Stanislav Govorukhin
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Stanislav Sergeyevich Govorukhin (Russian: Станислав Сергеевич Говорухин) (born 1936) has been one of the most popular Soviet and Russian film directors since the 1960s. His films, often featuring detective or adventure plots, are commonly dominated by strong male chracaters who seek to revenge criminal acts but have to eschew commonly accepted social norms in order to succeed.
Govorukhin was born in the Sverdlovsk Oblast and started his career as a geologist in 1958. He then joined a television studio in Kazan and enrolled at the VGIK. During the Soviet period, Govorukhin became noted for a slew of successful TV adaptations of adolescent classics, including Robinson Crusoe (1973), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1981), In Search of the Castaways (1983), and Desyat Negrityat (an adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) in 1987.[1] He also directed two movies starring Vladimir Vysotsky - Vertical (1967) and The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (1980), one of the cult films of the late Soviet era.
After the Perestroika, Govorukhin abandoned cinema for politics. He became one of the leaders of Democratic Party of Russia. In 1990, he directed a much-publicised documentary highly critical of the Soviet society, entitled We Can't Live Like This. Although his feature films were previously ignored by the critical establishment, this film won him the Nika Award for Best Director. It was at that time that Govorukhin released an extensive interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Govorukhin has been a member of the State Duma since its inauguration in 1993, running the Duma culture committee for some time. Following the Second October Revolution, he had abandoned his previous democratic anti-communist convictions and sided with the national-communist opposition. In 1996, he supported Zyuganov against Yeltsin during the second round of the presidential election campaign. In 2000, he unsuccessfully ran for President of the Russian Federation. During the latest legislative elections to the Duma in 2005, Govorukhin's opponent, the journalist and satiricist Victor Shenderovich accused him of using illegal funds to guarantee his victory.
More recently, Govorukhin returned to the cinema, co-starring with Alisa Friendlich in the detective TV series Female Logic and releasing another revenge movie, The Voroshilov Sniper (with Mikhail Ulyanov in the lead role).
