Depicts Russian Tsar Peter the First's conquest over the Swedes and his son Aleksey's plot to overthrow him.

To pay off their debts, parents sell their daughter Kira to an old coach maker, a wealthy man Stavro, before her birth. When Kira is 13 years old, Stavro takes her to his home as a slave wife.

A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory.