Alexander Dovzhenko's most important sound film, Aerograd, is set in the Siberian taiga, where the frontier guards prevent the infiltration of Japanese spies, and the pioneer population dreams of the construction of a Russian outpost on the Pacific, “Aerograd” (Air City). According to Soviet film historian Jay Leyda, Aerograd “now seems to me one of the great original films... Dovzhenko used music (by Kabelevsky) more freely (than in his previous film Ivan) - as another colour. Speech itself is more bold and stripped - sometimes addressed straight at the audience without pretext or inhibition. One of its extraordinary moments is only a gesture: Stepan Shkurat, as Khudyakov, discovered collaborating with a Japanese interventionist plot, is taken into the forest for execution by his best friend; as he passes the camera, he hides his face from us! Throughout the film Dovzhenko shows his delight in the strong beauty of the Siberian landscape, and his device of linking its variety by a singing traveller is almost a key to his idea of form.”