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For the past two years, research groups and universities have been exposed to the novel and unpredictable conditions of life during the viral pandemic, and to the constantly shifting restrictions on normal academic activities that have accompanied it. In particular, personal contacts—between teachers and students and between colleagues—have to a large extent been difficult or impossible. For some, the social restrictions have been a disaster, while others have found them to be an insignificant nuisance, or even welcome. Participants of the “Forum” discuss, how the pandemic has affected their own (work) situation and the situation at their home institution, whether the enforced (self-)isolation has created any new types of working practices or social relations that are desirable to persist in the future, and whether the humanities and social sciences have evolved any new research questions and topics that directly derive from the pandemic, the social restrictions associated with it, and efforts to fight its effects.

TWEAK (tumor necrosis factor-like weak inducer of apoptosis) is a member of the TNF superfamily that controls a multitude of cellular events including proliferation, migration, differentiation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, and inflammation. TWEAK control of these events is via an expanding list of intracellular signalling pathways which include NF-κB, ERK/MAPK, Notch, EGFR and AP-1. Two receptors have been identified for TWEAK – Fn14, which targets the membrane bound form of TWEAK, and CD163, which scavenges the soluble form of TWEAK. TWEAK appears to elicit specific events based on the receptor to which it binds, tissue type in which it is expressed, specific extrinsic conditions, and the presence of other cytokines. TWEAK signalling is protective in healthy tissues, but in chronic inflammatory states become detrimental to the tissue. Consistent data show a role for the TWEAK/FN14/CD163 axis in metabolic disease, chronic autoimmune diseases, and acute ischaemic stroke. Low circulating concentrations of soluble TWEAK are predictive of poor cardiovascular outcomes in those with and without diabetes. This review details the current understanding of the TWEAK/Fn14/CD163 axis as one of the chief regulators of immune signalling and its cell-specific role in metabolic disease development and progression.

Background:Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) is partly driven by autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic beta cell, facilitated by the release of inflammatory cytokines, including IFN-γ, TNF-α and IL-1β by cells of the innate immune system. Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) have been used to counteract autoimmunity in a range of therapeutic settings due to their secretion of trophic and immunomodulatory factors that ameliorate disease independently of the cells themselves.Objective:The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the secretome of human bone-marrow derived MSCs on cytokine-driven beta cell apoptosis.Methods:All experiments were conducted in two insulin-secreting islet cell lines (BRIN-BD11 and βTC1.6) with selected experiments confirmed in primary islets. MSC secretome was generated by conditioning serum-free media (MSC-CM) for 24 hours on sub-confluent MSC populations. The media was then removed and filtered in readiness for use.Results:Exposure to IFN-γ, TNF-α and IL-1β induced apoptosis in cell lines and primary islets. The addition of MSC-CM to cell lines and primary islets partially reversed cytokine-driven apoptosis. MSC-CM also restored glucose-stimulated insulin secretion in cytokine-treated cell lines, which was linked to improved cell viability following from cytokine challenge. Characterization of MSC-CM revealed significant concentrations of IL-4, IL-10, PIGF and VEGF. Of these, IL-10 alone prevented cytokine-driven apoptosis. Furthermore, the inhibition of IL-10 through the addition of a blocking antibody reversed the anti-apoptotic effects of MSC-CM.Conclusion:Overall, the protective effects of MSC-CM on islet beta cell survival appear to be largely IL-10-dependent.

TWEAK (tumor necrosis factor-like weak inducer of apoptosis) is a member of the TNF superfamily that controls a multitude of cellular events including proliferation, migration, differentiation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, and inflammation. TWEAK control of these events is via an expanding list of intracellular signalling pathways which include NF-κB, ERK/MAPK, Notch, EGFR and AP-1. Two receptors have been identified for TWEAK - Fn14, which targets the membrane bound form of TWEAK, and CD163, which scavenges the soluble form of TWEAK. TWEAK appears to elicit specific events based on the receptor to which it binds, tissue type in which it is expressed, specific extrinsic conditions, and the presence of other cytokines. TWEAK signalling is protective in healthy tissues, but in chronic inflammatory states become detrimental to the tissue. Consistent data show a role for the TWEAK/FN14/CD163 axis in metabolic disease, chronic autoimmune diseases, and acute ischaemic stroke. Low circulating concentrations of soluble TWEAK are predictive of poor cardiovascular outcomes in those with and without diabetes. This review details the current understanding of the TWEAK/Fn14/CD163 axis as one of the chief regulators of immune signalling and its cell-specific role in metabolic disease development and progression.

