Yakov Sverdlov
About Yakov Sverdlov
In 1902, at the Nizhny Novgorod fair, young Yakov Sverdlov finds a press for an underground print shop. Maxim Gorky helps him raise the money to buy it. He also greases his hands with rosin, climbs a slippery pole, wins a pair of boots, and gives them to the peasant Trofimov, who had slipped off the pole. In 1905 he agitates among Ural workers. The worker's son Lyonka Sukhov stays attached to him. Arrested, he leads a hunger strike in prison and is exiled to Siberia. In 1917, in Petrograd, he shuts down a Socialist Revolutionary speaker at the Constituent Assembly and reads out the first Soviet decrees. As chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee he returns to Nizhny Novgorod, where Mironov is stirring trouble among people posing as allies.
Cast & crew
More about Yakov Sverdlov
Sergei Yutkevich directed the script by Boris Levin and Pyotr Pavlenko. Iosif Martov photographed it. David Blok wrote the music. The release date on Wikidata is 12 December 1940.
Themes
Background
A 1940 biopic of Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1917 until his death in 1919.
Making
Yutkevich cast Lyubashevsky, a stage actor, as Sverdlov and used Shtraukh and Kobaladze in the Lenin and Stalin parts common in films of that year.
Look
Iosif Martov shot the fair, the prison, and the 1917 assembly hall.
Music
David Blok wrote the score.
Preservation
The film survives and is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Leonid Lyubashevsky plays Sverdlov. Nikolai Kryuchkov plays Trofimov. Pavel Kadochnikov plays Gorky.
- Maxim Shtraukh plays Lenin. Andro Kobaladze plays Stalin. Nikolai Okhlopkov plays Feodor Chaliapin.
- Igor Smirnov plays Lyonka Sukhov as a child.
- Kino-Teatr.ru records a Stalin Prize, second class, for 1941, to Lyubashevsky and Yutkevich.
Awards
- Stalin Prize, second class (1941), to Leonid Lyubashevsky and Sergei Yutkevich
Scenes
- Sverdlov climbs the greased pole and hands the boots to Trofimov.
- He starts a hunger strike in the tsarist prison.
- He dismisses the Socialist Revolutionary speaker and reads the first decrees.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (1940. Яков Свердлов.webm)
