The Soviet Government and Dziga Vertov: Too Close for Comfort, explores the relationship existing between the Soviet era film producer and the Soviet government. Vertov produced films rife with Marxist propaganda, touching on alienation of the worker, the labor theory of value, and the concept of scientific socialism. The Soviet government heavily regulated films during this era, insisting that most films be imbued with the Soviet Party line. While Vertov clearly supported the Marxist issues lying at the root of Soviet thought, especially the empowerment of the proletariat, he did not necessarily agree with the more specific stances taken by this government. Vertov was highly critical of the New Economic Policy and portrays the class struggle it encourages in a negative light through his film The Man With the Movie Camera. Vertov also was more a proponent of Leninism than Stalinism; he portrays deifying images of Lenin in The Three Songs of Lenin and brushes the issue of Stalin aside. He makes the distinction between the two clearer through his active support of the Leninist film ratio, which called for specific distributions of film types, and by his continued advocacy for the permanent world revolution. Stalin, in contrast, was a proponent of socialism in one country, and so in coming to power altered the party line from Lenin’s permanent revolution to his more temporary one. By repeatedly drawing attention to the discrepancies existing between Lenin’s theories and Stalin’s practices, Vertov highlighted to the people the mutations Stalin was introducing to communism. This repeated criticism from Vertov resulted in Stalin being highly sensitive to his films and led to tighter scrutiny of them.. Vertov also was not highly regarded by his contemporaries, they considered his work to be a medium of futurism and held that his complex process of montage created facts and presented them as truth. Vertov’s relationship with his contemporaries grew increasingly tense over the years as he looked down on their hackneyed methods (he especially abhorred acted scenarios and plots) and they looked down on his new creations. Further, his peers held that his work was hard to understand, a sentiment shared by the people. The common people attended Vertov’s showings with less and less frequency as the years progressed due to the complexity lying behind his work and their inability to understand it. Nevertheless, it does not appear that any one of these factors independently led to Vertov’s demise in the eyes of the Soviet Party, combined however, they presented him as wandering from the interests of the party. Vertov’s films are remarkable in that they are simultaneously full of Marxist propaganda and yet distinctly lacking in Bolshevik propaganda. This failure to support the party line, when taken with his inability to influence the proletariat in ways the government required, led to his inevitable downfall within the party.