Summary

A group portrait of Soviet people in the interior of the post-Soviet timelessness. Soviet Jews intoxicated with freedom, who did not want to leave the new Russia, and Soviet officers broken by freedom, who did not want to return to the new Russia. Ruddy first-year soldiers, singing obscene songs, and old men, "are terrible with their blind gazes into the lens, as into the abyss of time." People who died, long before they died. And people experiencing their rebirth. And there are cracked tombstones, ruined cemeteries, abandoned towns, an empty autumn sky and a chronicle of several wars that merged in the memory of an old soldier into one endless massacre that began in 1914 and continues to this day with a premonition of civil war.