Pyotr Pavlenko

Pyotr Andreyevich Pavlenko (Russian: Пётр Андре́евич Павле́нко; 11 July 1899 – 16 June 1951), was a Soviet writer, screenwriter and war correspondent.

[1] Pavlenko's travels in the Soviet East in the early 1930s[2] furnished him with material for reevaluating and overcoming the heritage of oriental romanticism, a literary manner characteristic of the Pereval (The Pass) group of writers, with which he was associated.

He was summoned to NKVD headquarters in May 1934 to witness the interrogation of Osip Mandelstam, who had been arrested after a police informer had heard him recite the now famous Stalin Epigram.

His written assessment was that Mandelstam's verses - with the partial exception of his 'Ode to Stalin' - were "cold and dead" and "smelled" like the work of Boris Pasternak.

Shumyatsky was dismissed and shot soon afterwards, and Eisenstein was permitted to resume film making, with Pavlenko as his screenwriter.

Pavlenko also collaborated with Eisenstein on a proposed sequence of three films about the Great Fergana Canal, but this project was never completed.

The gallery proof of his review were ready, but it was not published, because Pravda's editors were warned that Stalin liked the film.

In collaboration with Mikheil Chiaureli, Pavlenko wrote the scripts for the films The Vow (1946) and The Fall of Berlin (1949).

Grave of Pyotr Pavlenko at the Novodevichy Cemetery