In 1927, Soviet Communists marked the 10th anniversary of taking power in Russia by commissioning two films that dealt with those events. Both of those films later gained a reputation as classics of Soviet silent cinema. One was Eisenstein’s October, one of the most spectacular re-enactments of the October Revolution, while the other was The End of St. Petersburg, an epic drama directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller.
The plot begins in 1913 on a farm where the unnamed protagonist, a young peasant (played by Ivan Chuvelev) just learns that his mother is dying after giving birth to another baby. Realising that his impoverished family now has another mouth to feed, the young man decides to leave for St. Petersburg, which was the capital of Czarist Russia at the time, and tries to get a job in one of the city’s factories. He takes temporary lodging at the home of a woman (played by Vera Baranovskaya) from his area whose husband (played by Alexander Chistyakov) is a factory worker, but also a Bolshevik agitator. The greedy factory owners decide to increase their profits by prolonging working shifts while maintaining the same salaries, causing workers to go on strike. Management later brings scabs, including the protagonist, who after a scuffle naively points to the Bolshevik agitator as the main culprit. When he is arrested, the protagonist feels bad about what he has done and tries to set things right, resulting in his own arrest.
In 1914, Russia enters war with Germany, and the protagonist is brought from jail as a "volunteer" to fill the ranks of the Imperial Russian Army. While the capitalists see their profits rise due to the production of weapons and shells, the protagonist suffers the horrors of trench warfare, while the ordinary people in Russia suffer deprivations. All this results in the February Revolution that would bring down the Czar, but the new regime of the Provisional Government wants to continue with the increasingly unpopular war. In the end, soldiers rebel against their officers and join the ranks of the Bolsheviks that would storm the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the city that would later be known as “the city of Lenin”.
Pudovkin made The End of St. Petersburg a year after his feature debut Mother, a film with a similar theme. Those two, together with The Heir to Genghis Khan a.k.a. Storm Over Asia, make so-called Bolshevik trilogy. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet regime and had developed a theory of filmmaking before actually making films. Those theoretical principles, called “Soviet montage theory” by later film scholars, are applied in The End of St. Petersburg, but the general result is slightly less impressive than in Pudovkin’s debut. The most obvious reason for that is the plot being less focused and dealing with a larger set of characters than Mother, which tried to depict revolutionary activity from the perspective of a single family. Here the characters are somewhat less defined and more archetypal, although they are played well, including the worker’s wife, played by Vera Baranovskaya who brilliantly played the title character of Mother. Pudovkin’s use of editing in order to get an emotional response looks more crude, especially in the scenes when the horrors of trench warfare are intercut with greedy stock market brokers earning millions on soldiers’ and people’s misery. Intertitles with the commentary that espouses the official Soviet interpretation of history also make this film somewhat cruder form of propaganda. Inevitable comparisons with October, which covered the same events, are more favourable to Eisenstein’s work, which is more spectacular and more focused on the revolution, which is here covered only in relatively brief scenes near the end.
Although not among the top classics of Soviet silent cinema, End of St. Petersburg is nevertheless an interesting, well-made film that undoubtedly, despite its relative shortcomings, inspired many future film makers in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The current version of the film represents a restoration conducted in 1969 by Mosfilm, which also added a musical score by Vladimir Yurovsky.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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