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Alexander Askoldov, Whose Banned Film Was Found, Dies at 85

Alexander Askoldov, a Soviet-era director whose one film, “The Commissar,” was banned by censors in the late 1960s for its sympathetic portrayal of a Jewish family, only to resurface two decades later to great acclaim, died May 21 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he had a home. He was 85.

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RICHARD SANDOMIR
, New York Times

Alexander Askoldov, a Soviet-era director whose one film, “The Commissar,” was banned by censors in the late 1960s for its sympathetic portrayal of a Jewish family, only to resurface two decades later to great acclaim, died May 21 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he had a home. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by Marat Grinberg, the author of a book about the film.

A Communist Party member and himself a former government film censor, Askoldov shot “The Commissar” in black and white in Kamenets-Podolsk, in western Ukraine. Based on the short story “In the Town of Berdichev” by Vasily Grossman, it tells of a ruthless Red Army commissar who becomes pregnant during the Russian Civil War, which followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and is sent to stay at the crowded home of a tinsmith, his wife and small children until she gives birth.

The commissar slowly warms to the family’s generosity and decency. Late in the film, as everyone hides in a basement while artillery shells are exploding outside, the sweet-tempered, Tevye-like tinsmith (played by Rolan Bykov) dances to a Klezmer melody, inspiring his frightened wife and children to join in.

Sitting in the darkness watching them, the commissar (Nonna Mordyukova) has a vision: a flash-forward of Jews, wearing Nazi-era stars on their clothes, marching to a death camp. The tinsmith is among them — he is dancing — and the commissar, with her baby, follows at the rear. In the Soviet era, there was probably never a right time for Askoldov to make a film that portrayed Jews in a favorable light, or worse, to evoke the Holocaust.

“Anti-Semitism is never not an issue in the Soviet Union,” Tarik Cyril Amar, a history professor at Columbia University, said in a telephone interview. “It’s always there.”

Like other Soviet filmmakers, Askoldov had to endure a heavy-handed process just to receive approval to make a film.

“Different committees were responsible for different stages of production, from script to shooting,” Grinberg, a professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College in Oregon and the author of “Aleksandr Askoldov: ‘The Commissar'” (2016), said in a telephone interview. “Filmmakers themselves were included in these committees, so the censoring was done not just via party bureaucrats but by the filmmakers.”

Askoldov understood the risks of making a film under such rigid monitoring.

“Every day during shooting something was objected to,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I had only one assignment for myself: to live through this day of shooting, because tomorrow it may be shut down.”

The film ultimately antagonized Gorky Film Studio in Moscow, where Askoldov worked, and the party’s censors. They demanded that he diminish the Jewishness of the story and eliminate scenes, like the death camp march and one in which the tinsmith’s children enact a pogrom.

He refused, and the film was banned and buried in the archive, with no expectation that it would ever be disinterred.

“When people ask me why my film was banned,” Askoldov said in the book “Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies” (2010), by Louis Menashe, “I answer, ‘Because the system of moral and political principles that this film depicts went against the system of moral and political principles that prevailed for 70 years in the USSR.'”

He was fired from Gorky — the stated reason was ineptitude — and stripped of his Communist Party membership. He and “The Commissar” fell into obscurity for 20 years, until the film’s unexpected revival.

Alexander Yakovlevich Askoldov was born on June 17, 1932, and grew up in Kiev, where he was exposed to the darkness of the Stalin era. His father was a Red Army commissar and factory director — he was also, Grinberg said, probably Jewish — who was arrested by Stalin’s secret police and killed in 1937. His mother, a doctor, was arrested and imprisoned soon after.

Askoldov later recalled that at only 5 years old, fearful that he would be taken away, he left the house and found his way to Jewish family friends, who hid him before one of his grandmothers took him in.

He studied philology at Moscow State University. For a time he worked with novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s widow to help her publish Bulgakov’s best-known work, “The Master and Margarita.”

But rather than pursue his ambition to be a literary scholar, Askoldov went to work for the Soviet Ministry of Culture as an editor and censor. He went on to complete a two-year course in screenwriting and directing at a film school in Moscow.

After “The Commissar” was suppressed, Askoldov, exiled from Soviet cinema circles, took various jobs, including staging musical shows at a Moscow theater.

But the openness, known as glasnost, ushered in by the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev presented Askoldov with an unexpected opportunity. As other banned films were being resurrected, he asked that “The Commissar” be released as well. By 1987, the Soviet authorities had agreed to let him restore and show it.

Askoldov edited what was found in the Gorky archive, combining it with a separate reel already in his possession containing the Holocaust scene.

“This reel was supposed to have been destroyed, but Askoldov’s assistant carried it out, under her skirt, and it sat under Askoldov’s bed for 20 years,” Olga Gershenson, a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe” (2013), said in a telephone interview.

Askoldov told a more dramatic version of the story. He said he had believed that the entire film had been destroyed, until he found it in a “heap of rotting cans” in the archive.

“A woman said that she had been ordered to burn the film, but she said she decided it might be useful some day,” he told The New York Times in 1988. “I knelt and kissed her feet.”

The film was first screened at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1987, and acclaim followed. Among its awards was the Special Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.

Reviewing “The Commissar” in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, Kevin Thomas wrote that it “belongs among the classics of the Russian cinema.”

He added that it was “hard to imagine anyone but a Russian being able to bring such sheer lyricism, passion and epic scope to so intimate a tale.”

“The Commissar” found another path to approval: In 1988, the Soviet Union submitted it as its official Academy Awards entry for best foreign-language film. (It was not nominated.)

In the years afterward, Askoldov taught film at various schools in Berlin, where he lived part time. Besides Gothenburg, he also had a home in Moscow.

He is survived by his wife, Svetlana; his daughter, Marina; and three grandchildren. Askoldov had hopes of directing more films. He was intrigued by the Soviet Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater.

“Shortly after the war ended, he was murdered on Stalin’s orders, and the Moscow Yiddish theater was closed forever,” Askoldov told The New York Times in 1988. “That was the beginning of Stalin’s mad anti-Semitic drive.”

But he never made that film, or any other. Grinberg suggested that a lack of financing was one reason; another, he said, was Askoldov’s continuing resentment over the banning of “The Commissar.”

“He couldn’t work for 20 years,” Gershenson of the University of Massachusetts said. “That would break your spirit.”

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