Esfir Shub

Esfir Shub was born into a family of landowners. She studied literature in Moscow, but after Revolution she began to attend the classes at the Institute for Women's Higher Education and then got a job as a 'theater officer' at the State Commissariat of Education. In the theatre she worked in collaboration with the famous avant-garde director Meyerhold and the poet Mayakovsky, who was one of her friends. Shub joined the Goskino film company and met Dziga Vertov. Their professional friendship was lifelong, but stormy. Shub shared his belief in film's intrinsic ability to reveal aspects of reality not visible to the naked eye, but she became engaged more in the interpretation of the historical world than in only contemporary matters. First Shub worked as a re-editor of foreign films for Soviet distribution. In 1927 (the tenth anniversary of Revolution) she made her first documentary film Padenie dinastii Romanovykh (1927).

This film was the first part of the trilogy, which also consists of Velikiy put (1927) and Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy (1928). In the process of making the trilogy, Shub had to contend with not only an overwhelming volume of material but also the problem of locating relevant footage. She often found that valuable documents of the pre-war period had been sold abroad or had been badly damaged in ill-equipped newsreel archives. Shub compensated the lack of material by using newly shot footage. Her films derive much of their power from this technique of providing a contemporary context for archival footage. Thus, Shub created the absolutely new genre 'historical compilation film'. She later claimed she just wanted to create 'editorialized newsreels'. The critics and colleagues admired Shub's work, because she found a middle path between narrative and documentary forms. Sovkino denied her authorial rights for her trilogy claiming that she was just an editor.

However, in 1935 Shub was awarded the title Honored Artist of the Republic.