Aleksei (Lazar) Kapler was a prominent Soviet filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, and writer. He was born in 1903 (or 1904) in Kiev, in a wealthy Jewish family. His mother was Raisa (née Krinzberg). His father Yankel owned a sewing workshop. At the age of fifteen, Kapler, a gymnasium student in Kiev, established a "folk farce theater" with two classmates of his, Sergey Yutkevich and Grigory Kozintsev, both of whom would go on to become renowned film directors. The three put on a puppet show on the small stage of their theater. They went on to stage performances in a square in Kiev and at a music hall. Ahead of one of these shows, the director altered the names of Kapler and his partner, Lidia Vinter, on the promotional posters, citing his fear of antisemitism (“Kapler is a name fit for a garment company, not for the stage”1
Kiev seemed too provincial to Kapler and his colleagues, and they soon left for Petrograd. There, they founded the experimental theater “Factory of the Eccentric Actor.” The young innovators were convinced that the age of traditional art was over, that directors had no place on the ship of modernity, and that only stage managers were now needed; in this way, the play would be transformed into a “bunch of tricks.” These ideas were very modern and progressive for the time, and they helped the renovation of Russian theater.
From Petrograd, Kapler moved to Odessa and began to work at the Odessa Film Factory as the assistant of the remarkable film director Alexander Dovzhenko. He wished to acquire experience in filmmaking. During his time at the Film Factory, Kapler was present at the shooting of Battleship Potemkin (1925), the celebrated masterpiece by the great cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein, and he learned a great deal from that master.
In the early 1930s, he returned to Kiev and directed two movies, which were banned by the authorities. He then decided to become a screenwriter, and went on to write the scripts for several famous Soviet movies, such as Three Comrades (1935), Striped Trip (1961), and Amphibian Man (1962). However, he won his greatest acclaim for his collaboration with Mikhail Romm on the films Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939). That project was very risky: Lenin, Stalin, and the other major figures of the Russian Revolution had not been portrayed on screen until then, and there was no canonical way of depicting them. Nevertheless, the movies were admired by Stalin, and Kapler was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize. This success opened all doors to him.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Alexei Kapler was reluctant to join his colleagues, who had been evacuated to Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). After submitting his new script Kotovsky to the Alma-Ata studio (this script, about a Russian Civil War hero, would also be made into a famous film), he demanded to be sent into the partisan areas as a military correspondent. In March 1942, he was flown across the frontline and airdropped into the zone of operations of the 2nd Leningrad Partisan Brigade, which was led by Nikolai Vasilyev, one of the most renowned Soviet partisan commanders. Vasilyev had managed to unify the scattered partisan forces into a brigade, and liberate an area of more than 10,000 km2 in the enemy rear. After returning from this trip, Kapler published a series of essays in the central organs Izvestia and Pravda (and, simultaneously, in a separate book titled Behind Enemy Lines, 1942), and wrote the script for a partisan-themed movie, She Defends the Motherland (1943).
At the same time, he was planning to write the script for a new film about Soviet combat pilots. Stalin's son Vasily, who was a pilot himself, invited Kapler to his apartment to instruct him in the specifics of the profession. There, in 1942, Kapler met Svetlana Stalina (Alliluyeva), the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Soviet leader. In her memoirs, Svetlana Alliluyeva would recall this episode as her first love. Kapler tried to develop her artistic taste and showed her classical European and American films. Together, they visited museums and went on strolls through the city, talking all the while. When Stalin found out that his daughter and Kapler had become romantically involved, he was furious. According to Svetlana's memoirs, he cried:
“She couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” She believed that "the fact that Kapler was a Jew was what bothered him most of all"
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Letters to a friend. London, 1967. p. 193.
In 1943, because of his relationship with Stalin's daughter, Kapler was sentenced to five years in exile on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation." He was sent to the Vorkuta region in northern Russia, where he worked as a photographer and lived in a tiny room partitioned off in the corner of the local photo studio.
In 1948, he was convicted for a second time, and spent five more years at the Inta labor camp (Komi), where he was forced to do the hardest jobs in a coal mine. He was released only in July 1953, after Stalin's death. Kapler then resumed working in cinema and television. In the 1960s, he was mostly known as the director and host of the highly popular TV show Kinopanorama (cinema overview).
In 1954, Kapler became acquainted with the poet and World War II veteran Yulia Drunina, who was famous for her poems about the war. They married in 1960, and remained together until his death in 1979. Alexei Kapler was buried in Moscow. His widow, Yulia Drunina, later committed suicide, and was buried in the same grave.
- 1. Alexei Kapler, I and We: The Ups and Downs of a Knight of the Arts. Moscow, 1990. p. 28
