
A factory worker's mother tries to save her son from the police by showing them where he hid the guns, and watches them take him anyway. Vera Baranovskaya plays the rest of the film as that mistake working itself out: the trial, the education, the march. Pudovkin ends on the spring thaw, ice breaking up on the river as Pavel escapes across it and the demonstration moves beside it, and by then she is the one carrying the flag.
Pudovkin's answer to Eisenstein: linkage, not collision. The shots build on each other until the politics arrive as weather.