The second part of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk's epic biography of John Reed. It is October 1917 and the American journalist has found himself and his wife, Louise Bryant, in Petrograd on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.
Catello Coppola is a journalist dreaming a scoop to revive his career. Unexpected help comes following the death of a friend, who appears to him in a dream, promising to give him advance notice of the next day's news.
Gino Chelli spends his days between work, his friend Beppe and his contentious girlfriend Tea. He spends the nights dreaming about her former classmate Liza, who now is a famous star. One day, she comes back in town.
The social ferment in late 19th century Russia which led to the 1917 Russian Revolution is movingly portrayed in this lengthy historical drama, which is very faithful to the 1907 novel The Mother by the celebrated Marxist writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). In the story, "the mother" (Inna Tchourikova) has no other recourse than to watch her decent, kindly husband turn into an animalistic, drunken brute as a result of working in the inhuman conditions of a steel mill in the town of Sormovo. When he begins to express his suppressed rage by beating her, she is defended by her teenaged son Pavel (depicted Viktor Rakov as an adult, Sacha Chichonok as a boy). After his father's death, Pavel is forced to go to work in the same factory. However, Pavel and his friends begin investigating Marxism and socialist thought, and work to organize their fellow workers.
Having always lived in solitude, working the land (his only company being a cat), one day Alceo meets Ester, a girl much younger than him.
