In Perfenov's own words: "The whole history of Russian Jews, Russian, Germans, Russians, Georgians – it’s a relatively long period in the history of their people, when they massively moved to 'Russianness'. This is a fantastic story with no analogs. Now it is impossible to imagine that someone was deliberately cool to renounce their nationality, language, faith, culture, to go with the Russian spirit". The author takes audiences from the capital of Kievan Rus’, where there was an established “Jewish quarter” even in the 11th century, to revolutionary Petrograd in 1917. Parfenov’s film tells about the traditional Jewish ways of life and about how the later-famous financiers, industrialists, scientists, artists, and revolutionaries broke with them. It is about how the Russian word “pogrom” entered foreign vocabularies; about the Beilis affair, about the first wave of emigration. About the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks who shattered the Tsarist ranks, about Lenin’s closest comrades-in-arms who decided the fate of the country in October 1917. The next two films in the trilogy will tell about the later fate and self-identification of “Russian Jews” in Russia and beyond her borders. Leonid Parfenov is one of the most respected independent journalists working in Russia today. After a long career as a news presenter and producer on Russia’s main channel, he has lately focussed on mainstream TV documentaries, including Namedni, a long-running account of the last years of the Soviet Union. In 2010 he made international headlines for his outspoken criticism of TV journalism in Russia, referring to them as “not journalists at all but bureaucrats, following the logic of service and submission”.