In order to understand The Great Citizen, Parts I & II, the two slightly fictionalized films depicting the life and death of Sergei Kirov, one has to understand why the films were made. Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party boss of Leningrad in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was assassinated on December 1, 1934. As a result, 40,000 Leningraders were arrested and over 400 committed suicide rather than risk being interrogated by the secret police. Kirov's assassination triggered what later became known as the Great Terror, a state-directed terror campaign that eventually resulted in the arrest, exile, and death of millions of Soviet citizens. The terrible truth is that Joseph Stalin ordered the assassination as an excuse to rid himself of a potential rival and to avenge himself on anyone who had ever offended him.

And it was Stalin who, as overseer of all movies made in the U.S.S.R., ordered the making of the two Great Citizen films, by director Fridrikh Ermler with musical scores by Dmitri Shostakovich, movies which were to depict the fictionalized Kirov as a martyr and Stalin as the great and wise leader who avenged his death. One can only imagine Shostakovich's reaction to being ordered to compose music for these movies: he himself had been a victim of the Great Terror, albeit one who was never arrested but who lived in fear for his life after being condemned on the front page of the Party's official newspaper Pravda for writing music which was against the ideals of Communism—a capital offense in the late 1930s. Fortunately or unfortunately, only one excerpt of the music from either films is available, the Funeral March. It is a massive and monumental work cast in the heroic mold of Beethoven's Marcia funèbre from his Eroica Symphony. And, apparently, Shostakovich was serious about the Funeral March: he later reused it in his Eleventh Symphony.

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