In the small town of Gorovets in the Pskov region, located 30 km from the border with Latvia, an emergency occurred - half of the local police department's management was arrested. And this happened because of the largest legal business in the city - a cement plant: it was flourishing, turnover was growing, thus the enterprise became a tasty morsel for everyone, and the fight for it reached the federal level. As a result, Moscow operatives have to restore order in the city and head the local police department: Major Sergey Malakhov becomes the head of the department, and captains Vadim Gruzdev and Ivan Shadrin head the criminal investigation department.
Moscow, 1952, mid-October, the XIX Congress of the CPSU had just ended. A communal apartment on Bolshaya Pirogovka. In one of the rooms lives the Petkevich family: Ariadna with her husband Boris and her parents, professor of philosophy Peter Kazimirovich and his wife Angelina Fyodorovna. For those few months that remained until Stalin's death, the family experiences a series of dramatic events. But on a background of terrible time, antisemitism, fabricated "case of doctors", denunciations and snitches, there are people who live their lives without losing dignity.
1944. According to information obtained from a recruited German agent, a major act of sabotage is being planned in the Murmansk port, through which the USSR receives vital military cargo from the allies along the northern route. Counterintelligence officers Sergey Saburov and Elena Soley have a new dangerous mission, to prevent large-scale sabotage in the Murmansk seaport, find and neutralize the enemy.