Alexander Gelman ^People

In 1970 he co-authored a screenplay (with his future wife Tatyana Pavlovna Kaletskaya). It was later filmed as Night Shift. The next screenplay, also together with Tatiana, led to the movie Xenia, Wife of Fyodor (Lenfilm, 1974), which won an award in a USSR-wide competition. His career reached an early peak with the 1974 play Protokol odnogo zasedaniya (Minutes of a Meeting, also translated as A Party Committee Meeting) and staged in Leningrad at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater byGeorgy Tovstonogov and a year later at the Moscow Art Theatre by Oleg Yefremov, ti was filmed in 1975 as Premiya (Salary Bonus). It depicted a construction crew's rejec-tion of a salary bonus on the grounds that they felt cheated by bad management and poor workplace organization. Acclaimed as a sociological drama, the film won direc-tor Sergey Mikaelyan and screenwriter Gelman the USSR State Prize in 1976.Many people called Protokol odogo zasedaniya prophetic, presaging the strikes of summer 1980 and the workers' movement in Poland. In 1990, Gorbachevpersonally recommended Gelman to become amember of the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but left the partymonths afterward withoutstepping down from the Committee, prompting his fellow members to take the step ofexpelling him from the Central Committee afterward. Since 2001 he is a member of public council of the Russian Jewish Congress.