An exploited peasant suffers through the horrors of war and capital before awakening to the possibility of revolution in Pudovkin’s 1927 dramatic epic, made alongside Eisenstein’s October to honor the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. While October offers a more sweeping, collectivist account of the period, The End of St. Petersburg benefits from a more personal focus on how the individual is drawn into action. Like Eisenstein, though, Pudovkin knew how to film battle scenes, with several set pieces so powerful and realistic they were used in later documentaries on the Revolution.