12 Facts About Pyotr Pavlenko

Pyotr Pavlenko was part of the Soviet trade delegation in Turkey from 1924 to 1927.

Pyotr Pavlenko 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.

Pyotr Pavlenko was called in by the NKVD again in May 1938, when Osip Mandelstam was arrested for the second time, to evaluate his life's work.

Pyotr Pavlenko's 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.

In May 1937, Pyotr Pavlenko had visited Pasternak at home to put pressure on him to sign a collective letter applauding the execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders, but Pasternak refused to co-operate.

In 1937, when the renowned film director Sergei Eisenstein was under sustained attack by the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, Pyotr Pavlenko boldly spoke up at a cinematographers' conference in Eisenstein's defence.

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

Pyotr Pavlenko was not invited to work on Eisenstein's final project, a three part life of Ivan the Terrible, and he wrote a hostile review for Pravda of Ivan Grozny around the time that it was first shown, in January 1945.

In collaboration with Mikheil Chiaureli, Pyotr Pavlenko wrote the scripts for the films The Vow and The Fall of Berlin.

Pyotr Pavlenko wrote three books of essays, American Impressions, Young Germany and Italian Impressions.

Pyotr Pavlenko was a deputy to the third convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.

Pyotr Pavlenko died in 1951 in Moscow and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.