Boris Shumyatsky

Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky (Russian: Борис Захарович Шумяцкий) (November 16, 1886 – July 29, 1938) was the de facto executive producer for the Soviet film monopoly from 1930 to 1937. He was executed as a traitor in 1938, following a "purge" of the Soviet film industry, and much information about him was expunged from the public record as a consequence.

Shumyatsky was born in Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude) in the vicinity of Lake Baikal in Russian Siberia. He appears to have been active in communist circles by 1903. He was a member of the Bolshevik committee in Krasnoyarsk during the 1905 revolution, and was arrested for his role in organising a rail strike. He escaped and by 1907 was working underground in Vladivostok. Arrested again, he was deported to the same region of Siberia where Josif Stalin was in exile. Following the Russian Revolution he was a party functionary in Soviet Siberia, including a stint as premier of the Far Eastern Republic from November 1920 to April 1921. From 1923 to 1925, he represented Soviet interests in Iran, and after that was in charge of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and then a member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Party Central Committee back in Siberia.

In none of these capacities did he evidently have anything to do with film-making. Nonetheless, following a reorganization of the Soviet film industry he was selected by Stalin to become the head of Soyuzkino in December 1930. When Soyuzkino was dissolved and replaced by GUKF on February 11, 1933, he remained in charge and even with expanded powers over all matters of production, import/export, distribution and exhibition.

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