A Jewish tannery worker, Nahum Beychik, invents a machine that makes hard work easier in leather tanning. A private entrepreneur, former kulak Lopatin, tries to buy the invention and use it for his own selfish interests. Having met with a decisive refusal from Nahum Beychik, the kulak exploits the anti-Semitic sentiments of the backward part of the workers and, with the help of his accomplices, hooligans and truants, tries to kill the inventor.

In a remote Russian village during World War I, colourful and nuanced characters experience divided loyalties: family loyalty vs. personal desire, nationalism vs. transcendent humanism.

To pay off their debts, parents sell their daughter Kira to an old coach maker, a wealthy man Stavro, before her birth. When Kira is 13 years old, Stavro takes her to his home as a slave wife.

A 1925 Soviet comedy sponsored by the Soviet Finance Ministry, with a plot promoting the new economy. A small-town tailor, Petya Petelkin (Ilyinsky), bought a lottery ticket and handed it to his landlord, widow Shirinkina (Deykun) who wants to marry him. Petya is a hard-working tailor trying to start his own business. He is also in love with Katya (Maretskaya), whom he wants to marry. He has to survive a cascade of funny situations in the unstable Soviet reality, before his romance with Katya comes to a happy ending.

A feature film that depicts scenes from the census of Imperial Russia in 1882 and the upcoming census of the Soviet Union as of January 17, 1939. The census takers interview citizens, fill out census forms in the homes of urban residents, collective farmers, and among the guests of the "Moscow" hotel.

A young Lyova travels with the hope of ascent from Czarist Russia to New York. Disappointed, he returns to the young Soviet Union and is glad to have found a simple work.