As Western scholars were blithering about Putin's love for, and rehabilitation of Stalin in the 2000s, Putin-era state television produced a series of films commemorating Russian figures destroyed during the Stalin era. Some of the state or state-tied television channels' productions on the Soviet regime's atrocities, include Yesenin (a film about the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances and pressure from the communist regime), Moskovskaya saga (the story of a Moscow family's destruction under Stalinism), Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago, the great Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, and Mikhail Bulgakov's anti-Stalinist satire Master and Margarita, among many others. At the same time, the Russian Orthodox Church has been carrying out a permanent campaign against Stalin since the Soviet collapse-under both Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Putin (see, for example).
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