Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky

Born on 4 (16) November 1886 in Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude) to a poor, large artisan family, he was a child of the tsarist expulsions: after the assassination of Alexander II, St Petersburg's Jews were driven beyond the Pale of Settlement and the family was resettled in Siberia. He had almost no schooling, describing his education as 'home' instruction, and besides Russian he spoke conversational Buryat and could reportedly get by in Yiddish. The family moved to Krasnoyarsk in 1896, and from 1898 he was an apprentice in the Chita railway workshops. He joined the RSDLP in 1903 and worked in the Krasnoyarsk depot from 1904.

In the 1905 revolution he commanded a Bolshevik combat detachment of around 800, which included a Red Cross unit of paramedic-school students and barricaded itself in the Krasnoyarsk railway workshops. Arrested after the rising was suppressed in Krasnoyarsk, he escaped a death sentence in January 1906. He then lived on the passport of Ilya Silin, used the underground nickname Ilya-Kon, and wrote for newspapers as Ilya Silin; in 1906 he was secretary of the Verkhneudinsk RSDLP committee and editor of PriBaikalye, Baikalskaya Volna and Zabaikalets.

Fleeing the police, he hid in Harbin from 1907 as a member of the Harbin party committee, co-editing the legal social-democratic newspapers Golos Manchurii and Mysl. He worked in Vladivostok in the summer of 1907 and took part in the armed uprising of Pacific Fleet sailors there. From the summer of 1908 he ran illegal work in Omsk, Tomsk and Chelyabinsk. Evading police surveillance, he spent August 1912 to July 1913 in emigration in Argentina, working on fruit farms and in a cardboard factory. On returning to Russia he was arrested in Krasnoyarsk and, after six months in prison, conscripted into the army, where he ran underground Bolshevik work in Krasnoyarsk garrison units and from 1914 published in Pravda.

After the February Revolution he was deputy chairman of the executive committee of the Krasnoyarsk Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and helped publish Izvestiya Krasnoyarskogo Soveta, Krasnoyarsky Rabochy and Sibirskaya Pravda, and was a delegate to the Seventh (April) Conference of the Bolsheviks. From April 1917 he headed the Central Siberian bureau of the RSDLP(b) Central Committee; he was a delegate to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, elected to the VTsIK in June 1917 and put on the Pravda editorial board. After the July Days he worked underground restoring the organisation and preparing the Sixth Party Congress, and in September 1917 was responsible editor of Rabochy Put.

In October 1917 he was sent as Central Committee plenipotentiary for Siberia and Mongolia and elected chairman of the Siberian regional bureau of the RSDLP(b). At the First All-Siberian Congress of Soviets in Irkutsk he was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia (Tsentrosibir) and proclaimed Soviet power from Chelyabinsk to Vladivostok in the night of 15–16 October. He directed the suppression of the Irkutsk mutiny and was wounded during the negotiations.

During the Civil War he was one of the leaders of the West Siberian partisans and opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In March 1918 he left Irkutsk with a Red Guard detachment to fight the German advance in Ukraine; after his detachment disintegrated he stayed in Western Siberia and in 1918 was on illegal footing in the Altai, Irkutsk, Biysk, Barnaul and Novonikolaevsk. From July 1919 he did political work in the 51st Division of the Red Army's Eastern Front, joined the Siberian bureau of the RKP(b) Central Committee in August 1919, and was chairman of the Tyumen provincial revkom and party committee (October 1919 – January 1920) and then of the Tomsk ones (spring 1920). From June 1920 he was chairman of the Dalburo of the RKP(b) Central Committee and foreign minister of the Far Eastern Republic, and from July 1920 chairman of its Council of Ministers.

When Shumyatsky was appointed chairman of Soyuzkino in 1930, the Soviet film industry suffered from chronic underproduction and financial disarray. He built a centralized production system, streamlined script censorship and project approval, and established state-led training for creative personnel. Under his leadership, Chapaev (1934) became the model of Socialist Realist cinema, drawing thirty million viewers in its first year. It was followed by Jolly Fellows (1934), the Maxim trilogy (1934–1939), Circus (1936), and The Thirteen (1937), all achieving domestic and international success. In 1935 he founded the first Moscow International Film Festival and chaired its jury. He organized regular Kremlin screenings for Stalin and the Politburo, keeping stenographic records of their discussions, a unique primary source on the inner workings of Soviet film policy. After a study tour of the United States in 1934, inspired by Hollywood's division-of-labor studio system, he envisioned a 'Soviet Hollywood' on the Crimean coast at Laspi Bay, designed to produce two hundred films a year; the Sovnarkom rejected the project on budgetary grounds in 1937. His book Cinematography of Millions (1935) remains a notable attempt to theorize the mass vocation of socialist cinema.