On that dreary, on the civil one – Newspaper Kommersant No. 190 (7391) dated 10/13/2022

Dziga Vertov’s film The History of the Civil War (1921), lost and found thanks to film historian Nikolai Izvolov, is released. After looking at it Mikhail Trofimenkov thought about how simple and how boring civil war.

Mounted in a wild hurry, in three weeks, the film of the founder of the world documentary was shown only once at the III Congress of the Comintern, for the sake of which it was edited, and then seemed to have sunk into oblivion. Already in 1933, Vertov himself complained that he could not find the film, dissected, sorted through the film archives. It took, without exaggeration, the scientific and creative feat of Nikolai Izvolov, who in two years, based on scarce written sources, reconstructed the “History”.

However, he is not the first: on account of Izvolov reconstruction and the legendary films shot by Alexander Medvedkin’s propaganda “Cinema Train” (1932) at the construction sites of the first five-year plan, and Vertov’s first feature film “The Anniversary of the Revolution” (1918).

Izvolov can be considered a full-fledged co-author of Vertov, in the shoes of which, according to him, he got used to for many years. He failed to find only the most piquant from the modern point of view fragment of the film “The Tsaritsyn Front”, which provides a unique opportunity to see the young comrade Stalin. This is necessary. Countless future enemies of the people survived on film. From the defector-diplomat Fyodor Raskolnikov to the career Trotskyist Ivar Smilga, who tried the rebellious commander of the 2nd Cavalry Army Philip Mironov in 1919. From the commander of a partisan raid into the Czechoslovak rear, Innokenty Kozhevnikov, who went mad and was shot in Solovki back in 1931, to Grigory Zinoviev himself. From the young handsome Mikhail Tukhachevsky to the future bloody NKVD brigade commander with the exotic surname Lev. Their faces – the faces of people obsessed with the civil war – as well as the face of Kolchak frozen with cocaine or the clown mask of Makhno, are insanely interesting to look at. But here Stalin disappeared somewhere.

Those who expect from the film, so loudly titled, the epic attacks of Budyonny horse lavas, duels of armored trains or dashing landings of the sailor lads, will be severely disappointed. Unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, Vertov is impeccably honest. The equipment of that time did not allow filming on the battlefield, and Vertov did not stoop to staging. In the best case, somewhere in the distant future, our horsemen are jumping into battle, or not ours – go figure it out – horsemen. Yes, infantrymen hid in the ravine, just as vainly as the viewer, trying to figure out what is beyond the horizon and who is who.

The most interesting, tougher episodes that open the film and are combined into “pictures” “White Terror” and “Suppression of counter-revolutionary uprisings.” And also the “picture” closing the film “Suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion”. This is a civil war within a civil war. Not about head-on clashes between the Red Army and Denikin’s or Wrangel’s, but about the bloody civil strife of the socialist parties.

About the war-terror. About the disarmament of the anarchist lawlessness in Moscow in March 1918: machine gunners on Malaya Dmitrovka, a seriously wounded man, over whom the winners step over, chuckling and impudent prisoners. About the building of the Moscow Committee of the Party, bombed by the “anarchists of the underground” in September 1919, where its first secretary Zagorsky died. About blown up bridges, knocked down on their side (metaphysical greetings to the “Arrival of the Train” by the Lumiere brothers), steam locomotives, Yaroslavl domes pierced by shells and the perky smile of Sergei Kirov, who cut out the Astrakhan rebellion.

The rest, to be honest, is monotonous, tedious and just boring. Parades, parades, parades of winners. Columns, columns, columns of refugees. Funerals, funerals, funerals, rallies, rallies, rallies.

It is clear that Vertov and his comrades filmed what could be filmed with the then equipment, and so as not to part with their lives in the very first minute of filming. But this does not change the feeling of the film in any way: this civil war is still a dreary thing.