TNFAIP3 encodes a zinc finger protein called A20, which has potent anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic properties. A20 promotes beta-cell survival and protects against islet graft rejection in experimental models. The current study sought to investigate the mechanisms underlying the protective role of A20 in the pancreatic beta-cell. Two islet cell types were used for experiments: the insulin-secreting BRIN-BD11 cell line and human islet cells. A20 was silenced using siRNA against TNFAIP3, and knockdown was confirmed by qPCR and immunostaining of cells. Cell viability, cytotoxicity and apoptosis were assessed using the ApotoxGlo assay. Glucose-stimulated insulin secretion and production of inflammatory cytokines (TNFa, IL1b and IFNg) were measured by ELISA. Expression of beta-cell regulatory genes (Abcc8, Kcnj11, Kcnq1, Gck, Scl2a2) and transcription factors (Hnf1a, Pdx1, Nkx6.1, Ngn3) was determined by qPCR. A20 deficiency increased apoptosis, impaired glucose-induced insulin secretion, and reduced expression of beta-cell regulatory genes and transcription factors. Addition of recombinant A20 normalized gene expression profiles. TNFa, IL1b and IFNg were elevated in A20 deficient cells and found to independently elicit changes in gene expression. Analysis of PCR array data suggests that A20 action in the beta cell is largely, although not exclusively, driven by the P65 subunit of NF-kB. The current report demonstrates a role for A20 in controlling beta-cell integrity and survival, which likely results from the regulation of inflammatory signalling. Of particular note is the impact that A20 deficiency has on the expression of transcription factors regulating the maturation and normal function of beta cells.

GWAS studies have identified a number of SNPs connected to the development of type 1 diabetes (T1D). It is unclear how these variants confer risk for T1D development and whether this is based on direct effects on the beta cell, or whether the systemic inflammatory environment is detrimental to the beta cell. Using CRISPR mediated homology directed repair (Life Technologies), T1D risk variants rs10517086 and rs1534422 were introduced into the BRIN-BD11 beta cell line and the Jurkat T-cell line. Experiments were conducted in BRIN-BD11 cells expressing each variant and in native BRIN-BD11 cells treated with conditioned media from Jurkat cells expressing each variant. ApoTox GloTM (Promega) was used to assess cell viability, cytotoxicity and apoptosis. In all instances, cell viability and cytotoxicity were unchanged following the introduction of the two variants. However, rs1534422 significantly (P Disclosure W. Ratajczak: None. S. Atkinson: None. C. Kelly: None. Funding European Union Regional Development Fund; European Union Sustainable Competitiveness Programme for Northern Ireland; Northern Ireland Public Health Agency; Ulster University; Northern Ireland Department of Employment and Learning

Central necrosis hampers the formation of highly biofunctional Pseudoislets (PIs), which consist of aggregates of insulin-secreting pancreatic β-cells. Necrosis arises because of a shortage of nutr...

The production of “major films” was an insistent preoccupation of Soviet cinema’s regulatory bodies both at government and at Party levels. A director regarded as particularly successful in this respect was Gleb Panfilov. His 1975 film, May I Speak?, addressed issues of personal responsibility. The balance of public and family duties, which were of enormous importance in political debates at the time the screenplay was written, and its sympathetic portrait of a leading official were reassuring to commentators at Goskino and in Party offices at various levels. Panfilov was, unlike most younger artists at Lenfilm, a member of the Party and valued his parents’ Communist principles. The argument of some post-Soviet commentators—that May I Speak? represents a veiled attack upon its protagonist, Elizaveta Uvarova—is difficult to sustain. Yet Uvarova remains an ambiguous figure, and the treatment of her is enigmatic, not least in terms of gender identities, as the discussion here shows.

This chapter explores the work of Viktor Sokolov, a much-admired director at Lenfilm whose extensive work in genre films (production dramas, sports films, literary adaptations) made him relatively invisible to the critical establishment of his own day and later. Sokolov’s combination of emotional surges and a precise and critical eye for cinematic patterning made him difficult to classify at any time, and never more so than in A Day of Sunshine and Rain (1967), an unusual children’s film that explores the unexpected and fragile friendship of two young boys who have skipped school, but also the nature and purpose of art.

