The video was produced by John Dovkas of Eastern Light Productions California in co-operation with Close-up, a Russian video firm and Edinburgh based Lamancha Productions who released it. “The credit has to go to the Russians for assembling the material” David McWhinnie of Lamancha said. “We edited it, put the soundtrack (spoken by Robert Powell) together and did the graphics. Five researchers worked for months in ten Russian film and photograph archives, to which they had unprecedented access, to find the material. The results are remarkable. The video not only shows the Red armies supporting the Bolshevik Revolution (arse; it was a coup, not a revolution) of November 1917. there is also long-unseen film of the Whites, counter-revolutionary forces which set up governments in the Ukraine, southern Russia and the Far East. And there is even rediscovered film (not.very.much.of.it) of Nestor Makhno’s “Greens”, a third force of anarchists which roamed in the vast forests of the Ukraine ad fought the Reds, Whites, Ukrainian Nationalists and the invading Germans. There is film of the Japanese in the Far East and the atrocities they committed which helped turn the people from the Whites with whom the Japanese were allied. There is film of central Asia, then only recently conquered by Russia and still exotically Middle Eastern. There are images of the latest machinery of industrial war – Britsh tanks – heading for the white General Anton Denikin’s forces in southern Russia in 1919. There is also extraordinary footage of warships from the Red Volga flotillafiring form the mile-wide river in support of the Red forces which captured the city of Kazan from the Whites in September 1918. (The writer doesn’t mention that it also includes footage of the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921 which finally ended any pretence that the Bolsheviks were in it for anyone but themselves. Several days later the troops who massacred the workers were awarded medals and paraded through Red Square to be applauded by that great humanitarian Trotsky. The footage of them attacking Kronstadt across the ice were very cinematic but no film from Sergei about this rebellion though he may have had the footage in mind for Alexander Nevsky…)
