Tsar to Lenin

The film, based on primary source material from many different sources, accurately depicts the first, and only, socialist revolution in history. Throughout the Tsarist empire, the great mass of Russian workers and peasantry lived in deep poverty and were highly exploited by the Tsar, landowning aristocrats, and the capitalist class within Russia and abroad. Immense inequality prevailed not unlike today. With the first imperialist war driving social conditions to the breaking point, the working masses launched strikes, protested in the streets, and raised political demands. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the two principal leaders of the Russian Revolution, led this mass movement to end the imperialist war, deposed the Kerensky regime, and established a socialist republic based on internationalism and permanent revolution. Despite the degeneration of the October Revolution and its falsification by Stalin and his gang of counter revolutionaries, the film is objectively true, leaving Stalin out of this monumental revolution. The grave digger of October played no role whatsoever. This is a must see for the revolutionary struggles ahead.

As another reviewer has observed, the narration of this film has a distinctly propagandistic flavor: one that is bound to elicit laughter or even scorn from modern viewers. Assailed from without by a deeply socialist-phobic Europe and from within by intellectual snobbery and a rigid attachment to Marxist dogma (certain aspects of it, at any rate), the Bolsheviks blew it. Eventually they switched gears, but not soon enough to truly salvage their credibility as revolutionaries; their first priority had been to maintain power, and today they are remembered not for shaking the world in 1917 but for the appalling decisions they made afterward. For some reason the atrocities committed by Nicholas II are no longer touched upon, as if everyone had tacitly agreed that they were irrelevant to the discussion. "Tsar to Lenin" demonstrates otherwise, and therein lies its importance. This *was* a necessary and fully justified revolution, and in an age when the working class faces oppression on an almost infinitely greater scale, Lenin's example should be a source of hope for those of us who believe that things can--and must--change. Just be sure that you understand what took place before and after this crucial moment in history.