The World turned upside down: the story of the Russian Revolution

Duration: 80

Year Published: 1969

Creator: Time-Life

Format: 16mm

Color: B&W

Sound: sound

Description: Incorporating footage shot in Moscow and Leningrad plus archival film and stills from worldwide sources, this probing documentary sets the Russian Revolution in historical perspective. It looks back to the isolated splendor of the Czars and the servitude of the serfs and chronicles the seeds of revolt that paved the way for full-scale revolution, including: the 1825 uprising of aristocratic army officers against Czar Nicholas I; the 1881 assassination of Alexander II; the 1905 massacre on Bloody Sunday of protesting workers in Leningrad; and the mutiny of sailors aboard the Battleship Potemkin. The toppling of Nicholas II by the workers and the Army, suffering under the dire privations of World War I, was succeeded by Kerensky's ineffectual provisional government. Returning from enforced exile, Lenin, aided by the tactician Trotsky, effected the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks on October 25, 1917, the night the world was turned upside down. The Bolshevik victory was short-lived, subverted by civil war that pitted the Reds vs. the Whites and the ensuing famine that left 5 million dead. Lenin's domestic plans were curtailed by his death in 1924 and the looming specter of Stalin. In addition to rare archival footage, this comprehensive chronicle is Note worthy for its inclusion of recollections by Constantine de Grunwald who recalls Imperial St. Petersburg as far back as the wedding of Nicholas II in 1896; of M. Phillips Price, who was the Manchester Guardian correspondent and an eyewitness to key events and two Leningrad citizens, Bolshevik veterans of the assault on the Winter Palace and the civil war.