AllMovie

The Russian Story is actually several stories-in fact; snippets from 25 different Soviet documentaries were bundled together within this film's 68 minutes. Subtitled A Film Cavalcade of a Thousand Years of Russian Heroism, the picture is an unabashed paean to the USSR, which was then one of America's staunchest allies. The film's throughline is that Russia has beaten back dozens of invaders and would-be usurpers in the past, thus Adolf Hitler will likewise be thwarted in his efforts to conquer the Soviets. The assembled filmclips do not always congeal coherently, so it's up to English-language narrators Libby Holman and Morris Carnovsky to clarify things. Significantly, many of the people responsible for the American version of The Russian Story had trouble finding work after WWII, when the Russians were once more regarded as the "bad guys."