Great Soviet cinema... Movies that were watched by millions - “Battleship Potemkin”, “Start in Life”, “Chapaev”, “Jolly Fellows”, “Volga-Volga”, “Feat of a Scout”, “Quiet Don” , “The Cranes Are Flying”, “War and Peace”, “Prisoner of the Caucasus” - you can list your favorite films ad infinitum. But not everyone knows that the colossal empire of Soviet cinema was dominated by the struggle of various trends, creative differences, personal ambitions, and bureaucratic arbitrariness. The country's leaders kept cinema under special control. Stalin watched almost every new film. And the film “White Sun of the Desert” was released only with Brezhnev’s personal permission. Fyodor Razzakov talks in detail in his fundamental research about how the “Westerners” and the “native powers” fought, which ultimately led to the collapse of Soviet cinema, citing many unique and simply unknown facts from the lives of his favorite actors and directors...