From 1918 - 1921, he served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, first as a signalman and later rising to the rank of inspector of a Special Commission concerning the numbers of the Red Army and Fleet (Russian: Особая комиссия по вопросам численности Красной Армии и Флота) of the Field Staff of the Supreme Military Soviet of the Republic (Полевой штаб Реввоенсовета Республики)[1].

[4] Next he began work on a film version of The Queen of Spades, which he intended to have ready in time for the centenary of the death of its author, the poet Alexander Pushkin.

He then accepted a commission to make The Thirteen, a Soviet version of the 1934 American film The Lost Patrol, directed by John Ford.

but was ordered by the head of the film industry, Boris Shumyatsky to break off and make Lenin in October, which he was required to finish in four months, in time for the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

[5] While he was working on the screen play, which coincided with the Great Purge, he stayed in the Moscow flat of an assistant director of Mosfilm, Albert Slivkin.

He then returned, again, to work on The Queen of Spades, but in 1938, the project was terminated by the new head of the cinema industry, Semyon Dukelsky, a former NKVD officer whom Romm later described as "an idiot, a son of a bitch... a cretin, a dog.

He educated and influenced many prominent film-directors, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Grigory Chukhray, Vasily Shukshin, Nikita Mikhalkov, Georgiy Daneliya, Alexander Mitta, Igor Talankin, Revaz Chkheidze, Gleb Panfilov, Vladimir Basov, Tengiz Abuladze, Elem Klimov and many others.

The documentary Triumph Over Violence, (aka Ordinary Fascism) (1965) about the Third Reich gained over forty million viewers.