Ne nado krovi! is one of the five or six films Protazanov directed between February and October 1917. The story was directly inspired by real events. Through a long flashback it illustrates the contents of a secret police dossier which was spared the anger of the mob that invaded the police headquarters: a young, high society woman rebels against her class and chooses a course of violent, clandestine activism. Director and screenwriter, Protazanov depicts social inequality, militancy, police infiltration, judicial repression and the questions faced by the victorious revolutionaries: which scores need settling and with whom? What to do with the archives of a past that they want to deny? How to refute violence? The love story is relegated to a secondary position (possibly lost along with the two middle reels), but Protazanov never was a sentimentalist. He explains in detail police procedures, the humiliation of the detainee and the confusion of the days immediately following liberation without taking a position – just as Evgenij Bauėr did in the same period with  Revoljucioner, a film in support of carrying on a patriotic war.
As is often the case, Protazanov obtained distribution thanks to the Art Theatre in Moscow. The film is one of the few surviving titles to feature one of Stanislavskij’s favoured actresses, Ol’ga Gzovskaja, who is here teamed with her husband, Vladimir Gajdarov.

Bernard Eisenschitz