by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was The End of St. Petersburg, a.k.a. St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, a 1927 production by the “other” great Soviet
silent director, Veslvolod Pudovkin, who along with Sergei Eisenstein (the
first name that comes to mind when discussing Soviet silent directors) was
commissioned by the Soviet government to make a movie to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution that had brought down Russia’s
provisional government just seven months after it had been established in the
wake of the abdication of the last Czar, Nicholas II. Eisenstein’s film, October, was a dramatization of the Bolshevik leaders,
including Lenin (played by a Moscow butcher with no acting experience because
Eisenstein thought he looked just like the real Lenin) and Trotsky, but it
didn’t get shown until 1928 because in the meantime Stalin had ousted Trotsky
from the Soviet leadership and Eisenstein was obliged to re-edit his film to
eliminate Trotsky and all the other upper-echelon Bolsheviks who had supported
him. (He left in two sequences in which the actor playing Trotsky had his back
to the camera — and at the premiere Stalin’s police goons ordered the film
stopped and the house lights turned on so they could find out who in the
audience had applauded when Trotsky appeared on screen.)
Pudovkin got his film completed and shown on schedule because it
didn’t depict any of the Bolshevik leaders; instead he and his screenwriter,
Natan Zarkhi (though the film’s imdb.com page gives the writer’s first name in
its English form, “Nathan”), managed to create a parable of both rural and
urban oppression and impoverishment that pulled off the trick just about any political film has to: giving us enough individual
characters to identify with we can see how the repression affects people
directly and also giving us a
sense of the largeness of the events overall. A character identified only as “A
Worker” (Aleksandr Chistyakov) and his wife (Vera Baranovskaya) leave the
farming region around Novgorod to come to St. Petersburg looking for work since
his mother has just died and a recently born daughter has just added to the
burden of feeding his extended family. Clearly they’re hoping that he’ll land a
job paying well enough not only to support them in St. Petersburg but give him
money he can send as remittances back to the rest of his family in Novgorod,
and he has a contact — another relative who has a job at the factory of
capitalist Lebedev (V. Obolensky). Unfortunately, his timing turns out to be
rotten: he arrives in St. Petersburg just as a communist agitator at Lebedev’s
plant successfully organizes its workers to stage a wildcat strike in response
to Lebedev’s order that the workers put in longer hours so he can fulfill a
government contract, which he used to bid up the price of his own company’s
stock. (There’s a weird scene early on in which, after we’ve seen only handfuls
of rural peasants and urban proletarians, a whole crowd of stock speculators
masses on the steps outside the St. Petersburg stock exchange and bids up the
price of Lebedev’s stock. It seemed odd, to say the least, that a film about
the class struggle ostensibly taking the side of the 99 percent would show so
many more of the 1 percent. “That’s so they could have fewer superheroes and
more villains,” Charles commented.)
Then World War I starts, the Worker gets
drafted and he survives three years at the front, only when he comes back
Russia is in the middle of its revolution, the Czar has been toppled and the
Provisional Government is haplessly hanging on as best it can against the
onslaught of the Bolsheviks, who won the support of the rank-and-file in the
Russian military primarily by promising them an end to the war while the other
parties were pledging to continue it. They also won the support of the peasants
by promising to expropriate the big landowners and distribute the land to
individual peasants — a promise that kinda-sorta got honored until 1929, when
Stalin abruptly decided that the future of Russian agriculture lay in
collective farming, and he implemented that policy with his usual thug-like
determination and fervor. An officer still loyal to the Provisional Government
tries to order his troops to shoot the Bolshevik militants, but instead the
troops switch sides, the crew of the cruiser Aurora mutinies and threatens to shell the city if the
Provisional Government doesn’t resign in favor of the soviets (the roughly
organized workers’ and peasants’ councils through which the Bolsheviks
ultimately gained control), the Czar’s Winter Palace gets stormed and the
Worker’s wife finds him in the street, dying — in a piece of heart-rending (if
somewhat predictable) irony, he survived World War I only to get mortally
wounded in the Revolution, but she’s able to say his last goodbyes to him
before he expires and she shows off her collective spirit by giving the food
she’d brought him (it was hard to see what was in her little bucket — they
looked like potatoes but the people she gave the foodstuffs to were able to eat
them immediately instead of having to cook them) to the other Bolshevik
fighters. She strolls through the now-deserted Winter Palace — obviously
Pudovkin got permission from the Soviet government to film in the real one —
and the contrast between her state and the preposterous decorations of the
Palace’s walls makes the point Pudovkin and Zarkhi intended about the
fundamental injustice of a handful of people at the top of a society living
lavishly while most everybody else, whose labor is generating the wealth that
the upper class seizes, is starving.
One French critic said of Russia’s two
great silent directors, “Pudovkin’s films resemble a song; Eisenstein’s, a
scream,” and there are certainly some quite lyrical shots in The End
of St. Petersburg, including ones of rivers
flowing and others of farmers tilling fields (still with human-pushed plows in
the early 20th century!). The overall effect of this film is somber
and sad — if you want an exuberant celebration of the revolutionary spirit,
watch Eisenstein’s October
instead — and of course it’s impossible to watch this film today without
imagining the sequel, the 74 years during which the Communist party tyrannized
Russia and ruled by force and terror, then collapsed and led to yet another
Russian oligarchy that has restored St. Petersburg to its original name. (The
Russian title St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad reflects that in 1914, since Russia was fighting
Germany in World War I, the Czar’s government decided to change the ending of
the city’s name from the German “-burg” to the Russian “-grad,” both meaning
“city,” and after the Bolsheviks took over they took Peter the Great’s name off
the city he’d founded and put their own leader’s name on it instead, and since
it was the name for only three years almost nobody calls it “Petrograd” unless
they’re writing or talking about the Revolution.) The End of St.
Petersburg is a brilliant film, an
acknowledged and deserved classic; it’s true, as an imdb.com reviewer said,
that it’s “great without actually being entertaining,” though at least part of
that depends on what you consider “entertaining.” Just as Dwight Macdonald once
wrote that to him the French art film Last Year at Marienbad was entertaining (he defined “to entertain” as “to
hold the attention agreeably”) and a Jerry Lewis comedy wasn’t, so to me The
End of St. Petersburg is entertaining and a
modern-day gross-out comedy with farts, belches and semen hair-gel isn’t.