Naum Birman’s Chronicle of a Dive-Bomber (1968) was one of a trio of strikingly unconventional war movies produced at Lenfilm in the late 1960s, along with Vladimir Motyl’s Zhenya, Zhenechka, and the “Katyusha” Rocket (1967), and Viktor Tregubovich’s War Is War (1969). This chapter explores how the highly specific emotional atmosphere of Birman’s film was created during production, transforming a script that editors had thought rather weak into a remarkable study of the boredom and frustration, as well as courage and idealism, of the war effort. As I argue, collaboration was fundamental to the successful development of the film: first, Birman himself substantially rewrote the script (and was later credited as co-author), and later, the designer and composer, as well as the film editor, made extensive contributions (which were gratefully acknowledged by Birman in the studio discussions).

Sergei Mikaelyan’s Widows (1976) is a highly unusual war movie because of its focus on civilians and on “postmemory,” the retrospective experience of the aftermath of conflict. Two elderly women campaign against the removal of the remains of two soldiers whom they found in a nearby field during the Great Patriotic War, and the publicity then inspires many people bereaved during the conflict to claim the remains as “theirs.” The chapter traces the origins of the story in a 1970 newspaper article and its slow transition to the big screen, not helped by assessors in the studio and at Goskino who found the material “tasteless.” As the analysis shows, the film raised uncomfortable questions about the significance of war memory in a new and changed society; Widows was to remain an admired movie that never quite made it into the canon.

Yuly Fait’s A Boy and a Girl (1966) created great controversy while it was being made and in the months leading up to its premiere in Moscow (immediately before which, the movie was pulled from the screen). The chapter contends that the reason for the uproar lay less in the sexual relationship between two teenagers at the heart of the film (which was present in the original script by prominent writer Vera Panova, and had not caused trouble during discussions) than in the alteration of nuance and tone that occurred during the filming, and especially the way in which Fait placed questions of pleasure and sensual gratification at the heart of the narrative.

This book examines cinema in the Brezhnev era from the perspective of one of the USSR’s largest studios, Lenfilm. Producing around thirty feature films per year, the studio had over three thousand employees working in every area of film production. The discussion covers the period from 1961 to the collapse of centralized state facilities in 1986. The book focuses particularly on the younger directors at Lenfilm, those who joined the studio in the recruiting drive that followed Khrushchev’s decision to expand film production. Drawing on documents from archives, the analysis portrays film production “in the round” and shows that the term “censorship” is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, “control,” which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced: the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1969 (chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (chapter 2), the working life of the studio, and particularly the technical aspects of production (chapter 3), and the studio aesthetic (chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are typical of the studio’s production. The book concludes with a brief survey of Lenfilm’s history after the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers’ Union in 1986, which swept away the old management structures and, in due course, the entire system of filmmaking in the USSR.

In 1961, the government bodies responsible for film production (the Ministries of Culture of the USSR and RSFSR) forcibly imposed on a reluctant Lenfilm the complete reorganization of production planning. The old Scripts Department was shut down and three “creative units” set up. This change was pushed through by Lenfilm’s energetic and flamboyant new general director, Ilya Kiselev, who had begun his career as an actor. Of the creative units, the earliest to emerge was the Third Creative Unit, which soon had a role as the flagship of contemporary cinema, a genre heavily promoted during the Thaw. However, the Third Creative Unit ran into increasing trouble as political control tightened after Khrushchev was forced to resign, and in 1969, it was closed down altogether. Yet life was not always calmer in the other units, as witnessed in particular by the difficulties that gripped the Second Creative Unit’s efforts to produce movies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, and by the problems of the First Creative Unit in establishing its own character and repertoire. At the same time, the general political line at this period, while unpredictable, was not uniformly harsh, as manifested in the conclusion of Leningrad’s Party leader that audiences could “make up their own mind” about a film he disliked.

The discussion here is focused on Dinara Asanova, an unusual figure at Lenfilm not just because of her Kirghiz background (she was one of only two Central Asian directors at the studio), but because of her commitment to using improvisation, a considerable feat given that the entire system of Soviet control assumed scripts would be filmed verbatim. As the chapter contends, the license allowed to Asanova was at least partly dependent upon the categorization of her as a specialist in “children’s films,” which acted as a convenient way of trivializing her activities. The film at the center of analysis here, Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches, is examined as a particularly revealing manifestation of Asanova’s aesthetic principles because its protagonist, the young jazz enthusiast Mukha, has autobiographical echoes and because the spontaneity of his performances and the compositional manner of the film are in obvious association.

