward, knocks the man to the ground with her fist and runs to warn her allies. Despite a deadly wound, she later uses a bayonet to good effect against a Hun who has shot an unarmed female in the back, urges her fiancé to pursue a treacherous German spy, and sees eventual victory over “beastly Huns” alongside victorious Soviets who threaten the invader with destruction. 

Though director Romm refers to Balzac and Tolstoy as key influences, Mechta (Dream, 1943) resembles a merger of Gorki’s The Lower Depths (1902) with Stalinist pathos melodrama. Peasant girl Anna (Kuz’mina) leaves her impoverished parents, seeking work in Western Ukraine then under Polish control. Exploited both by the nightclub that employs her and her landlady, she initially appears as a clumsy, naïve victim of capitalism while her brother takes part in a revolutionary group. When she receives privileged close-ups in the film, her ability as a screen actor appears. When expelled from the city 64 minutes into the film, her final facial gestures show a combination of despair, recognition of the kind driver who has driven her there for free, and then fortitude in facing whatever awaits her. The sequence ends with her dwarfed by her surroundings. In her search for work, temptations towards prostitution for survival, Anna reveals herself to be a strong woman surviving hardship. Her refusal to name her brother’s friend Tomash Kruticky (Valetin Schegelov) after undergoing brutal Polish police torture, revealing facially her love for him before donning a blank expression, is screen acting at its finest. Anna is the only one of the main characters to reach the Soviet Union and when she returns at the end of the film as a mature activist to show one character that his engineering dreams have been fulfilled in Russia, she learns of Tomash’s execution. Again, her silent close-up when she learns of this is both fine acting and Kuz’mina’s developing characterisation of the contemporary resilient Soviet heroine.

Chelovek No. 217 (Girl No. 217, Mikhail Romm, 1945) is Kuz’mina’s most distinctive wartime performance where she embodies symbolically a contemporary Mother Russia persona expressing the oppression and resilience that many Soviet women faced in the fight for their very existence. The film opens with a victorious 1944 procession through a liberated city where the Red Army parade their humiliated Wehrmacht prisoners. When one woman expresses pity for a limping, scholarly-looking prisoner, the prematurely aged Tanya Krylova (Kuz’mina) begins to educate her over her misplaced sympathies. The film moves into flashback showing Tanya, her young friend Klava (Anna Lisyanskaya), and male prisoners in 1942 put on cattle trucks to become slaves in Germany. Fearing separation, Tanya tries to exchange a number with another prisoner before being purchased at an auction organised by the S.S. and sent to unpaid labour in a grotesque bourgeois German household, the Krauss family, who resemble George Grosz caricatures. While there, she is treated like a trained animal forced to perform domestic tasks and sharing a room with another Russian slave, scientist Sergei Ivanovich (Vasily Zaychikov) who teaches her survival tactics and stimulates her into hopes of returning home. When Tanya hits Rudolf (Pavel Sukanov), the opportunistic prospective son-in-law of the greedy family, she suffers humiliating solitary confinement, a montage of silent scenes revealing both her despair and resilience. Memories of her kind father, school graduation, and first dance stimulate her during this ordeal. She returns to her original location, finding an ailing Klava there, and is victimised by an ugly family reunion involving Eastern Front veterans Max Krauss and his thuggish friend Silent Kurt who tries further humiliation of a defiant Tanya. Both murder Sergei. She takes revenge on her two Eastern Front oppressors, her hair prematurely greying, and escapes from the house with Klava before a Soviet airstrike demolishes it. Klava dies from malnutrition, leaving a now white-haired Tanya to mourn her before returning. The film returns to 1944 with Rudolf recognising the defiant Tanya watching him before allowing Kuz’mina to condemn not just the Nazis but the whole German people for what she and others have suffered. It is both a striking and ideological moment allowing Kuz’mina to articulate the feelings of her generation. 

