The story starts in 1881, well before the storming of the Winter Palace, tracing the Ulyanov family through the hanging of Lenin's older brother for a terrorist plot against the tsar and the radicalization that followed. From there the film builds outward into the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, the failures of the provisional government, and the Bolshevik seizure of power that replaced three centuries of monarchy with a new political order. It moves through the causes usually cited for 1917, war exhaustion, food shortages, and entrenched inequality, before following the revolution's course into civil war and its long aftermath. The focus stays on named figures and family history rather than abstract forces, using Lenin's own path from grief to organized revolutionary as the throughline connecting personal motive to national upheaval. It functions as a chronological primer, useful for placing the familiar images of 1917, mutinies, soviets, the abdication, inside the decades of buildup that produced them.