Boris Frumin was perhaps Lenfilm’s most obstinate younger director when it came to the editorial and vetting process, and in the case of The Errors of Youth (1978), the result was a major conflict both with the studio and with Goskino. What appeared to be a harmless script by Eduard Topol turned into a film that resembles a Soviet version of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! Frumin’s movie provoked outrage, during vetting, with a whole range of bureaucracies, including the army, the Party, and Goskino. After the tragic death of Stanislav Zhdanko, the film’s lead actor, and the emigration from the USSR of Topol, and then Frumin himself, the movie was abandoned before completion and shelved. It was later to become a hit of the perestroika era. This chapter examines the vicissitudes that beset Frumin’s project, many of them related to the insolently detached demeanor of the movie’s hero.

The 1960s witnessed the transformation of “film factories” from metaphor to lived reality. Lenfilm’s output rose once more to the levels its predecessor studios had reached in the 1920s, but the conditions of production were now far more complex and demanding, with staffs more than ten times the size. And while the 1960s was an era of optimistic emphasis on the Soviet film industry’s capacity to equal and surpass the world in technological terms, during the 1970s, the conviction took hold that the technological superiority of Western films was of direct relevance to audience share. Increasingly, ambitious filmmakers petitioned Goskino for permission to shoot on Kodak and to use Arriflex cameras; criticism of inferior Soviet film stock and GDR-produced film editing tables mounted, both across the USSR and at Lenfilm itself. Yet investment in studio infrastructure and technology remained at best haphazard, particularly at Lenfilm, which enjoyed less generous support from the center than Mosfilm, but also more limited resourcing than film studios in the capitals of Soviet republics. At the same time, Lenfilm had an unusually diverse, energetic, inventive, and loyal workforce, with corporate values that inspired manual workers and porters as well as “creative” personnel. Hierarchical at some levels, the work culture was egalitarian at others, and the frenetic process of scrambling to finish films in trying circumstances created strong bonds. The chapter explores the various conflicts and contradictions, but also rewards, that this situation generated.

Aleksei German’s recollections of his time at Lenfilm emphasize his own marginality and beleaguered status. The documentary record does not bear this out. However, the conviction that he had endured discrimination and misery was, for German, creatively energizing. Whether in relation to his own life or in relation to history more broadly, German sought not to establish facts in order to challenge or undermine myths, but to use myths of his own to challenge official myths. In other words, he tried to combat official war history on its own terms, rather than searching for alternative, antimythic narratives. Hence the provocativeness of German’s historical films with the agencies that were charged with protecting the integrity of official memory. Added to this, it was the emotional resonance of German’s historical films that made them problematic, their frequent recourse to hysteria not just in the sense of uncontrollable weeping, shrieking, and laughter, but in the technical, Freudian, sense, where hysteria applies to a specific worldview and set of discursive principles. This chapter traces these elements with particular reference to My Friend Ivan Lapshin, perhaps German’s greatest film, which also represented a decisive break with the “Lenfilm style” of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the start of a new artistic era.

The 1970s saw a mass exodus of younger, artistically ambitious directors from moviemaking for the big screen into TV. Among the beneficiaries of the new medium was Igor Maslennikov, who had struggled to establish himself as more than “promising.” Maslennikov’s TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes rapidly made him one of the most famous filmmakers in the USSR. The main subject of this chapter, however, is an adaptation for “quality TV” of a different kind, The Queen of Spades, by Russia’s most famous writer, Alexander Pushkin. Where Maslennikov’s Conan Doyle adaptations were studiedly casual (The Hound of the Baskervilles is an exercise in playful eccentricity rather than a plunge into Victorian Gothic), his reworking of Pushkin went precisely in the other direction. This “hyperauthentic” interpretation of the Russian author sought to retain “every last comma” in the original, right down to scene-setting commentaries presented by an on-screen narrator. As this chapter argues, had it not been for the exceptionally vexed history of attempts to film The Queen of Spades (Maslennikov was the fourth director selected to make the movie), his “hyperauthentic” approach might have proved more controversial. Whichever way, the adaptation more closely resembles late modernist films of the era such as Eric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O than the conventional literary adaptations of the later Soviet era, which came from a tradition where reconstructing the source text was the accepted norm.

