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It goes without saying that Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the most important movies ever made. But in addition to its legendary status, Potemkin was also a pretty controversial film back in the day. Commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Potemkin tells the real-life story of an actual mutiny…and that didn’t sit well with the governments of the world.

After its initial premiere in the Soviet Union—where it did pretty well, outperforming Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922)—the film arrived in Germany where it immediately ran into trouble. Worried the movie would disrupt “the public order,” the Weimar Government banned the film and only agreed to show Potemkin if over one hundred feet of film were cut. They were particularly disturbed by the movie’s violent scenes—like the moment when Potemkin officers are tossed into the ocean and when a young boy is trampled on the Odessa Steps.

So why were the Germans so afraid of Eisenstein’s film? Well, perhaps this incendiary piece of “agit-prop” might inspire German citizens to join revolutionary causes, or it might encourage open rebellion among the armed services. That’s why German soldiers and police officers were forbidden from seeing the film. Taking things even further, the Weimar Government even replaced Edmund Meisel’s original score, claiming the music was just “too subversive.”

Of course, Germany wasn’t the only country fretting over Battleship Potemkin. According to Ronald Bergan of The Guardian, when the film reached the U.S., it was quickly censored because the government feared it would give “American sailors a blueprint as to how to conduct a mutiny.” When Potemkin arrived in France, the French launched a Battleship barbecue, burning every reel of film they came across. And when the movie showed up in the U.K., it was banned for a whopping seventy-nine years.

Eventually, Battleship Potemkin returned to its homeland where it was released in 1950…only this time with some significant changes. In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviets scrapped Ed Meisel’s score because Meisel was a German, and plenty of Russians were still angry about that whole Nazi invasion thing. Seventy shots were dropped, some footage was rearranged in a more linear fashion, and perhaps most tellingly, censors replaced an opening quote by Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin’s enemy, with a new quote by Vladimir Lenin.

In fact, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica and film critic Roger Ebert, Stalin eventually outright banned the entire film, thinking it might lead Soviet citizens to kick him out of the Kremlin. But perhaps the governments of the world were a little too worried about Potemkin’s impact.” While Eisenstein’s masterpiece was most definitely propaganda, it didn’t exactly spark any revolutions…well, not real ones anyway.

As Bruce Bennett points out in his Kino essay, “A Revolution on Screen,” while Potemkin didn’t spread socialism across the world, it did launch “a global revolution in filmmaking.” Battleship Potemkin would go onto inspire generations of filmmakers, and we’re still feeling its powerful ripple effects to this day. Blending political message with the power of montage, Potemkin made cinema a much more interesting, vibrant, and powerful art form, and that’s the kind of revolution we can all get behind.