Sergei Eisenstein: Tsar Ivan The Terrible Part II

The arts and media in Russia throughout the 1930s and 1940s were highly censored and restricted. All art had to be considered a work of socialist realism in order to be accepted and published. This led to works being commissioned in to be used as propaganda in order to support the government. One of the artists commissioned to create this art was film director, Sergei Eisenstein. After being asked to create a film about Tsar Ivan, he made Ivan the Terrible Part 1 and subsequently Part 2. Unlike most socialist realist works of this time, these films raised many questions and actually invited the viewers to engage with and think about what they were seeing, much to Stalin’s dismay. In 1941, Sergei Eisenstein was ordained by Joseph Stalin to create a film that would glorify Stalin through the legacy of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Tsar Ivan was viewed as a great ruler and a rather intelligent man, who was responsible for

Part 2 did not follow the same path. In fact Part 2 was not even allowed to be released and would not be until a few years after both Stalin and Eisenstein had passed away. To begin with, Eisenstein published the screenplay in 1943 before the movie was released. The screenplay falls more easily under the umbrella of socialist realism as it does not have the visual message displayed by the film. This helped people to see it as a true work of socialist realism. Another factor that played into the successful acceptance of Part 1 was the “wartime relaxation of state control over the arts”. Stalin no longer had the time to view and approve each film that was made in Russia. By the time, it was time for Part 2 to be passed, art was looked at more closely and kept under tighter control. Not only was state control stronger, Part 2 was even more explosive politically, which would in turn make it even more challenging to get it