James Cagney narrates this 1962 Department of Defense production, tracing the history of communism from Karl Marx's writings through the Russian Revolution, two world wars, and the postwar division of Germany to the concrete and barbed wire of the Berlin Wall, raised in August 1961. Produced by Robert Saudek for the Directorate of Armed Forces Information and Education, the film was built as an orientation piece for American servicemen, laying out the ideological argument the Pentagon wanted its own troops to understand before it wove in the era's real footage of Soviet leaders, East German border guards, and the wall itself under construction. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, an unusual honor for a government-issued film. The Cold War framing is blunt and one-sided by design, but that bluntness is itself the artifact: a case study in how Washington explained the standoff with Moscow to its own soldiers at the moment the Berlin Wall was going up.