The Youth of Maxim

The film tells the story of Maxim, a young factory worker. It is set in Saint Petersburg at the start of the twentieth century. Maxim begins as a carefree young man and moves gradually into politics. Balvanov, an old party member, is the one who guides him. The account builds a worker’s turn into a revolutionary step by step. It is the first of three films, the others following in 1937 and 1939. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the music for all three. The film drew a large audience in the Soviet Union, while in the United States it was treated as propaganda and not released until the sixties. Boris Chirkov and Valentina Kibardina appear in the Soviet film by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, completed in 1935.