Russia Today

This film was copyrighted at a length of 8,800 feet, while NYSA records list a film with the same title, manufactured by Julien Bryan and Burton Holmes, at a length of 1,000 feet (which would have had a running time of approximately 11 minutes) after eliminations had been made. It is not known if the film listed in NYSA is that same as that which was copyrighted. Another film of the same name, made by Carveth Wells, apparently has no relation to this film.
       According to a booklet about documentary filmmaker Bryan, published in the late 1930s, he made his first trip to Russia in 1930 with a party led by Maurice Hindus and returned yearly. Following his trips, Bryan gave lectures and exhibited the footage he shot. By 1932, his films of Russia were exhibited in large theaters. Burton Holmes, a producer of travelogues, saw one of Bryan's presentations, and together, in the spring of 1933, they presented a show entitled Russia As It WAS-Russia As It IS Today, which May have included material from Russia Today. NYSA records list a 1934 film manufactured by Bryan entitled Russia As It Is (; for more information on Holmes, please see entry above on Normandy and Brittany.)
       Bryan either copyrighted or submitted for New York State censorship approval a number of other films on the Soviet Union during the 1930s, including Russia-1936, Russia Reborn, Russia and the two-reel film Siberia. His footage shot on his yearly trips made up most of two March of Time newsreel productions (Vol. 1, No. 4 and Vol. 2, No. 2). (A modern source characterized the March of Time sequence as "extremely naive," in that it gave the impression that consumer goods were plentiful at a time when there were severe shortages in the country, and noted that the Hearst newspapers characterized the sequence as Communist propaganda.) By the end of the decade, Bryan had shot 200,000 feet of film in the Soviet Union, had become the first American to make films in Siberia, and had expanded his subject matter to include the Caucasus, Manchukuo, Japan, China, Turkey, Poland, Finland and Nazi Germany. Bryan prepared films on these subjects for various lecture programs he gave around the country, in addition to a series of 16mm films put out by the Eastman Kodak Co. Teaching Films Division for visual education on Human Geography in the schools, which were used in seven countries. [For information concerning specific films on these subjects, please see Bryan's entry in the Personal Name Index.] In the booklet, Bryan acknowledges Robert S. Carr as his associate in production and Tom Cobb, Peter Mayer, William Halstead and, beginning in 1935, J. V. D. Bucher as his assistants in the Soviet Union. In the 1940s, Bryan make a series of twenty-two films commissioned by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller to acquaint U.S. audiences with South America. In 1945, he organized the International Film Foundation, an independent organization for producing and distributing educational films, especially for children. Bryan died in 1974, and in 1989, the footage he shot was acquired by the stock footage library Archive Film Productions.