His mentor as a young man, a great avant-garde stage director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, was executed in 1940.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

At risk to himself, Eisenstein managed to save Meyerhold's papers and notes and hide them in the wall of his own dacha.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been

The experience of working with Meyerhold had decisively shaped Eisenstein's own artistic ideas, convincing him that theatre and cinema should take their place among the modern, and indeed the avant-garde arts, whose stagecraft and visual design needed to break decisively with 19th-century realism.

ECONOMIST: Film��s great might-have-been