Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Eisenstein is often referred to as the "father of montage" he is a leading figure in the modern cinematic form. It was in his 1924 film Stachka that he first showed what he called "dubbed montage". This contained a series of conflicting images which aimed to overlap symbolic meanings, who's emotional effect on the audience was more powerful than the individual images themselves. Eisenstein became a scholor at the Moscow film school where he wrote essays about montage and motion picture direction.
Here is an example of one of his montages from his film Oktiabr:
Dziga Vertov (1986-1954)
Highly influenced by Marxism he was a strong believer "that the impartial eye of the camera is far better suited to recording and organizing the truth than the subjective and often faulty human eye". His films provided a reflection on Soviet 'reality' and were often seen as highly poetic. An element of this is that came out later in his career is that he wanted the viewer to identify himself through the filmmaking process.
His most famous film would be Man With The Movie Camera which was filmed in the Ukraine with Lev Kuleshov.
Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)
What Kuleshov is probably most famous for is the Kuleshov Effect where he juxtaposed an expression less actor against several different pieces of footage of various items creating an emotional piece. The concept of the montage was very important to Kuleshov and said that it is not neccessarily the content of the film that is important but actually the way it is structured and put together. Therefore when looking at montage theory he is a very important person to consider.He worked with Eisenstein and Vertov on films in the late 1920's such as The Man with a Movie Camera.
Here is a short video of Alfred Hitchcock going some way of explaining the Kuleshov effect:
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