Boris Efimov

Emmy Awards nominee for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research: Multi-faceted portrait of the man who succeeded Lenin as the head of the Soviet Union. With a captivating blend of period documents, newly-released information, newsreel and archival footage and interviews with experts, the program examines his rise to power, deconstructs the cult of personality that helped him maintain an iron grip over his vast empire, and analyzes the policies he introduced, including the deadly expansion of the notorious gulags where he banished so many of his countrymen to certain death.

A landmark four disc Box Set - Unearthed from Moscow's legendary Soyuzmultfilm Studios, the 41 films in ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA span sixty years of Soviet history (1924 - 1984), and have never been available before in the U.S.

Over the course of his long career, Boris Efimov drew political cartoons about pretty much every important world event. He spent his entire career at periodicals and newspapers such as Pravda, meaning that for many years he drew under the most exacting, watchful eye of Stalin. In this film made just before his death in 2008 at the age of 108, Efimov explains in one of the many conversations with the director Kevin McNeer that his feelings about the dictator are ambivalent.

This film was made in reaction to revanchism fear that Germany would reunite and seek revenge on Europe and the USSR for World War II. A disguised Nazi slips into the US zone of divided Germany. The Americans nurse him back to health as he plots how to reunite the Fatherland. His plans are ruined when he runs headlong into the Berlin Wall, erected by the USSR between East and West Berlin in 1961.