THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG

St. Petersburg, 1914. A young peasant is forced by hunger and misery to leave his village and go to the city in search of work. Hosted by a fellow villager, he arrives at a factory whose workers are on strike to protest against the boss who wants to increase the working hours for the same wages. The young man, considering the agitation harmful to the workers, decides to denounce his comrades to the boss, but when he realises his mistake he attacks the director and the boss, ending up in prison himself. Later, when world war broke out, he was sent to the front, and then in the days of the October Revolution he joined the soldiers storming the Winter Palace, an event that marked the end of St Petersburg and the birth of Leningrad. Filmed to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the film is one of the seminal works of Soviet silent cinema, at the centre of a trilogy that also includes ‘Mother’ and ‘Storms over Asia’. The film by Vselovod Pudovkin, one of the most studied film theorists as well as director and actor, originally intended to narrate the history of the last two centuries of the city, aroused more than one perplexity in his homeland, but it was to be greatly appreciated abroad.