A Moscow hat shop girl chances upon a penniless young man who has arrived from the countryside for university and takes pity on him.

With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape chess. On the brink of giving up, she meets the world champion, Capablanca himself, with interesting results.

Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in.

Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR.

After a man kills two members of his Yukon gold prospecting team, the other two surviving members struggle to keep him subdued for the next several months until they can turn him over to the law.

An ignorant and prejudiced American’s visit of Soviet Russia goes off the rails after his luggage is stolen and he is separated from his bodyguard.

Shortly before the outbreak of WWI, a peasant from rural Russia arrives in St. Petersburg to find work.

Life is short and full of oppression, but that doesn't mean Parasha can't find love and laughter when she leaves her country home to take a job as a maid in the overcrowded, overworked, and underpaid world in the big city.

Jacob, a farmer, returns from the war to his wife Marie and begs the landlord baron for a plot of land to rent. The Baron grants the request, but only for a barren, rocky, useless acreage. The pair struggle to make do on this land, but then the Baron demands that Maria leave her husband to serve as wet nurse to his married daughter Anya's new baby, on threat of eviction. While nursing the daughter's baby, Maria receives unwelcome attentions from the daughter's husband, and a scandal erupts, ruining Maria in her husband's eyes. When she escapes from her employers and seeks to return home, the police give her the yellow passport signifying a prostitute, further degrading her. She approaches home, unsure of the reception that awaits her.

The film is based on real events and reveals the tragic episodes from the life of the Austrian biologist scientist-materialist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926), hunted by regressive scientists and Catholic reactionaries who committed suicide.