Marat Grinberg - Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar

To my grandfather Mikhail Goldis with gratitude and love

The Library of Congress system has been used throughout, with the following exceptions: when a Russian name has an accepted English spelling (e.g. Tchaikovsky instead of Chaikovskii; Chaliapin instead of Shaliapin), or when Russian names are of Germanic origin (e.g. Eisenstein instead of Eizenshtein; Schnittke instead of Shnitke).

I am grateful to Richard Taylor, Birgit Beumers and everyone at Intellect for taking on this project and making it a reality. I owe a debt of gratitude to Aleksandr Askol'dov, with whom I conducted a series of phone and Skype interviews in spring 2015. I am enormously thankful to Radislav Lapushin and Stuart Liebman for reading the manuscript in its entirety and offering their important suggestions. I am also thankful to Anna Kupinska and David Roizen for providing some of the archival materials and photographs. I am equally thankful to the staff at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art for providing a copy of the films script. I am fortunate to have been able to discuss The Commissar individually and at various conferences with Nancy Condee, Yuri Tsivian, Olga Gershenson, Harsha Ram, Luba Golburt, Harriet Murav, Elizabeth Duquette, and Katja Garloff. I am thankful to Hillary Larson for help with translating from French, and to Gennady Estraikh for help with understanding a Yiddish phrase in the film. Finally, writing this book was both an intellectual and personal journey for me. I was born in Kamenets-Podol'skii, ten years after The Commissar was shot there, and grew up with anecdotes about the production from my grandparents and mother, who then lived in the city: from spotting the actors and the crew around town, to the travails of a local Jewish woman who was injured by a horse during the shoot. I am grateful to my grandfather, mother and sister for their encouragement and support, and to my wife and son for their love, care and patience.