In Lausanne, Léon is involved by accident with a small Leninist group and gets to know Léa, a dedicated activist and the group leader's mistress. The police keep a close watch on them and trouble is bound to follow.

Srubov is a part of CHEKA, the secret police Lenin established after the Bolshevik Revolution. They arrest, interview for a minute, try in ten seconds, and execute intellectuals, aristocrats, Jews, clergy, and their families. In the building basement, five people at a time are shot as they stand naked facing wooden doors. No one to remember their last words; no martyrs, just anonymous bodies. Daily, the kangaroo court, the executions, the loading of bodies onto wagons. Srubov is cold, distant, sexually dysfunctional, and a deep thinker, hated by former friends and his family. As he tries to reason the nature of revolution and the purpose of CHEKA, he slowly goes mad.

St. Petersburg. Winter of 1917, the eve of the February Revolution. The maid finds in the room the corpse of the murdered tenant. In his pocket, a hotel account was found in the name of Karl Fischer, a well-known banker. An investigation is beginning. In the list of suspects - an agent of the secret police...

This is 1920: Sophia and Trofim Ivanytch have been living on Vassilievski Island, which is part of Petrograd, for thirteen years. In their house, which looks like a ship wreck, the atmosphere is gloomy. Sophia cannot have children and she is aware that, because of that, she is likely to lose her husband. That is why, when their neighbor dies, she asks Trofim to take in Ganka, his orphaned thirteen-year-old daughter. Trofim agrees and their new life begins...

The year is 1949. One of the last outbreaks of Stalinist terror was a bloody buffoonery under the auspices of the fight against cosmopolitanism. In the Writers' House near Moscow, where a young writer finishes her story about her husband's arrest and death, there is a painful atmosphere of fear, suspicion, suspiciousness and foreboding that can drive you crazy...