"Tsar to Lenin" Slated For New Lecture Hall Tomorrow

"Tsar to Lenin," a documentary film tracing Russia's history through the World War and the 1917 Revolution and edited and commented on by Max Eastman, will be presented tomorrow evening at 8 oclock in the New Lecture Hall under the auspices of the Harvard Socialist League.

Eastman and Herman Axelbank spent 13 years assembling movie shots made by newsreel men, Red and White propaganda films, and pictures taken by amateur photographers including Tsar Nicholas II himself. The producers of the film have attempted to counteract the effects of official Soviet films which have been accused of minimizing the role played by Leon Trotsky in the Revolution.

When the picture was shown at the Filmarte in New York, the theatre was picketed by Communists who sang the "International" in protest against what they regarded as Trotskyite propaganda.

By Frank Nugent of the New York Times, however, the picture has been called "The most complete, impartial, and intelligent film history of the Russian revolution thus far shown."

According to the National Board of Review Magazine, "this is the best use of documentary films to record history, with historical intent, that we have seen. But it proves that history is not an abstract thing but something made by a an historian."