An aviation colonel comes to the Western Urals, to a large village of industrial importance. He remembers running here as a barefoot boy with his friend in the early 1930s. Then there was only a small crossing and a small village. About how they lived and studied here, how they became active builders of a new life, how they dreamed of seeing different countries, how they bravely fought the Nazis far from their homeland.
During the Gorbachev years, Platon Makovski and his four buddies are university students who jump on the private capitalism movement. Fast-forward 20 years, Platon finds himself the richest man in Russia, having sacrificed his friends to get to the top. But with this cynical rise, comes a brutal fall.
During the Great Patriotic War, battalion commander Pavel Akimov fell in love with the military translator Anechka Belozerova, but the circumstances of military life separated them.
