Mistress Hen has a lot of worries every day. She needs to feed the chickens, take them to kindergarten, clean, iron, and prepare dinner. But how to cook something without salt? Hen goes to the neighbor Goose to borrow salt, but she asks to do her a favour. A simple request triggers a whole cascade of favours that must be arranged to get...salt. The cartoon satirically mirrors the rampant barter and blat in the poor Soviet society of the late "stagnation" era.

For years, Andrei Evilenko eluded the obsessive Detective Lesiev and the psychiatric profiler Aron Richter. Spurred on by his rabid fury at the gradual crumbling of his precious Soviet Union, Evilenko is a man who will live, die and kill as a communist.

Colonel Karas lives with his wife, Larisa, a gynaecologist and their son, Andrey in a large house in the city. Apart from his demanding job in the military, the colonel loves to hunt and fish, which takes him away from home for long periods of time. However, it is his love of other women that is the real cause of his absences and his marital problems. With this example to follow, it is no surprise that the children are also proving unlucky in love. Daughter Veronica has fallen in love with the wrong man while son Andrey is following in his father's footsteps and gaining a reputation as a ladies' man. When the colonel is told by his superiors that his family is to be relocated to a small flat, he decides the easiest solution would be to marry Andrey off.