Law student Oleg, who lives with his mother and stepfather, learns that his father has been released from prison and wants to see him. Having met his dad, Oleg discovers that he is a passionate lover of gambling. So the young man plunges into the world of big poker, underground casinos and research laboratories. Having become part of this shadow reality, Oleg becomes infected with a gaming addiction.
Teenager Ruslan takes care of the dying old man Tikhon, the village sorcerer who has been healing people all his life. Tikhon dies, and the local priest refuses to conduct the funeral service. Ruslan decides to fix it himself.
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.