Boris Gusman

Boris Yevseyevich Gusman (1892–1944) was a Soviet author, screenplay writer, theater director, and columnist for Pravda. As deputy director for the Bolshoi Theatre and later director of the Soviet Radio Committee Arts Division, Gusman played an important role in promoting Sergei Prokofiev's music in the USSR and internationally. Gusman was arrested during the Great Purges of the late 1930s, and died in a labor camp in 1944.

As a young man Gusman was a violinist and played for the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra of the Sheremetev family. Prior to the Russian Revolution and during the First World War, Gusman associated with intellectuals and critics around the Enchanted Wanderer magazine, including Dimitri Kruchkov and Victor Khovin, both members of the Ego-Futurist movement. In 1917 he moved to Nizhny Novgorod to marry the daughter of a merchant, who soon gave birth to a son, Israel Gusman. Gusman also became active in the local Bolshevik branch in Novgorod; he joined the Communist Party in 1918, and by 1920 was named the editor of its newspaper, the Nizhny Novogorod Workers' Leaflet (later the Nizhny Novgorod Commune).

It was in 1921 that Gusman and his family moved to Moscow, where he began writing for Pravda. He was recognized as an important film critic, and from 1923 onwards headed Pravda's theatre section. Gusman rejected arguments among some Soviet filmmakers, associated with the Proletkult movement, that contributing to a new Soviet cinema required abandoning the history of film altogether. Gusman wrote that the new cinema "must be built brick by brick, making use of everything that is healthy about the New World, and that which is good about the old." Gusman responded favorably to candid films pioneered by Dziga Vertov called Kino-Pravda. He described them as "lively… striking… and interesting," but criticized the lack of connection between scenes and the absence of unifying themes.

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