Transatlantic flight 713 is in trouble because the pilot and crew are poisoned while flying above the ocean. Now the passengers have to take control to save their lives.
The film tells about the "new Russians" who want to buy a cottage and find themselves in the house of a dead writer, whose family members meet the main characters in different ways
Man is trying to find simple human happiness. He decides for himself the question of what this happiness consists of - wealth, high social status, or something else.
Set in December of 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Lenin and the communists are making every effort to strengthen their power. Lenin appoints Felix Dzerzhinsky the Commissar for Internal Affairs and the head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (CheKa). It became the predecessor of GPU and KGB.
Set around the Volga river, the story begins around 1900, when Russian peasants are let free and allowed to own their farmlands. But soon they suffer from losses during the 1917 Russian Revolution and the following Civil War. Then, the major national catastrophe is started by Stalin: his communist government kills millions of farmers and steals all their food supplies, causing the longest and deadliest famine all over central Russia during the 1920s and 1930s.
Nadya Shumin is engaged to be married to Andrey Andreitch, the son of a local priest. Nadya lives on her grandmother's estate with her mother, "a fair-haired woman tightly laced in, with a pince-nez, and diamonds on every finger." While Nadya is a woman with a great desire for education and independence, Andrey is a friendly but rather vacuous and totally unmotivated man. Sasha, an ill and impoverished young man who is spending the summer on the estate has long been considered part of the family. Sasha implores Nadya to follow her heart - to go to Petersburg and attend the University.