This charming comedy tracks the lives of several romantic pairs through trials and tribulations. The main focus of the story is a young soldier with a good heart but little ambition and his fiancée, who feels torn when a charming and sophisticated intellectual enters her life and sweeps her off her feet. There are also several side stories, also all dealing with relationships, most significantly the soldier's mother, whose comfortable but unexceptional marriage is threatened when a past love returns to her life.

A young Russian store clerk has a drab existence in times of shortages and is berated by her ailing mother for not seeing men. So she brings home an unknown young man who she met on the tram. She dreams many things but pines for this man.

Sergey Gusev, a thirty years old engineer from Moscow is kidnapped and forced to work in a mine.