In documentary style, events in Petrograd are reenacted from the end of the monarchy in February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the decrees of peace and of land in November of that year.

Following The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet Government to produce this reconstruction of the 1917 Revolution—a dramatization full of soaring set pieces, an ironic, satirical scrutinizing of Kerensky, and the director’s revered innovation in montage.