Based on short stories by Vasiliy Shukshin. About the life and people of the modern Soviet village. Old Yermolai lived all his life in one village. He has four sons, each with their own problems. The youngest foolishly ended up in jail and, three months before his release, greatly missing his family, escaped.

Antonina Vasilyevna, as a member of the bureau of the district committee of the party, was instructed to save the Leningrad children, whom the war overtook in the suburban camps. She took them to the Kirov region. After twelve days of hard travel, the children arrived in the village of Supryadki...

The plot is based on the dramatic fate of the Red Army commander Aleksei Ivanovich Pavlov. Having been captured in January 1942 and being among the displaced persons, he didn't immediately decide to return to the USSR. Having rolled around the foreign country for 17 years, Aleksei nevertheless returned to his homeland. He goes to his brother in the south of the country to Sevastopol. Aleksei accidentally meets the doctor Anna Andreyevna, who was saved from death in besieged Leningrad. She travels by car from Moscow and also to the south, with her daughter Tanya; she suggests he join them. Aleksei tells about his life on the road.

On the outskirts of the provincial town, Yevdokim and Yevdokiya live, raising foster children. Yevdokim works at a factory, Yevdokiya is a housewife. The family seems to be safe and happy: the only trouble is that Yevdokiya cannot forget the love of her youth. This Yevdokim cannot stand and offers Yevdokiya freedom, while he will remain with the children. But all these contradictions are drowned in mutual love for children and for each other.

About the early years of the life of the philosopher and writer Alexander Herzen, about his first and unrequited love, about the throwing of youth and growing up of a young critic and revolutioner. According to his father, he comes from an ancient Russian family, and his mother was a simple German woman. As an illegitimate son, he was not given the name of his father, Yakovlev. In his youth, he was fond of the ideas of freedom, for which it is not a pity to fight, which even then was close to the ideals of the revolution...

Based on the novel of the same name by Mikhail Sholokhov, about the fate of people broken by the First World War, the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in Russia (1917-1922), about the collapse of the foundations and ideals of the Don Cossacks of Russia at the beginning of the XX century, about the personal tragedy of the protagonist — Grigoriy Melekhov.