Galina Kravchenko

Biography

Galina Kravchenko was a Russian film actress known as Maria Lvovna Karagina in War and Peace (1965). She was born Galina Kravchenko on February 11, 1905, in Kazan, Russian Empire (now Kazan, Tatrstan, Russia). After the Russian revolution of 1917, she moved to Moscow; there her mother worked in the Soviet Government. In 1923, in her mother's Moscow office young Kravchenko met Vsevolod Pudovkin, who was very impressed with her natural beauty and talent, and recommended her to the acting school at State Institute of Cinema (VGIK). From 1924 - 26 she studied acting under Vladimir Gardin, graduating as actress. During the 1920s and 30s Kravchenko was a staff actress with Mezhrabpom Film Studio. She enjoyed a stellar career in Soviet silent films. Kravchenko was married to popular actor Andrey Fayt, and the couple was part of Moscow cultural milieu during the 1920s and early 30s. During the 1930s she was married to the son of the powerful Soviet leader, Lev Kamenev, who was a political opponent of Joseph Stalin. After the party leader Sergey Kirov was assassinated on Dec. 1, 1934, Kamenev was secretly tried and sentenced, on false accusations for having contributed to the crime. In August 1936, however, Kamenev and Zinovyev were tried again in the first public-show trial of the Great Purge. Accused of conspiring to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, Kamenev was brutally pressured and eventually confessed to the fabricated charges in the vain hope of saving his family. He was shot, and his wife perished in the Gulag. Five decades later, Lev Kamenev was cleared of charges by the Soviet Supreme Court in 1988. Kravchenko suffered a blow to her acting career and personal life. She was censored under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, and was practically unemployed for more than 20 years. After the death of Stalin, Kravchenko returned to Moscow and struggled to survive until the late 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev initiated the "Thaw" in cultural life in the Soviet Union. At that time, Kravchenko was an almost forgotten aging actress, and her career was limited to playing bit parts as mothers and grandmothers in low-budget Soviet films. Kravchenko made a comeback as Maria Lvovna Karagina, the omnipresent socialite in War and Peace (1965) by director Sergey Bondarchuk. At that time, Bondarchuk was not a member of the Soviet Communist party, so he was dare to cast many actors who were previously censored under Stalin, including Kravchenko. She later wrote a book of memoirs describing her joy of working with Bondarchuk in 'War and Peace'. Kravchenko was designated Honorable Actress of Russia in 1980. Both her late husband and her father-in-law, Lev Kamenev, were posthumously cleared of all charges during Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms "perestroika" and "glasnost." Kravchenko died on March 5, 1996, in Moscow, Russia.