"Utilizing stock footage, Esther Shub showed great skill in editing shots taken in different styles by different cameramen working at different times. She revivified shadows of the past to demonstrate that the downfall of the (Czarist) old world was inevitable. Her first three films, beginning with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, were a kind of film encyclopedia of the Russian revolution and the establishment of socialism in the Soviet Union... More sensitively than Vertov and more carefully than any newsreel editor in the world, Esther Shub examined the whole archive of preserved newsreels, frame by frame, finding the implications and connectives in each shot that only a skillful editor is trained to do... By the juxtaposition of these 'bits of reality,' she was able to achieve effects of irony, absurdity, pathos, and grandeur that few of the bits had intrinsically. The Romanov film drew upon the quantity of private as well as public film chronicles of the imperial family and their activities, to add to Shub's reconstruction of events leading to the overthrow of the dynasty in February 1917." Jay Leyda, Kino, A History of the Russian and Soviet Film