October: Ten Days That Shook The World

In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions? Historians have debated the revolution for over a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of literature can be daunting. But most of us now  know and accept what came next: the Revolution’s nightmare offspring – Stalinist terror and the 20 million dead. No one contests the catastrophe, but there are those, who look back to the events of 1917 and are still haunted by the thought that “it might have been otherwise. It might have been different”.

Sergei Eisenstein’s  powerful testement to his genius, artistry, and ambition, his amazing dramatisation  October — the director’s third feature, after Strike and Battleship Potemkin — was commissioned by the Soviet government to honour the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Eisenstein had nearly unlimited resources placed at his disposal, including the run of Leningrad’s Winter Palace for several months. His startling re-creation of the events of 1917 is both a sweeping historical epic of vast scale and a magnificent monument to his fascination with intellectual montage — the juxtaposition of two disparate images to convey an idea or concept not inherent in either image alone. The film’s most celebrated examples of the technique include a baroque figure of Christ reduced, through a series of successive images, to a primitive idol, and Kerensky, head of the pre-Revolutionary provisional government, compared to a preening mechanical peacock. Such metaphorical experiments met with official disapproval; the authorities complained that October was unintelligible to the masses, and Eisenstein was attacked, for neither the first time nor the last, for “formalism." He was also required to re-edit the work to remove references to Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Stalin. October remains an immensely rich experience.

The film was originally released in 1928 as Oktober in the Soviet Union, and later internationally as Ten Ten Days Shook  The World  borrowing from John Reed's well known classic account of the Revolution. In documentary style, events in Petrograd are re-enacted from the end of the monarchy in February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the decrees of peace and of land in November of that year. Lenin returns in April. In July, counter revolutionaries put down a spontaneous revolt, and Lenin's arrest is ordered. By late October, the Bolsheviks are ready to strike : ten days will shake the world. While the Mensheviks  vaciliate an advance guard infiltrates the palace.Antatov Oveyenko leads the attack and declares the proclamation dissolving the provisional government. You can watch this epic masterpiece of world film history below which is rousing, shocking and stunningly visualised.