Mikhail Bleiman


Mikhail Yurievich Bleiman was a Russian and Soviet screenwriter and film critic.

Life and career

Bleiman studied history and philology in Rostov between 1920 and 1923 and at the in
Moscow in 1923–1924. He worked as a journalist before specializing
in screenplays.
Bleiman’s first two scripts were made into satirical shorts: History of an Advance Payment, a morality tale about the dangers of alcohol abuse,
and The Adventures of Vanka Gvozd, a mockery of the Orthodox Church. Both were produced by a Komsomol-based company in Bleiman’s hometown Rostov-on-the
Don and directed by . In 1924, together with M.V. Bolshintsov, A.I. Grisenko, S.I. Brumer and other Rostov Komsomol members, he created the only non-governmental Komsomol film studio in Russia, Yuvkinokomol. At this film studio, according to his script, in 1926 his first full-length feature military adventure film "Order no...." about the exploits of young Rostov revolutionaries was shot.
Bleiman’s most well-known work is the screenplay for Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Citizen, a reflection of
Stalinist strategies within the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s, showing
Joseph Stalin’s struggle against the “leftist and rightist oppositions".
He was one of the creators of the script of the cult film "The Scout's Feat", for which he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1948.
Bleiman was also successful with war dramas, authoring or co-authoring the scripts for Yuli Raizman’s Moscow Sky, Leonid Lukov’s It Happened in the Donbas, and most notably for Boris Barnet’s Secret Agent, a spy film that won both the director and the
screenwriters Stalin Prizes.
Bleiman was accused of “formalism” in the early 1930s. In 1948–1949, despite his loyal service to
Stalin and the Communist Party, he became one of the major targets
of the anti-Semitic campaign “against cosmopolitanism.” Among
his noteworthy later screenwriting efforts are the Civil War story
Restless Youth —the directing debut
of Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov — and a hugely popular
espionage dilogy, The [Road to 'Saturn'] and The End of Saturn.
He was also a prolific film critic who regularly published his views on ideological and
aesthetic aspects of Soviet cinema.

Filmography

Literature

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