Daily Telegraph: Why Stalin loved Tarzan and wanted John Wayne shot

"Every one of Stalin's houses had its own private cinema, and in his last years, the cinema became not only his favourite entertainment but also a source of political inspiration. It was one of the venues from which he ruled the Soviet Empire: this was cinematocracy - rule by cinema.
Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff. The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing.
So, while in Hitler's Third Reich, even Goebbels, minister of culture and enlightenment, did not perform all these roles, in Soviet Russia, Stalin considered himself (in modern terms) Sam Goldwyn and Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Joe Eszterhas and Richard Curtis, rolled into one.
After late meetings in his office, Stalin would suggest a movie and then some dinner. Leading the way through Kremlin alleyways and courtyards, he took his seat in the front row of the Great Kremlin Palace cinema with Beria, Molotov and his cultural supremo, Andrei Zhdanov.
"What will Comrade Bolshakov show us today?" Stalin would ask. His terrified cinema minister, Ivan Bolshakov, had to gauge Stalin's mood. If it was good, Bolshakov could risk a new Soviet movie.
Stalin took his role as supreme censor very seriously. Lenin had said "For us, cinema is the most important of all the arts," and Stalin agreed. From the early 1930s, he had supervised every aspect of the huge Soviet film industry, promoting not only Socialist Realism but also cheerful jazz comedies.
When he saw the first of these, Grigori Aleksandrov's Jolly Fellows in 1934, he was so pleased he summoned the director: "I felt I'd had a month's holiday!" Then he quipped: "Take it away from the director! He might spoil it!" "