Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in order to build a "complete socialist society".

A mix between newsreel and found footage, Vertov edited sequences filmed by eight teams of kinoks (kinoki) during their trips.

[2] Thanks to A Sixth Part of the World and his following feature The Eleventh Year (1928), Vertov matures his style in which he will excel in his most famous film Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

Vertov starts by showing us, with intertitles in giant Cyrillic characters, what he sees (Вижу) about the capitalist West with its foxtrot and black minstrels, and then switches his attention to the audience (Вы) and then the individual viewer (Ты).

Then the film shows Bukhara where one of the mosques is looking very dingy and crumbled, and to Leningrad where trams run down the middle of broad empty boulevard as a horse-drawn carriage turns out.

Whether it is a newsreel, a comedy, an artistic hit-film, A Sixth Part of the World is somewhere beyond the boundaries of these definitions; it is already the next stage after the concept of ‘cinema’ itself… Our slogan is: 'All citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 10 to 100 years old must see this work.

By the tenth anniversary of October there must not be a single Tungus who has not seen A Sixth Part of the World” (quoted in Barbara Wurm's essay in the DVD booklet).

[3] At the beginning of 1918, Dziga Vertov was hired to edit the newsreel Kinonedelia ("Cineweek") for the Moscow Cinema Committee.

In the hope of putting his theories into practice, in 1922 he formed the first group of kinoki ("cine-eyes") in which he began to issue the Kinopravda ("Cine-truth") serie of films.

[7] In 2015, the Belgian post-rock band We Stood Like Kings, specialized in writing new soundtracks for silent movies, released its own new live score USSR 1926 for the film on the German label Kapitän Platte.