In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution.
This brought his father to Germany after the defeat of the Tsarist government, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1918, he left school and joined the Red Army to serve in the Russian Revolution, although his father Mikhail supported the opposite side. Education Īt the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein studied architecture and engineering, the profession of his father. Among the films that influenced Eisenstein as a child was The Consequences of Feminism (1906) by the first female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. Eisenstein was raised as an Orthodox Christian, but became an atheist later in life. Divorce followed and Julia left the family to live in France. Her son would return at times to see his father, who joined them around 1910. Julia left Riga the same year as the 1905 Russian Revolution, taking Sergei with her to St. She was the daughter of a prosperous merchant. The mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, was from a Russian Orthodox family. The father had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
His father, the famous architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was born in Kiev Oblast, to a Jewish merchant father, Osip, and a Swedish mother. His family moved frequently in his early years, as Eisenstein continued to do throughout his life. Sergei Eisenstein was born on 22 January 1898 in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire in the Governorate of Livonia), to a middle-class family. Young Sergei with his parents Mikhail and Julia Eisenstein