Girl No. 217

Based on a play by poet and journalist Konstantin Simonov (1915-1979), Romm’s The Russian Question, like Aleksandrov’s Vstrecha na Elbe (Meeting on the Elbe, 1949) is strongly affected by the change in American-Soviet relations influenced by Churchill’s notorious March 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech that launched the Cold War. Both films mention HUAC but Romm’s film also mentions the spectre of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia as well as a corrupt American press changing the wartime collaborative mood to one of aggression. Sincere journalist Harry Smith (Vsevolod Aksyonov) refuses to betray his principles by writing a book of Cold War propaganda. His wife Jessie West (Kuz’mina) eventually leaves him. Set mostly in America with Russian actors, Kuz’mina delivers a virtuoso performance as Smith’s wife who once abandoned him in wartime, then marries him hoping they embark on a dream of post-war American affluence. As well as portraying a shallow character, she wears glamorous costumes and make-up in contrast to her earlier roles, trying to still be with her abandoned husband but finding the pressure too much in the end, resulting in her leaving him. It is another virtuoso performance, this time revealing a character less resilient than her previous heroines but one opportunistic, refusing to return to her abusive former lover at the end, but lacking the integrity to remain with her husband who faces further persecution at the end of the film. 

In the Stalin Prize-winning Sekretnaya missiya (Secret Mission, Mikhail Romm, 1950), she plays intrepid Soviet agent Mariya Glukhova out to foil the endeavours of Republican Senator Allan (Nikolai Komissarov) and fellow businessmen who fly to Germany in January 1945 ready to do a deal with Krupp and Himmler so Americans can join the Nazis against Russia. A malevolent Winston Churchill (Mikhail Vysotsky) plots his own deal with Martin Borman (Vladimir Belokurov) only to find his plans destroyed and vowing before a bust of Napoleon that the victorious Soviet Union will face post-war retaliation. Admittedly propagandist like The Russian Question, Kuz’mina’s self-sacrificing heroine dominates the film portraying aptly a female constantly in jeopardy by discovery.⁸

Her last performance in a Romm film was playing Emma Hamilton in Korabli shturmuyut bastiony (Attack from the Sea, 1953), sequel to the colour production Admiral Ushakov (1953) featuring Ivan Pereverzev (1914-1978) in the title role of the heroic Admiral forced to retire by Tsar Nicholas I despite his naval achievements. Despite her non-starring role, Kuz’mina dominates the screen first dressed in glamorous period costume dominating the weak males around her and quite willing to be the heroic Admiral’s “good angel” as she has been to Nelson, a line delivered with a knowing glance. Unfortunately for her, the non-corruptible Admiral cannot be bought by this ancestor of Jessie West, and she leaves in a huff turned down for the first time in her life. 

Changing circumstances following Stalin’s death led to Kuz’mina’s fall from stardom and brief appearances in character roles in film and television. In 1956, she appeared as Aurora Bompas in George Bernard Shaw’s one-act play Kak on lgal eyo muzhu (How He Lied to Her Husband), showing her accomplishment as a stage actress in the first film directed by former NKVD agent and VGIK graduate Tatyana Berezantseva (1912-1995). Berezantseva would later direct her in the film version of Chekhov’s Nikt nie zna prawdy (Duel, 1961) in a supporting role as Mariya Konstantinova. Between these films, she appeared briefly as Vera Vasilyevna Kasjkadamova in Valentin Nevzorov’s Semya Ulanovykh (The Ulyanov Family, 1957), a film about Lenin’s early years, family life, and his first involvement with politics.

By this time, the days of Kuz’mina’s stardom had long passed and she soon began to specialise in character supporting roles in Russian television movies and mini-series as she gradually began to age. She appears in the first of her babushka roles in a 1976 episode of the Mosfilm television historical mini-series Vechnyy zov (Eternal Call) as Evdoshikha and in a similar performance in the 1974 TV movie Vylet zaderzhivayetsya (Flight Is Postponed, Leonid Maryagin) as well as briefly in the 45-minute TV short about a collective farm Zemlyaki (Fellow Countrymen, Valentin Vinogradov, 1975). Fortunately, she made her last appearance as the mother of an alcoholic son in Beda (Trouble, 1977) directed by Dinara Asanova (1942-1985),⁹ one of the most popular and acclaimed female directors of the late Soviet Union whose significance was far more prominent than Tatyana Berezantseva. In this way, although much older, Kuz’mina’s career had come full circle since she ended her career with an innovative director whose independently-minded films paralleled directors such as Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Barnet with whom she achieved remarkable success.

Alcoholism then, in the Tsarist past and contemporary present, is a fundamental problem in Russia. But, despite its ideological associations with an “old order” as in the films of Dziga Vertov, mainstream Soviet cinema preferred not to show its “dirty linen” in public, especially with its Western rivals. Trouble is a film that deals with the issue directly, emphasising the personal and social consequences of alcoholism, but not dangerously associating it with a dream that has failed. Asanova’s approach to that and other problems in her society followed an indirect method of representation, one that would not fall prey to the forces of censorship. Many Soviet viewers who knew of Kuz’mina’s earlier associations with an idealist (though propagandist) phase of Russian cinema might have drawn comparisons with this role in her final film? It is hard to tell. Whereas her first film referred two important Zola texts, her final work reveals the influence of the writer’s warning against the dangers of alcoholism, L’Assommoir.

