Motion Picture Administrator. A career Communist bureaucrat with no knowledge of movies, he served as head of the USSR's film industry during the 1930s. Under his nominal leadership the once truly revolutionary Soviet Cinema was strong-armed into churning out lifeless propaganda, at the expense of both art and entertainment. Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky was born in Verhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude), Siberia. He was an active Bolshevik from his teens and after the 1917 Revolution held various ministerial and diplomatic posts, becoming a member of the Party Central Committee in 1926. In 1930 dictator Josef Stalin appointed him chairman of Soyuzkino (later the GUKF), the new ruling body that oversaw all motion picture production in the USSR, with the task of exercising strict government controls on the medium. Acting on Stalin's orders, he introduced rigid censorship, stifled personal expression, and banned the import of foreign films as a "harmful influence". Movies now had to be produced along the lines of "Socialist Realism", which demanded a simplistic, uncritical view of Soviet life, and even comedies and historical epics had to be viewed through an ideologically "correct" lens. Filmakers of the caliber of Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov, and Kuleshov, who did such groundbreaking work in the 1920s, were bullied into depressing conformity. The greatest of them all, Sergei Eisenstein, was singled out for persecution by Shumyatsky and was unable to complete a single project during his tenure. (He dogged the shooting of Eisenstein's "Bezhin Meadow" for two years before finally scrapping the film, at a cost of millions). Although he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his efforts, ambition and inefficiency soon proved his undoing. In the summer of 1935 Shumyatsky made an extensive tour of American studios and came back with grandiose ideas of building a Soviet Hollywood, "Kinograd", in the milder climate of Odessa in Ukraine, where all of his country's future moviemaking would be based. This would have amounted to his own little fiefdom away from Moscow, and nothing came of the scheme. Instead he began drawing fire from the Kremlin for falling short of his production quotas, a consequence of his hopelessly bureaucratized methods. Of the 360 films he planned between 1935 and 1937, only 115 were made and some of these were never released. Even worse, the 20th anniversary of the Revolution in 1937 came and went with only one acceptable film, Mikhail Romm's "Lenin in October" (a last-minute rush job), to mark the occasion, an oversight that left Stalin furious. In December 1937 Shumyatsky was relieved of his duties and the following month he was denounced as "politically blind" on the pages of Pravda. He disappeared soon afterwards. For years he was rumored to have been put in charge of a small factory in Siberia, but it was later revealed he had been arrested, tried for sabotage, and shot on July 29, 1938. Shumyatsky's legacy was negative and lasting: the Stalinist policies he helped force into place would mar Soviet Cinema for the rest of its history.