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Stalin's Final Films explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.

The late Stalin era constitutes the most overlooked period of Russian and Soviet cinema history, largely because of its reputation for extreme censorship and resulting artistic stagnation. This article examines the censorship machine that developed in these years, using the memoir of film editor/censor Nelli Morozova in partnership with official resolutions and other archival material to explore what the so-called film famine looked like from within. It provides an overview of how the bureaucracy of film censorship was restructured and examines how it operated in practice, from the everyday absurdities to the small acts of intrepidity that defined what was at that point the most intensive system of film censorship the world had ever seen.

Stalin's Final Films explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.

Agrobacterium tumefaciens has long been known to transform plant tissue in nature as part of its infection process. This natural mechanism has been utilised over the last few decades in laboratories world wide to genetically manipulate many species of plants. More recently this technology has been successfully applied to non-plant organisms in the laboratory, including fungi, where the plant wound hormone acetosyringone, an inducer of transformation, is supplied exogenously. In the natural environment it is possible that Agrobacterium and fungi may encounter each other at plant wound sites, where acetosyringone would be present, raising the possibility of natural gene transfer from bacterium to fungus. We investigate this hypothesis through the development of experiments designed to replicate such a situation at a plant wound site. A. tumefaciens harbouring the plasmid pCAMDsRed was co-cultivated with the common plant pathogenic fungus Verticillium albo-atrum on a range of wounded plant tissues. Fungal transformants were obtained from co-cultivation on a range of plant tissue types, demonstrating that plant tissue provides sufficient vir gene inducers to allow A. tumefaciens to transform fungi in planta. This work raises interesting questions about whether A. tumefaciens may be able to transform organisms other than plants in nature, or indeed should be considered during GM risk assessments, with further investigations required to determine whether this phenomenon has already occurred in nature.

Stalingrad may have been the most popular battle in terms of film production, but it was not the battle that inspired record-breaking numbers of Soviet filmgoers to part with their rubles and kopeks. This honor rested instead with the much smaller-scale but no less defiant struggle on the outskirts of the Ukrainian mining town of Krasnodon, where a handful of young Soviets resisted a villainous occupying force to the point of losing their lives in a gruesome mass execution. These youths were the historic Young Guard immortalized in Aleksandr Fadeev’s Stalin Prize-winning novel and brought to life on the big

True to the escapist tendencies of cinema in general, and the political sensitivity of authoritarian state cinema more particularly, postwar rural films skipped over the social and political disruption caused by demobilization, wartime occupation, and destruction. But these were not the areas of whitewashing that earned the collective farm comedies and dramas of the late Stalin era such infamy. Instead, an altogether cruder application of lacquer darkened the legacy of rural cinema: namely, the treatment of the postwar crisis of privation. Wartime economic disruption spilled over into the postwar period as shortages persisted and famine set in, tainting the recent

According to one Soviet viewer, films that incorporated Stalin into their storylines did a great service to the public by providing an exciting opportunity to see the beloved leader. “After all,” he explained, “not everyone is destined to see comrade Stalin [in person]!”¹ Stalin’s turn as a lead character in postwar films was more than simply image promotion; it was also about facilitating encounter between the leader and his people. The question is, what did audiences make of such encounters? As we saw in the previous chapter, the films themselves modeled an array of proper responses to Stalin. Chiaureli’s historic

According to Khrushchev, late Stalin-era war films were sickening. Dedicated to “praising Stalin as a military genius,” they “surround[ed] Stalin with glory, contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth.”¹ This is an accurate description—but only of three out of the thirty-eight war films released in this period. The remaining thirty-five films tell a somewhat different story, as this chapter will reveal.² War films were the most popular type of Soviet-made feature to screen during 1945–50, after which point their production ceased until after Stalin’s death. They account for over a third of all feature film releases

In 1944, cinema returned to Moscow. Through the course of the year, the film industry made its way back to Leningrad and Kyiv too, crossing mountains and steppes from its temporary homes in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan during wartime evacuation.¹ It was anything but a triumphant return, however. Film workers were greeted not by familiar sets and soundstages and a seamless transition back into prewar working groups but by broken-down buildings stripped of furnishings and fittings, and reduced ranks of cadres that cast into sharp relief the cost of supplying the war front with cinema personnel to chronicle victory. For