A RUSSIAN WINTER FOR THE ARTS : Archives Reveal Soviet Film Treasures : * Movies: Hidden since the late 1920s, many recent Soviet finds may be the best cinematic works since Stalin consolidated his grip on power.

While new Russian independent filmmakers are concentrating on turning out adventure and action films, it seems that the best Soviet films to be seen in years may be emerging from the shelves of newly opened archives.

Since the late 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his grip on Soviet power, stories abound of films being made and never shown. If a director was lucky, a film went to a storeroom. If he was unlucky, he went to prison or, in some cases, to his death.

Naum Kleiman of the Museum of the Central Filmmakers’ Union in Moscow reports that there is now open access to the archives of the major film studios as well as to the central documentary film archive, which stockpiled footage of Trotsky, Bukharin, Khrushchev and other leaders. The once-secret archive of the Interior Ministry has also been opened and researchers are now allowed access to its films, many of which were poorly catalogued or simply unlabeled. “Sometimes the specialists can identify those films without titles,” Kleiman says.

A member of Kleiman’s staff recently unearthed the 1925 documentary “Jews on the Land,” director Abram Room’s study of a kibbutz established in the southern Crimea, as well as the 1932 Yiddish talkie, “The Return of Nathan Becker,” a propaganda film about a worker who returns home from the United States.

Another film to emerge from state archives is the 1925 comedy “Jewish Luck,” a screen adaptation of Sholom Aleichem stories with frames of dialogue by the Odessa satirist Isaac Babel.

“It was there, we knew it was there, we had heard that it was there, but we had never seen it,” says Sharon Pucker Rivo of the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, who is including newly rediscovered films from the old Soviet Union on an international tour of Yiddish cinema.

Researchers such as Kleiman hope that the KGB will be the next to open its film archive. “Officially, there was no film archive of the KGB, only documents,” says Kleiman, who has now learned that a KGB film archive did exist.

“(Sergei M.) Eisenstein made a film called ‘Bethin Meadow,’ ” says Kleiman, who thinks the reels might have been seized by the KGB, since the director was forced to stop work on the film in 1937 and denounce the project publicly. “Maybe it was destroyed, maybe confiscated--nobody knows,” Kleiman says. “Nobody saw how they destroyed the film, so this is our great hope.”