for his natural talent of painlessly pulling out teeth. The implication, that society inevitably ostracizes those that are gifted, horrified the censors who told Klimov to change it. When Klimov refused, the film was given the lowest classification, "category three", which meant that it was shown in only 25–78 movie theatres. Next, Klimov began making a film about Grigori Rasputin called Agony. The road to release took him nine years and many rewrites. Although finished in 1975, the final edit was not released in the USSR until 1985, due to suppressive measures partly because of its orgy scenes and partly because of its relatively nuanced portrait of Emperor Nicholas II. It had been shown in western Europe a few years before. In 1976, Klimov finished a film begun by his teacher Mikhail Romm before the latter's death called And Still I Believe.... In 1979, Klimov's wife Larisa Shepitko died in a car accident while directing an ecological fable based on a famous novel by Valentin Rasputin called Farewell to Matyora. A year after her death, Klimov filmed a 25-minute tribute to his wife entitled "Larisa" (1980), then went on to finish the film she had started. Despite being shelved for two years after completion, Farewell was still released in 1983. His wife's death had a profound impact on Klimov. All his subsequent films were tragedies. His next film, Come and See, was released in 1985 to worldwide acclaim and won the Golden Prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. The film depicts the experiences of a 15-year-old boy joining the resistance in German-occupied Byelorussia in 1943. Speaking of how the film drew on his own childhood experience of the war, Klimov said, "As a young boy, I had been in hell... Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it." In 1986, fresh from the success of Come and See, and with the changes brought by perestroika in the air, Klimov was chosen by his colleagues to be the First Secretary of the Filmmakers' Union following the V Congress of the Soviet Filmmakers. During the congress all previous heads of the Filmmakers' Union — including Lev Kulidzhanov, Sergei Bondarchuk, Stanislav Rostotsky and others — were overthrown in favor of "liberal" activists. According to some critics and filmmakers, the congress was conducted by Alexander Yakovlev, one of the grey cardinals of