The Great Dawn

External image

1938 poster of The Great Dawn.

The Great Dawn (Georgian: დიადი განთიადი, trans. Diadi Gant’iadi; Russian: Великое зарево, trans. Velikoe Zarevo. English-language title: They Wanted Peace.) is a 1938 Soviet Georgian film directed by Mikheil Chiaureli. It is considered a representation of Joseph Stalin's cult of personality.

In 1917, the people of the Russian Empire are no longer willing to fight Germany, but the bourgeois government of Alexander Kerensky is unwilling to defy its imperialist allies and stop the war. Only Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party is resolute in calling for peace. In the front, the soldiers of one battalion elect three delegates to travel to St. Petersburg with donations the troops collected for the Pravda newspaper: Gudushauri, Panasiuk and Ershov. The three arrive in the capital and describe the horrendous conditions in which the soldiers live to Joseph Stalin, Lenin's trusted aide and colleague. They join the Bolsheviks and take part in the storming of the Winter Palace, led by Stalin and Lenin. Stalin announces that the great dawn of revolution has broken.

The Great Dawn was part of a group of films made in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, which also included Lenin in October and The Vyborg Side; since Sergei Eisenstein's October, it became customary to release pictures about the revolution with each decade anniversary to it. The film was the first in a series of four which director Chiaureli directed with Joseph Stalin as their main theme, and the marked Mikheil Gelovani's first appearance as Stalin on screen - a role he since played in thirteen other productions.