Grigori Aleksandrov

Aleksandrov walking the wire as Glumov for Eisenstein's Wise Man production

Aleksandrov was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1903. Starting at age nine, Aleksandrov worked odd jobs at the Ekaterinburg Opera Theater, eventually making his way to assistant director. He also pursued a musical education, studying violin at the Ekaterinburg Musical School, from which he graduated in 1917.

Aleksandrov came to Moscow after studying directing and briefly managing a movie theater. In 1921, while acting with the Proletcult Theatre he met a then 23-year-old Sergei Eisenstein. In 1923, Aleksandrov was given the main role in Eisenstein's adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1868 comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (Na vsyakovo mudretsa dovolno prostoty) and in Eisenstein's first film Glumov's Diary (Дневник Глумова), a short film that was included in the play.[4] Eisenstein and Aleksandrov collaborated on several plays before Eisenstein made his first feature-length film, Strike, which Aleksandrov co-wrote with Eisenstein, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valeryan Pletnyov. Next came Eisenstein's landmark The Battleship Potemkin, in which Aleksdanrov played Ippolit Giliarovsky. Aleksandrov co-directed Eisenstein's next two features, October: Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also their last works in the silent era.

Along with Eisenstein's other major collaborator, cinematographer Eduard Tisse, Aleksandrov joined the director when he came to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also traveled with them to Mexico for the filming of Eisenstein's unrealized project about the country. An edited version of the footage, known as ¡Qué viva México!, was put together by Aleksandrov in 1979.

Aleksandrov returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 under direct orders from Joseph Stalin. He directed a pro-Stalin film, International (Интернационал), the following year and after a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, he embarked on making the first Soviet musical, Jolly Fellows, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova, whom Aleksandrov later married. (Orlova had been previously married to an economist who was arrested in 1930.) She starred in his most successful films: Circus, Volga Volga, and Tanya.

The Great Patriotic War (June 1941) came when Alexandrov and his wife Orlova on vacation near Riga, Latvia. They hurriedly returned to Moscow. During one of the Nazi air raids, Aleksandrov had got a contusion and injured his spine. He made a propaganda movie Fighting Film Collection #4 with Orlova singing a new version of the famous march from Jolly Fellows: "A horde of dark villains has attacked our laboring and jolly people..."[5]

At the end of October 1941, with the other Mosfilm employees, Aleksandrov and Orlova were evacuated to Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR. Soon the director was sent to Azerbaijani Baku to run a local studio. There Aleksandrov and his wife made a film A Family which was banned from being released in theatres for "poorly reflecting the struggle of the Soviet people against the German fascist invader".[6] In September 1943, Aleksandrov was ordered to return to Moscow as manager-in-chief of Mosfilm studio.[7]

Aleksandrov's first postwar film was Springtime, another musical comedy starring Lyubov Orlova, as well as several other top-notch actors, including Nikolai Cherkasov, Erast Garin, and Faina Ranevskaya. He also made a movie about the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, obviously pushed by his Moscow Conservatory nurtured wife.

Popular public figures in the Soviet Union, Aleksandrov and Orlova had a difficult relationship with Stalin, who admired their films (he reportedly gave a print of Volga Volga as a present to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt) but frequently humiliated the pair.

He taught directing at VGIK from 1951 to 1957, Leonid Gaidai was among his students.[8] He also made several films about the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, including several about Vladimir Lenin.

• Order of the Red Star (January 11, 1935)
• Stalin Prizes:
  • First class (1941) for the film Circus (1936) and Volga-Volga (1938)
  • First class (1950) for the film Meeting on the Elbe (1949)
• People's Artist of the USSR (1948)
• Hero of Socialist Labour (1973)
• Three Orders of Lenin
• Order of the Red Banner of Labour, three times
• Order of the Friendship of Peoples (January 21, 1983)

Aleksandrov (second row, 2nd from the right) and his wife Orlova (with a postbag) in Moscow during the shooting of Fighting Film Collection #4 in August 1941

Internationally, Grigori Aleksandrov is consensually perceived by film critics as a lesser talented Russian-language version of the German director Leni Riefenstahl. Usually in this version the USSR under Joseph Stalin is equated to Adolf Hitler's Germany (see. Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism). Logically, this perception is often perceived by both the ethnic and non-ethnic Russians as a sign of stereotypical Western European attitude towards Russians because, unlike Hitler, Stalin was an ethnic Georgian (non-Slavic) who couldn't even speak the Russian language without a thick accent. According to the popular anti-Caucasian version, during Stalin's reign, the majority of ex-Empire had been occupied by a power-seeking foreign person who didn't represent both the Slavic ethnicity and, to a certain degree, even Russian language and culture, while traitorously benefiting from the anti-nationalist ideology of Marxism.[18][19] However, Aleksandrov is better known in the West for his early work with Sergei Eisenstein.

