Amanda Holloway on how a Shostakovich film score lived again [Times Online, 3 February 2006]

One film that certainly wouldn’t have been up for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar (had there been one) in 1931 was a spectacular Soviet drama called Odna (Alone). Audiences were moved to tears by the story of the plucky heroine played by Yelena Kuzmina trying to bring communist ideals to a feudal Siberian village, but the film was withdrawn by the Soviet authorities for being offmessage. Far from being propaganda extolling the Soviet system, it seems, Odna was full of veiled digs at its ideology and its leaders.