A girl comes from Uzbekistan to Volgograd to enter medical school. Due to her inexperience, she hastily arranges an internship in Afghanistan and goes there to a military unit.
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.
Terror strikes when a heartbroken woman uses black magic to get her husband back.
In the regional centre Kuznetsky the mayor has been killed in his office. The murderer is Dimur Kavsadze, in charge of commercial construction work for the city administration. A squall of public concern beleaguers the city. Alexander Danilin is an undercover curator, an intermediary between the business and the authorities; he tries to eliminate trouble and return life to normal. The cause of the tragedy was a construction project, which wrapped itself around Kuznetsky like a tumour, and which was a source of profit for the authorities and the local builders. The construction “devours” free land, the souls of people and even what seems beyond the law of profit: the family. Neither the death of people, nor common sense can stop the construction…
The creator of the best virtual reality games is convinced that in reality everyone and everything is controlled, but a chance meeting with a young activist opens his eyes to the fact that the world is much wider and more complicated than anything that he knows and understands about it.
