The scene of Era d'ottobre opens with images from Eisenstein's film dedicated to the Bolshevik Revolution and, subsequently, with Renato Guttuso's painting I funerali di Togliatti. It is from that painting that, in order to narrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution (1917-2017), Paolo Mieli takes his cue by trying to to explain why some of the great protagonists of the - century-long - history of communism (Lenin, Stalin, Togliatti, Dolores Ibarruri, Ho chi Minh) are represented and others (Trotsky, Khrushchev, Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Solgenitsin, Dubcek) are not.

to each of these figures is devoted a portrait in the course of a narrative that crosses the Spanish Civil War, World War II, destalinization, gulags, Soviet dissent, liberation struggles, the Chinese revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Hungarian uprising, the Prague Spring, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. To end it all with the season of Gorbachev as well as the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989). And with a tribute, in the theater, to these hundred years of history.