In the first part of the film, prior to her son’s arrest and imprisonment for robbery, Kuz’mina is an aged Mother Russia powerless to help her son along with his wife who will eventually divorce him. When she decides to visit his prison on a long journey taking over five days, close-ups emphasise the pathos on her face as well as point-of-view shots showing a younger generation (Asanova’s major focus of interest in her films) soon to face the perils of adulthood. At her destination, the prison staff treat her with respect and sympathy, with the brief time she spends with her son leading to flashbacks of happier times and his realisation of what he has lost due to his alcoholism, a once-loving wife and baby son. These are lyrical scenes often aided by Kuz’mina’s return to techniques of silent cinema acting, expressing regret and sorrow by facial and bodily gesture far removed from her early years with FEKS. The final image is of her outside the prison after a poignant visit to her incarcerated son looking at a fruit blossoming on the trees in a snowy landscape. She has promised to be alive for him once he finishes his sentence so they can begin a new life together far away from the village and its alcoholic temptations and bad companionship that brought about his L’Assommoir form of La Débâcle. A different hope from that expressed by New Babylon, but something significant in the historical star status of this actress who has now come full circle in her Zola associations, now expressed in a new form towards the decline of the Soviet Union and its cinema in which she played crucial roles. Perhaps she read L’Assommoir again, as she may have once done, when working on The New Babylon and seen its relevance to one of the major problems affecting Russia. Yet, unlike Zola, she and Asanova intended to conclude the film with an image of tentative hope? 

Trouble

Kuz’mina’s acting career echoed all the major changes in Soviet society from the avant-garde hopes in The New Babylon to the pessimism indicative of “The Brezhnev era of stagnation.” Yet, despite her negative role as a materialistic American woman in The Russian Question who chooses not to “stand by her man,” her performances echo all the main changes that occurred in her society during the peak of her career. That she did not accomplish more is no reflection on her proven abilities, but those of a society where the ideological often took precedence over creativity, sometimes with dire result. Yet, in the case of Kuz’mina and other talented actors and directors, this important latter element broke through in surprising ways. 

In memory of Tony Williams, 1946-2026.

Filmography

• Novyy Vavilon (The New Babylon, Grigoriy Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, 1929)
• Dvadtsat dva neschastya (Twenty-Two Misfortunes, Sergei Bartenev & Sergey Gerasimov, 1930), comedy short
• Vesyolaya voyna (The Merry War, Nikolay Dirin & Pavel Veysbrem, 1931)
• Odna (Alone, Grigoriy Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, 1931)
• Tri soldata (Three Soldiers, Aleksandr Ivanov, 1932)
• Gorizont (Horizon, Lev Kuleshov, 1932)
• Okraina (Outskirts, Boris Barnet, 1933)
• U samogo sinego morya (By the Bluest of Seas, Boris Barnet, 1936)
• Trinadtsat (The Thirteen, Mikhail Romm, 1936)
• Vsadniki (Riders aka Guerilla Brigade, Igor Savchenko, 1939)
• Mechta (Dream, Mikhail Romm, 1943)
• Chelovek №217 (Girl No. 217, Mikhail Romm, 1945)
• Russkiy vopros (The Russian Question, Mikhail Romm, 1947)
• Sekretnaya missiya (Secret Mission, Mikhail Romm, 1950)
• Korabli shturmuyut bastiony (Attack from the Sea, Mikhail Romm, 1953)
• Kak on lgal eyo muzhu (How He Lied to Her Husband, Tatyana Berezantseva, 1956), short film
• Semya Ulyanovykh (The Ulyanov Family, Valentin Nevzorov, 1957)
• Duel (The Duel, Tatyana Berezantseva & Lev Rudnik, 1961)
• Vechnyy zov (Eternal Call, Valeriy Uskov & Vladimir Krasnopol’skiy, 1973-1983), TV miniseries
• Vylet zaderzhivayetsya (Flight Is Postponed, Leonid Maryagin, 1974), TV movie
• Zemlyaki (Fellow Countrymen, Valentin Vinogradov, 1975), TV movie
• Beda (Trouble, Dinara Asanova, 1977)

Endnotes