The Big Breakthrough Theory

RT (2024)

Film Review

Russian with English subtitles

This documentary profiles the Soviet effort to suppress the massive achievements of five dissident Russian intellectuals who emigrated to the West. The first was the father of television Vladimir Zvorkin, the second photographer and designer Alexsay Brodovich, the third revolutionary ship designer Ivanovich Yurkevich, and the fourth and fifth the fathers of Hollywood Joseph and Nicolas Schenk.

• Vladimir Zvorkin – attended St Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1906, where he worked with Boris Rozing, inventor of the cathode-ray tube used in the first television receiver. Facing arrest for collaborating with White Russians during the Bolshevik Revolution, he escaped to the US via Denmark and Great Britain. With the help of Russian born RCA director David Sarnoff, he patented the first prototype television in 1938. He returned to Russia many times, where he helped develop the Russian TV industry.
• Alexsay Brodovich – former White Army officer, emigrated to France shortly after the October Revolution where he befriended the French impressionist painters Chagall, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso and Derain and was hired as a set designer  and photographer by Serge Draghilev, founder of France’s Ballets Russes. In 1930 became France’s first graphic designer. Relocated to the US he started a design school and worked for the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts Advertising Design Department before becoming Harper’s Bazaar design director in 1938, turned the magazine into a work of art. He never returned to Russia although he raised funds for the USSR during World War II.
• Vladimir Ivanovich Yurkevich – after studying ship building at St Petersburg’s Polytechnic University, he emigrated to France in 1917 and designed the Normandie a massive (“floating super city”) French passenger liner and one of the first to do regular transatlantic trips. During World War II involved with Russian emigres who lobbied the US to open a second front. He also prepared US lend lease vesels that were lent to the Soviet Union. At his death in 1964, he willed all his blueprints to the Soviet archive.
• Joseph and Nicolas Schenk (changed from Schenker) – emigrated to US via France prior to the 1917 revolution, after their Jewish father was threatened with expulsion to the Pale of Settlement for changing his profession.* In 1917, after financier Marcus Loew brought them into the nickelodeon business, Joseph organized a film production company while Nicholas started a film distribution company. In 1924 Nicholas started Metro Goldwyn Meyer (by buying three small film companies and consolidating them). Joseph subsequently acquired United Artists, founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Joseph, who championed the career of Marilyn Monroe, did four years in jail for paying his Mafia protection money with a bad check.

*The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Prior to 1917, Russian Jews weren’t allowed to own property or change professions.