Sofia Sokolovskaya

Sofia Ivanovna Sokolovskaya (Russian: Софья Ивановна Соколовская), also known as Yelena Kirillovna Svetlova (Елена Кирилловна Светлова) (10 April 1894 – 26 August 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, politician and senior official of the Soviet film industry until she became a victim of the Great Purge.

Biography Sofia Sokolovskaya was born into a middle-class intellectual family in Odessa, where her father practised law. Her parents, who were socialists in the Narodnaya Volya tradition, moved to Chernigov (Chernihiv) when she was nine. She became involved in revolutionary politics at school. She joined the Bolsheviks as a student in St Petersburg in 1915. In January 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, 23-year-old Sokolovskaya was elected chairman of the executive committee of the soviets for Chernigov province. While Ukraine was under German occupation, the authorities put a price of 5,000 roubles on her head, but when German troops came to arrest her in Kiev, she duped them by pretending to be German herself, speaking to them in fluent German. In May 1937, the Central Committee overruled Shumyatsky, and Sokolovskaya had a hand in commissioning Eisenstein to make Alexander Nevsky, one of the finest films produced in the USSR in the 1930s. She was briefly head of Mosfilm after the arrest and execution of the previous head, V.A. Babitsky.

Arrest and death Sokolovskaya and her husband, Yakovlev were both arrested on 12 October 1937. She co-operated with her interrogators from the start. She wrote a self-incriminating letter to Joseph Stalin saying “I didn’t find the courage to break out of this counter-revolutionary filth, come to the party and expose this gang of enemies of the party and the people." This did not save her. On 7 November, Stalin told the head of Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, that she was a "French spy" who had betrayed the Bolsheviks in Odessa in 1918. She was shot on 26 August 1938 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.