This is a story about the battle for a hospital building in Grozny (Chechnya) in January 1995 between Russian Army forces and Chechen rebels supported by Arabian mujahideen and international mercenaries. Although the story is fictional, most of the characters are based on real-life prototypes and events are the compilation of true events during the Grozny Siege in the First Chechen War.

Boris Pavlovich Raisky, a bored Petersburg aesthet, comes to his family estate in a small town on the Volga. He hoped to find boredom and the faint-hearted provincials there, and did not expect that in the outback he was waiting for real life, dramatic love and serious passions. Boris Raisky’s estate is a blessed corner where everything pleases the eye: a native old house, tender greenery of birches and lindens, a silver strip of the Volga in the distance. And only a mysterious precipice at the end of the garden frightens the inhabitants of the estate. According to legend, at the bottom of it in ancient times, a jealous husband killed his wife and rival. “Precipice” is a symbolic word in the fate of the main character Vera. It fell to her to fall in love with a nihilist and a cynic who preaches "love for a term", painfully choose between feeling and duty, finally, go down to her beloved person in a cliff, cut off everything that connected with her former life...