Nurdin is a man who failed to protect friendship and love, who retreated before deceit and hypocrisy. The benevolent viewer is personified by the Old Man, a character who seems to stand outside the plot. Nurdin tells the Old Man about his life.

Performance based on the novel of the same name by Yuri Olesha with the participation of actors from the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theater of M. Gorky.

About the trial of the October Revolution, which was organized in 1919 by the US Senate.

The teleplay was based on V. Mayakovsky’s poems “You!”, “Listen!”, “Conversation with Comrade Lenin” and other works of the poet.

The front-line friends during the heavy battle swore to each other that the one who would survive would continue the work of the deceased. Mikhail Nesterov remained alive and the main business of his life was the search for a deposit of valuable clay. These searches began his friend before the war, in remote taiga places. Yevdokiya Perevalova — the widow of a deceased friend decides to help Nesterov get to those deaf places...

Kolya Kasatkin, who saw in his wife Tanyusha the ideal of female charm, tenderness, kindness, who loved her to the point of oblivion, was at a loss before the idle conversations of well-wishers about his wife's betrayal. Having found his wife with the choir director, Nikolai demanded a divorce. Continuing to love each other, the former spouses are unhappy in separation. Kasatkin's new hasty marriage did not return his peace of mind. In daily agony, in the pursuit of a past life, he also lost his old dream — to live and work in the Far East, where he served in the army. Both realized too late that love does not forgive hasty decisions, that it must be able to keep and protect.

Leonid Pleshcheyev returned from the war blind. Against his will, he became a dependent. He drowns his grief in unrestrained drunkenness, thereby tormenting his wife Mariya and his teenage son Lyonka. Mariya finally decides to take her son and leave for Altai, but the boy runs away and returns to his father. So, together, they eke out a half-miserable existence until Grigoriy Shalagin, Pleshcheyev's longtime friend, returns from the army. It is he who awakens in Leonid the extinct self-esteem and pride of a soldier. Pity aside, he helps him get back to work.

In the main character's diary, he describes his life, his work, and the people around him. He goes on to write about his feelings for a woman, and soon after that he begins to show signs of insanity - he talks to her doggie Meji, he gets hold of letters that Meji wrote to another doggie. After a few days, he's already completely disconnected from reality...

The years of civil war. Teacher Lyubov Yarovaya is on the side of the revolution. Her husband Mikhail is a White Guard officer. Mikhail fiercely fights against Soviet power. The struggle in the woman's soul between her love for her husband and her revolutionary duty ends with the victory of the latter. She passes a harsh and merciless sentence on Mikhail...

After the end of the civil war, sailor Ivan Ivanov, who dreams of working at the legendary Putilov factory, arrives in Petrograd to build a new life.