Comrades That Shook the World: Oral Storytelling and the Making of Sergei Eisenstein’s October

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Narrative II: Processing the Revolution in Media and History

Abstract

On March 11, 1927, Nikolai Podvoiskii came to Leningrad together with Grigorii Aleksandrov, the assistant director of the future movie October (at that time tentatively called Ten Days that Shook the World), and the film crew to gather oral testimonies from the participants of the revolution and use them as a basis for the film. The Leningrad Commission on the History of October Revolution and Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) (Istpart) aided them by conducting a series of reminiscence evenings with the participants to find in their recollections the stories that could highlight the chronicle of the revolution. At one of these meetings, Podvoiskii, in his speeches to the old comrades who managed to shake the world once, urged them to create a new history made not by historians but by the people and thereby to shake the world again. This anticipatory element of the popular stories used not to merely repeat historical October but to re-vitalize it was a distinguishing feature of the film. Using the archive of reminiscence evenings’ transcripts, I will attempt to illuminate the connection between Sergei Eisenstein’s movie, the oral stories told by the revolution veterans, and the way film transformed them.

Author

• Stanislav Khudzik, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign