Originally entitled The Sailor from the Aurora, the film shows the NEP-era misadventures of a young sailor assigned to the revolutionarily iconic cruiser Aurora. Vania finds himself in Leningrad’s ‘Narodnyi Dom’ amusement park, where he is distracted from his revolutionary zeal by the beauteous delinquent, Valia. The Aurora leaves without him and, overwhelmed by his deserter’s guilt, Vania comes with his damsel-in-distress to a den of the NEP criminal element. Leningrad’s lower depths are depicted with imaginative gusto; and admiringly, especially owing to the figure of the charismatic gang leader ‘Human Question’. In a disproportionately aggressive operation, the police exterminate the gang and its leader, and this grandiose finale overwhelms whatever attention the viewer might pay to Vania’s melancholic return to the Aurora in the dim Leningrad morning.