April 10, 1894
She was born in Odessa Sofia Sokolovskaya — a revolutionary, one of the first directors of Mosfilm.
She joined the "circle of revolutionary-minded youth" while still in school. At age 20, while still a medical student, she began to climb the party ladder.
After the February Revolution, she headed the Chernigov Provincial Council. When the Bolsheviks withdrew from World War I in March 1918 and surrendered Ukraine to the Germans, she remained to work underground.
Germany valued Sokolovskaya's head at 5 gold rubles. During one search, speaking excellent German, she told the gendarmes that "Sofia is not home" and managed to hide the revolutionary committee's seal in a jar of flour.
During the Civil War, she was detained twice by the White Guards, and escaped both times.
She corresponded with Lenin and in one of her letters she named the Odessa proletariat "rotten shit through and through."
In 1921, she headed the Moscow Provincial Department of Political Education. After Stalin's rise to power, she headed the Central Commission for the Purification of the Soviet Apparatus.
In June 1937, she became head of Mosfilm, but in October, she was arrested along with her husband on charges of espionage. According to a denunciation, she turned a blind eye to the filming of a banned movie. Eisenstein "Bezhin Meadow" - about murder Pavlika Morozova.
After the first footage was developed and shown in the studio, management did not notice anything significantly alarming. (Pravda newspaper, 1937)
They also wrote that Sokolovskaya tried to “slander and defame Soviet reality.”
In a letter to Stalin, she admitted her guilt and disowned her husband. The leader called her a "French spy" who had betrayed the Bolsheviks back in 1918.
I couldn’t find the courage to break free from this counter-revolutionary filth, come to the party and expose this gang of enemies of the party and the people. (from Sokolovskaya's letter to Stalin)
Her husband was executed in July 1938, and Sokolovskaya on August 26, along with other wives and mistresses of the country's top leaders. This day went down in history as "Executed Wives Day."