The context for Lenfilm’s productions in the Brezhnev era was shaped by both spatial and temporal factors. The studio, one of Leningrad’s most important enterprises and sites of cultural production, occupied a commanding position in the city center, and the mixture of imposing newbuild at the front and tumbledown yards behind lent it a character that was quite different from the USSR’s newer, homogeneous studio territories, such as Mosfilm and Kazakhfilm. Leningrad also had a specific character as a city with a highly developed artistic underground. However, filmmakers were employees of the state, and some degree of conformity was essential. Thus, the shift from the overt political mobilization of the Khrushchev era to the “inclusionary politics” of consensus that was requisite under Brezhnev had a significant impact upon the young filmmakers who joined Lenfilm from the 1960s onward. Yet, this should not be seen, as it often has been, in terms of “calcification” and loss of artistic integrity: the characteristic energy and optimism of the “Thaw” years were not necessarily the preferred emotional tone of all younger directors. Lenfilm is distinct from some Soviet studios precisely because its most creative time was from the late 1960s onward, rather than in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though adverse comparison with the 1930s, the so-called golden age of Chapaev, The Maxim Trilogy, and Member of the Government, still persisted when films were reviewed in the studio and beyond.

Gennady Shpalikov’s A Long Happy Life (1967) was pitched to Lenfilm as a movie about a young woman in a factory job. The eventual result was very different, focusing as it did on two people who meet by chance and whose relationship lasts just one day. This chapter examines the reception in the studio (where the movie puzzled its viewers, but Shpalikov, who already had a noted career as a scriptwriter, was permitted a great deal of freedom), and beyond. While A Long Happy Life had positive as well as negative coverage in the Soviet press, an attack in Pravda during the “Czechoslovak crisis” of 1968 sealed its fate, though since the late 1980s, the film has been considered one of the most important movies of its time. The chapter explores the paradoxical responses provoked by the transfer of personal material from Shpalikov’s biography, lyric poetry, and songs to the big screen, and especially the curiously affectless nature of the couple’s relationship, captured by its Soviet viewers in the disapproving word “indifference.”

This chapter explores the understanding of “film art” that prevailed at Lenfilm during the last three decades of the Soviet Union’s existence. It was unusual for filmmakers at this period to produce manifestos or detailed discussions of their own artistic practices, but the studio discussions over nearly thirty years allow conclusions to be drawn about overall aesthetic aims. Though the term “socialist realism” was used seriously only by official figures from the film management and Communist Party worlds, filmmakers were deeply concerned with the representation of lived reality, even if they argued that reality should be refracted in ways that challenged the viewer’s interpretation and assailed accepted convention. As Joseph Heifitz put it, this was “socialist neorealism” rather than anything resembling the epic representations of the 1930s. For Bella Manevich, one of the studio’s leading designers, a striking example of an entirely convincing film was Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, despite or because of the fact that the film was set in its own idiosyncratic world. Most characteristic of Lenfilm, though, was not the avant-garde excursion into alternative realities, but a kind of willed poverty that was carefully evoked and emulated also in a film of great significance for the era, Ilya Averbakh’s The Voice, about a dying actress who is working on the voice-over of her last film.

This chapter explores the production and reception history of a notable Cold War Soviet thriller, The Dead Season, directed by Savva Kulish, a former cameraman and collaborator of Mikhail Romm and Maiya Turovskaya on a famous documentary about life in the Third Reich, Ordinary Fascism. Kulish’s background and his own Jewish descent prompted him to adopt a highly serious approach to the story of a former Nazi war criminal who is now resident in “a certain Western country.” Rather than an exciting adventure story, the film became an exploration of psychological tension, as the discussion here makes clear.

Ideological pressure continued to bedevil film editing and production in the 1970s. This decade saw increasing financial pressure and an emphasis on budgetary control. A scandal about Aleksei German’s Operation “New Year” was related to the film’s representation of the “Great Patriotic War,” but also to the failure to comply with production targets. The fuss led to the sacking of Ilya Kiselev and the appointment of Communist Party apparatchik Viktor Blinov. Yet Blinov continued to subscribe to Lenfilm’s core values of artistic quality and respect for talent, with the result that conflicts with regulatory bodies persisted. This was exacerbated by the policies of Leningrad’s Party leader, Grigory Romanov, who kept the studio’s activities under tight scrutiny. In 1978, Blinov was dismissed. The next appointment as general director was Vasily Provotorov, and most of his short tenure of office was occupied with issues of work discipline, with the liveliest work done for TV rather than the big screen. But under his successor, Vitaly Aksenov, filmmakers had the opposite problem of autocratic control that paid little heed to the studio’s artistic ethos. The main development of Aksenov’s time as director, which ended after only three years, was a successful line in blockbuster romantic comedies, such as Vladimir Bortko’s The Blonde from around the Corner and Igor Maslennikov’s Winter Cherries. Otherwise, signs of discontent and malaise became ever stronger. The studio entered the Gorbachev years in a diminished condition, having sacrificed the artistic prestige that reached its heights in the mid-1970s.