In Russia, Grigori Aleksandrov's pre-war movies have been credited for "helping to win the war", the Soviet Union's success against Nazis in the World War II.[20] For the same reason, his movies are still controversial in modern Russia, considering the cost of irreparable casualties and subsequent consequences leaving a room for a theory about Russians benefiting more from a Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II. By submission to Hitler, the USSR could have saved its non-Jewish population and approximately 20 millions of the Soviet people and, in the 1990s, the Russian cross in demography, after the country's ideological turn to the opposite 'righteous' direction, would not occur.[21][22] According to a poll, only 13 percent of Europeans believe USSR had played a key role in the liberation of Europe from Nazism.[23]

In 2016, a Russian-speaking Jewish actor Valentin Gaft said about Aleksandrov's movie: "Those [terrible] were happening and there was this film that outweighed everything. It had brought great joy to a part of the population."[24] According to this version, the people of the USSR could have successfully rebelled against Stalin in the early 1930s but the good-quality propaganda movies, like Aleksandrov's with his wife, had prevented them from overthrowing the inferior regime. And WWII, with the Slavs and the Jews making the majority of casualties, Eastern Front.

Following America's win in a Cold War in 1991, Orlova-Aleksandrov's movies about female empowerment, their 1936 box-office hit Circus with an American Catholic protagonist especially, were blamed for setting a losing trend for USSR cinema in a so-called propaganda war, eventually losing to its 1939 analog Ninochka trend which also included a movie Comrade X. Maya Turovskaya about Ninochka's connection to Circus: "This is the story of how a Soviet woman from the USSR came to France and stayed there because she fell in love with the French viscount. Unlike Marion Dixon, she does not seem to change the ideology, but in fact, just like in the Circus, not everything is well there, ideologically."[25] According to Ph.D. O. V. Ryabov, “the villainization of the USSR” as a whole was the main American cinema on this topic, but not the only one: "Summing up the results used in the process of villainization of the USSR. Hollywood representations of the Soviet order of performing the construction of "red representation". At the same time, they serve as a significant component of the discourse of “mysticism of femininity” described in the bestseller by Betty Friedan. Finally, I would like to emphasize that many plots and images of American cinema were used in the anti-communist discourse of the perestroika with its slogans "return to normalcy", including the "natural relationships between men and women."[26] According to a reviewer Evgeny Bazhenov, the American cinematographers were even using all the means, including pseudo-Cyrillic and typography with the inverted hammer and sickle to represent the G in a poster for the movie The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming"(1966) to dehumanize the ideological enemy while the Soviet filmmakers could never do the same quite effectively.[27]

In 2014, Gender scholar Natalya Pushkareva wrote the comparative analysis on women in science portrayal: "The heroine of Grigory Aleksandrov's film Springtime is the first character of physicist Irina Nikitina played by Lyubov Orlova. The scientist lived alone in a two-story, bourgeois-looking apartment with a housekeeper, she was drinking her tea from the finest porcelain and tamed solar energy. The government was forming such a stereotype about the life of scientists, the myth of wealth. And those who were then loyal to the authorities and dealt with the allowed topic only, they had dachas and apartments. For the comparison, let's take the 2013-2014 film A Second Breath, also about a woman physicist Masha Sheveleva. In this plot, the main character is cheated on by her husband, with no housekeeper, she has a cruel shortage of money (and there are two children in her arms), she is not accepted by the "nano center". That is as our cinema has evolved, after over half a century, from the image of a woman professor, the one to whom the Soviet government gave everything just for her work, to a modern scientific worker whose work is not appreciated and is not adequately being paid. And they try to put it into the minds that a women's personal happiness is more important than her success in science, and, if she wants a scientific achievement, she should look for a husband who will replace her in the family. I remember such phrases from the series (screenwriters are men): "You are a good woman, Masha, even though you're intelligent!" or "I don't need a bluestocking full of ideas, I need a wife!"... These are the ideological concepts of the ruling party, and women's organizations associated with it understand unequivocally: it is necessary to return women to the family, to increase the birth rate. This conservative turn towards pronatalist politics has been evident since the early 2000s."[28]

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