Pavel Bazhov

Bazhov is best known for his collection of fairy tales The Malachite Box, based on Ural folklore and published in the Soviet Union in 1939.

His family, like most in factory towns, struggled to make ends meet and had virtually no political power in Czarist Russia.

He took part in many protests, the most famous one resulting in him receiving a note of political disloyalty from his reactionary teacher on his certificate.

In 1918, he joined the Bolshevik Party, volunteered for the Red Army, and was deployed into military actions in the Ural frontline.

From 1923 to 1929 he lived in Yekaterinburg and worked in the editorial board of the Krestianskaya (Peasants) Newspaper, as well as contributing his essays on old factory life conditions and the civil war throughout 1924.

It was also during this period that he wrote over forty tales on themes of Ural factory folklore that contributed to his collection, The Malachite Box.

Kuhn named Bazhov in the report on the 60th anniversary of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the Communist Party of Kazakhstan among those wonderful people, "who in the years of revolution and civil war, with a rifle, a plow, or a book, claimed a life on the Kazakh space, with high international quality, resilience, courage and heroism".

During the Second World War Bazhov worked with both Yekaterinburg writers and those already evacuated from different corners of the Soviet Union.

After the war his eyesight started weakening dramatically, but he went on his editing work, as well as collecting and creatively adapting local folklore.

The film was narrated by Yevgeny Vesnik, but also contained the unique recordings of Pavel Bazhov's voice.

Commemorative coin featuring Bazhov.