Vitaly Melnikov is best known for his film comedies, beginning with the children’s movie, Gruff Visits Bobby (1964), the merry tale of the havoc created when a street dog decides to visit the home of his pampered canine friend. Mother’s Got Married (1969), which portrayed a late teenager trying to adjust to his mother’s recent and unexpected marriage, had a less easily defined emotional register. The film chimed with new views of the status of happiness that had emerged during the Thaw, yet there were also complaints that its central characters were “nothing like the real working class.” This chapter traces the movie’s difficult progress to the screen, and in particular the challenges posed by scriptwriter Yury Klepikov and Vitaly Melnikov’s decision to explore the uncommunicative emotional life of people often ignored in the Soviet cinema.

The Fifth Congress of Soviet Filmmakers represented a cataclysmic moment of change, but also the onset of a serious crisis for the entire film industry. Filmmakers in the studio had only a vague sense of what the new slogans, “glasnost” and “perestroika,” would mean for them. In the summer of 1986, a frustrating period of stop-start reform began: no sooner were structural and managerial changes achieved in the studio than they were rendered obsolete by fresh directives from the top. In 1987 began the process of setting up new “creative units” that, unlike the old ones, now had financial and managerial autonomy. These rapidly developed their own character, with German’s “First and Experimental Film Studio” championing avant-garde aspirations, while Maslennikov’s “Trinity Bridge” and Tregubovich’s “Ladoga” pursued a more market- and audience-oriented approach. Within a few years, however, younger film artists had outgrown the old mentoring tradition—a landmark was the departure of one of the most talented newcomers, Aleksei Balabanov, to run his own production company. From now on, Lenfilm was to act mainly as a facility for outside companies. However, these changes in the management of production were in the end less significant and less damaging than the impact of commercial distribution. Film production never stopped, and indeed, during the early 1990s, encouraged by influxes of private funding, often from money-laundering, it became easier than ever before to make movies. What became increasingly difficult was reaching the public, as cinema owners and distributors turned their sights on foreign-produced movies.

This chapter examines the career of Ilya Averbakh, whose work more than any other director’s came to signify to 1970s audiences the essence of “Lenfilm style.” It contends that a key factor in Averbakh’s easy progress to authority among his elders was his capacity to inspire trust not just by his professional standing within the world of cinema, or his elite Leningrad background, but by virtue of his former professional life as a physician—that is, his membership of a group that enjoyed particularly high esteem from the Soviet population generally. The chapter also traces the resonance of trust in Averbakh’s own films, and particularly, Degree of Risk (which represents a cardiologist) and Monologue, where a scientist’s difficult path to professional rehabilitation is juxtaposed to his increasingly tense relations with his student-age granddaughter.

In Soviet sources from the Brezhnev era, the history of architectural preservation after 1917 was presented as a triumph of rational state-building and cultural organisation: with the support of Lenin, the Bolshevik government had rapidly put in place effective measures to protect historic buildings for future generations. As this article shows, the evolution of legislative and practical measures was considerably more complicated than this optimistic representation would suggest. In the early Soviet period, a highly ideologised understanding of the past meant that preservationist ambitions might (especially during the ‘Great Break’ of 1928–1932) be seen as intrinsically reactionary. The canon of historical buildings was shaped by perceptions of centrality to Soviet values, as well as historical and aesthetic importance. The article also explores the transformation of attitudes to architectural heritage as a response to destruction by the invading forces during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, after which commitment to preservation became far more whole-hearted, although enforcement and financial support continued to be inconsistent. The Soviet case indicates not just the importance of heritage preservation to the cultural ambitions and self-image of the modern state but the limits of commitment to preservation and the pressure placed on this by the commitment to all-out modernisation and to the propaganda of new identities and values.