Tsar to Lenin

The film opens with the following statement: "This picture has taken thirteen years to prepare. The films come from the ends of the earth. They were made by over a hundred different cameramen during the revolution, from one hundred different angles. Some were taken by the Tsar's royal photographer, some by the Tsar himself, some by the Soviet photographer, some by the German General staff, some by the staff photographers with the French, English and Japanese armies of Occupation. Others were taken by American War Correspondents and still others by private adventurers. Some of the pictures were designed to be used as propaganda for the White Armies, others for the Red. Every event recorded in this film is authentic and has been placed in the correct chronological sequence, without any attempt to take sides in that bloody conflict, or defend any man or class of men."
       In a May 1937 article in Stage, editor and author Max Eastman relates the genesis of the film. He states that Herman Axelbank had spent eight years collecting film footage of Russia and the revolution, and that Axelbank came up with the initial idea to put together a film history on the subject. (A 1956 Los Angeles Examiner article states that Axelrod had to bribe border guards to get the film out of Russia, and that American journalist John Reed tried to smuggle some of the footage out of the country by wrapping negatives around his suitcase, but he was caught and jailed.) Eastman quotes Axelbank as saying, "I thought how wonderful it would be if we could actually see Robespierre and Danton on the screen, and I said to myself, 'Future generations are going to see Lenin and Trotsky, and all the great figures of the Russian Revolution, and they're going to see the Revolution!'" Axelbank offered Eastman, whom he considered "an authority on the Russian Revolution," the opportunity to have "absolute sovereignty in the making of the film." Eastman interested financier Otto Kahn in backing the project, with the agreement that Kahn's involvement was to be kept confidential. (After press coverage of a legal case involving the film revealed Kahn's connection, Eastman saw no reason not to publicly thank Kahn in the Stage article.) In addition, the American Fund for Public Service put up two thousand dollars. Eastman credits Eliena Krylenko as "splicer and expert adviser on things Russian, she having been an eye-witness of what really happened in Petrograd in 1917," and he relates that Axelbank, in addition to supplying the footage was the "technical instructor and contact-man with the film laboratories of Broadway." Eastman relates that in addition to Axelbank's collection of film, he found footage in Germany of the tsar and his family, in Paris of Lenin addressing the workers, and that Axelbank found in Chicago the picture of Rodzianko, the president of the Duma, writing a telegram to the tsar in the midst of the February revolution. A modern source states that Soviet newsreels uncovered by Soviet film editor Esther Schub were also used in this film.
       Eastman was called in a 1955 LAMirror News article a "onetime Soviet sympathizer who became an anti-Communist." A modern source deemed him the "ideological leader of the American Trotskyites" and Frank S. Nugent, in the New York Times review, stated that Eastman's "long friendship with Trotsky and his dislike of Stalin have induced him to dwell upon the former and slight the latter." Eastman, in the Stage article, states that he attempted to avoid "propaganda distortions in any direction whatever." Most reviewers judged the film to be unprejudiced, including Nugent, who wrote, "The resulting picture is honest, unbiased, reasonably thorough. The narrative accompaniment is not always so abstract, but it attempts, at least, to seem non-partisan." Film Daily remarked, "there is not a trace of so-called propaganda in the footage, and Motion Picture Herald accused Eastman of "breaking down only occasionally to indicate...what he really thinks about masses, classes and such." A modern source, however, accuses Eastman of attempting with his narration and selection of footage to manipulate the footage used for his own purposes. Eastman, for his part, stated that he attempted to find shots of Red executions of White Russian prisoners "to offset our gruesome shot of the execution of fifteen Red soldiers by the officers of [General Alexander Vasiliyevich] Kolchak," but that he was unsuccessful. Los Angeles Examiner stated "the complete omission of Stalin is noticeable," but Eastman related that he unsuccessfully searched film libraries of New York, Chicago and Europe to find footage of Stalin before the end of the revolution and the civil war, and that he was assured by the Soviet Trade Embassy in Berlin that there was no such film of Stalin at that time in existence. The print viewed does contain a shot of Stalin after the war.
       According to a Hollywood Reporter news item, the film had its first West Coast showing on May 20, 1955 at film writer and historian Seymour Stern's film history class at UCLA. In a 1956 article, Los Angeles Examiner remarked that the film "has been acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest and most important documents ever made." It was re-issued in a new 90 minute version in 1966, which, according to reviews, included footage not in the original release of Lenin's death, the rise of Stalin, Trotsky in flight from Stalin and finding refuge with painter Diego Rivera in Mexico, a brief talk with Trotsky (the film's only sync-sound sequence) in which he denounces Stalin's falsification of history, and the great purges of Stalin. Reviews state that the new version, which was narrated by Valentine Dyall from a text written by William Hepper and Cyril Jones, emphasizes the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky over the mission of Communism and the distortion of Marx's and Lenin's teachings by Stalin. The 1966 version was previously included in the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1961-70; F6.5200.