Lewis Milestone — director (oscar) with roots in the Russian Empire
Lewis Milestone (born Lev Milstein) was a Russian-born American film director who won two Academy Awards and directed All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) — still widely regarded as the greatest anti-war film in cinema history. Born in Chisinau (Russian Empire, now Moldova), he emigrated to the United States and became a major Hollywood director.
Tracing the roots — Chisinau (Moldova)
Born in Chisinau (Kishinev, Russian Empire) in 1895 — the city made infamous by the brutal 1903 pogrom that triggered one of the great waves of Jewish emigration — Milestone arrived in the US and built a career that produced one of cinema's most powerful statements against the kind of nationalism that had made his hometown a site of mass murder.
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Chisinau (Moldova). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.