Mikhail Gayvoronsky

At the school where worker Nikolai Zhikharev studied, students were given a lot of theoretical information, but how to work with machinery was not explained. Therefore, on one of the first working days at the plant Zhikharev made a serious mistake - he let steam out of the boiler. He was transferred to the clerk's office, but even there difficulties awaited the hero. However, Zhikharev did not give up. He decided to change the educational process in schools so that trained and prepared workers would come to the factories.

After the critical lambasting of his masterpiece Earth, Dovzhenko returned with a more popular iteration of its main motifs. Much like Earth, Ivan concerns itself with the natural rhythms of country life, disrupted by the beat of looming industrialisation.

The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.

No plot available for this movie.