Lithuania, 1941. German tanks and motorized columns broke into the border military town. Seven Soviet soldiers were cut off from the garrison. Without food and weapons, they went through the occupied territory to the location of the Red Army units.

The social ferment in late 19th century Russia which led to the 1917 Russian Revolution is movingly portrayed in this lengthy historical drama, which is very faithful to the 1907 novel The Mother by the celebrated Marxist writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). In the story, "the mother" (Inna Tchourikova) has no other recourse than to watch her decent, kindly husband turn into an animalistic, drunken brute as a result of working in the inhuman conditions of a steel mill in the town of Sormovo. When he begins to express his suppressed rage by beating her, she is defended by her teenaged son Pavel (depicted Viktor Rakov as an adult, Sacha Chichonok as a boy). After his father's death, Pavel is forced to go to work in the same factory. However, Pavel and his friends begin investigating Marxism and socialist thought, and work to organize their fellow workers.

The film takes place in pre-Christian Russia, when Ratibor united the East Slavs into one army against the nomadic Khazars.

Every day, the postwoman Manka goes through the forest to the fishermen on a long voyage. And every time an orphan girl, knowing with what impatience men are waiting for news, shouts out outlandish spells. And Manka does not know how to tell his beloved Porfiry that his Lenka was carried away by visiting sailors and forgot about the fisherman...