The love story of young Countess Natasha Rostova and Count Pierre Bezukhov is interwoven with the Great Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon's invading army.

In 1805 St. Petersburg, Pierre Bezukhov, illegitimate son of a rich nobleman, is introduced to high society. His friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, joins the Imperial Russian Army as aide-de-camp of General Mikhail Kutuzov in the War of the Third Coalition against General Napoleon Bonaparte. Part one of the four-part adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel.

Surrounded by a few party officials, Alexei Ivanov, a stakhanovist smelter, is decorated by Stalin. The "Little Father of the Peoples" takes this opportunity to invoke threats of war.... One day, war indeed breaks out. Bombs fall on the field where Alexei finds himself in the company of the schoolmistress Natacha, his fiancée. Alexei joins the Red Army and soon becomes a sergeant. Fighting rages and German troops advance. Natacha is arrested and deported. But the tide turns decisively with the German defeat at Stalingrad. Now the major offensive against Hitler can begin.

The secret police agent finds that factory director wife is counterrevolutionary but dies from the heart attack. The director reads the diary of an agent and turns his wife to police.

In an unnamed English-speaking capitalist land, a young engineer invents inexhaustible giant robots to replace the fragile human workers on high-volume assembly-lines, and soon finds his invention co-opted by the military-industrial complex.

It is May 1912. Thirteen political prisoners are being tried in a naval fortress of Kronstadt. They are sentenced to death by hanging. A clandestine Bolshevik organization decides to free the prisoners during their transfer to the place of execution. Vasily Panin, a junker of a school of naval engineers, is one of those entrusted with this dangerous task.