The party functionary who ran Soviet cinema as a state Hollywood: blockbusters, Oscars, and ideological control
When Andropov called after watching 'Siberiade' and demanded, 'Isn't this an anti-Soviet film?', Yermash replied, 'I'm a Siberian myself — that's how it was,' and the film stood.
Filipp Yermash chaired the USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) from 1972 to 1986, controlling all Soviet film production, distribution, and censorship throughout the Brezhnev stagnation era. Born to a Siberian peasant family and a decorated WWII sapper, he rose through the Komsomol and Sverdlovsk party apparatus to become cinema sector head at the Central Committee's culture department in 1962. As Goskino chairman, he pursued mass-audience blockbusters like 'Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears' and 'Air Crew' alongside auteur works by Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky, restructuring the industry around profitability in a bid to build a Soviet Hollywood. Removed after fierce criticism at the 1986 filmmakers' congress, his tenure nonetheless saw Soviet cinema win two Oscars.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1941–1945Red Army sapper; Order of the Red Star, Medal for Courage
- 1951–1956Second then First Secretary, Sverdlovsk City Komsomol
- 1956–1962Head, Dept of Science, Schools & Culture, Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee
- 1962–1972Cinema sector head → Deputy head, CC Culture Dept
- 1972–1986Chairman, USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino)
- 1976–1989Candidate member, CPSU Central Committee
Related historical events
Censorship practice under Yermash's Goskino
Goskino managed film production and also carried out censorship, and as its chairman Yermash stood where the mechanics of that censorship were set. The critic Armen Medvedev, who worked under him, judged that Yermash did what lay in his power to make censorship operate as gently as possible at the Goskino stage. He saved pictures that could be saved and, where he could, avoided wrecking them. When committee officials demanded some fifteen changes to Balayan's 'Flights in Dreams and Reality', Yermash pointed out that so many amendments meant shooting a different film, and asked what was wrong with it: did Balayan's film undermine the foundations of Soviet power? That remark decided the picture's fate.
Control did not work through outright bans alone. A film could be made effectively invisible by giving it a reduced category or approving a small number of prints, and distributors read the committee's signals closely: a picture that arrived in few copies, they reasoned, was not worth screening at all. All-union premieres and mass print runs, by contrast, signalled a film everyone was expected to see. Under Yermash finished films still had to pass several levels of approval. Sergei Solovyov's 'The Rescuer' was held up for eight months after the intervention in Afghanistan because its hero is seen off to army service, with additional footage demanded; unsure he could get Politburo approval, Yermash took a detour and asked Konstantin Chernenko, by then a powerful figure around Brezhnev, to watch it at his dacha.
Medvedev holds that Yermash's judgement was uneven. He defended Solovyov and his films to the end, and moved to rehabilitate banned works, yet personal sympathies and political caution also governed his choices toward Alexei German's 'Twenty Days Without War' and 'My Friend Ivan Lapshin' and in the case of 'Scarecrow'. Repression in his years at Goskino worked through an institutional mechanism and the discretion of higher bodies, not one man's taste alone.