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Esfir Shub was a prominent documentarist and film editor in the Soviet Union; her masterpiece was Padenie dinastii romanovykh (1927). This compilation documentary contains invaluable historical information about the Romanov Dynasty. In 1922, she began her career by working as a film editor for Goskino. She then edited several western feature films, including Fritz Lang's 1922 classic Dr. Mabuse, to make them suitable for Soviet audiences. In the early '20s she began studying Russian pre-revolutionary history, which led her to produce her magnum opus. Following that film, Shub continued to produce documentaries up through the '30s. In 1932, she made the first Soviet documentary to use sound. From 1943 to 1953, Shub worked as an editor. She spent her retirement writing her memoirs Krupnym Planom (1959). Twelve years after she died, another volume of memoirs, Zhizn moia: kinematograf, was published.