"The implicit message of *Starvation* was that wherever the “Bolshevik element” is allowed to gain a foothold, atrocity begets atrocity. As Baker wrote to Hoover two weeks before the film’s premiere: “The definite value of the picture is that it is the first anti-Bolshevik document possessing any potential strength with the masses. No normal mother who sees it will be likely to tolerate talk of direct action in her home.” THE FOOTAGE LIVES ON Starvation never made it beyond New York City. No print of the film survives, although Johnson’s execution sequence was salvaged and eventually landed in the Hoover Archives. It may not be the first execution ever captured on film, but it may well be the oldest surviving such footage. It has appeared in numerous documentary films about World War I and the Russian Revolution over the years, often improperly identified as visual evidence of Whites slaughtering Reds during the Russian Civil War. This is no doubt due in large part to Max Eastman, the socialist writer and former associate of Leon Trotsky who, in editing the 1937 documentary film Tsar to Lenin, identified the executioners as soldiers of the White Russian army under Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Eastman also contrived to heighten the drama of the sequence by manipulating the images. Instead of taking his place among the first trio of victims, **the laughing Bolshevik, after nine of his comrades have been shot dead, is shown looking up from the ground and cackling, in what is meant to be a spine-tingling cutaway shot**. Thanks to the editor’s handiwork, the laughing Bolshevik exits last, taunting his executioners to the end, as narrator Eastman intones: “The Red soldier is still laughing!”