Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga to a middle-class family. His father, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was a civil engineer who designed and built many buildings in Riga, and his mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, came from a merchant family. This bourgeois upbringing would later fuel Eisenstein's revolutionary fervor, as he sought to dismantle the social structures he was born into.

Following in his father's footsteps, Eisenstein began studying engineering in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). However, his interests were quickly drawn to politics and art, a path that would drastically alter his life's course.