RUSSIAN JEWS. Film 2. 1918 – 1948

The second film in the trilogy by famous Russian journalist and TV host Leonid Parfenov captures the thirty-year period of a large scale Jewish participation in every domain of the Soviet political and cultural life. Centuries of harassment and pent-up energy among Jewish youth – which were the subject of the first film in the “Russian Jews” trilogy – spilled out in the form of unparalleled career success in the new state. The film describes Leon Trotsky’s role as the constructor of the Red Army, Marc Chagall’s early career, Sergey Eisenstein’s creation of a new visual language, the first Soviet popular music stars from composers Matvei Blanter and Isaak Dunaevsky to the singer Leonid Utyosov, writers, with Isaac Babel in the lead, who brought the zest of Odessa into the mainstream literature and other figures and fates, without which the grandiose Soviet “project” is impossible to understand.

The film three of the trilogy will cover the more recent pages of the Russian Jews’ story and their self-identification.