Twenty-year-old Bob rides 1000 km to Moscow on his vintage motorbike to collect a bad debt for his boss; the city chews up and spits out this naive country boy, whose head is full of Easy Rider dreams.
The social ferment in late 19th century Russia which led to the 1917 Russian Revolution is movingly portrayed in this lengthy historical drama, which is very faithful to the 1907 novel The Mother by the celebrated Marxist writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). In the story, "the mother" (Inna Tchourikova) has no other recourse than to watch her decent, kindly husband turn into an animalistic, drunken brute as a result of working in the inhuman conditions of a steel mill in the town of Sormovo. When he begins to express his suppressed rage by beating her, she is defended by her teenaged son Pavel (depicted Viktor Rakov as an adult, Sacha Chichonok as a boy). After his father's death, Pavel is forced to go to work in the same factory. However, Pavel and his friends begin investigating Marxism and socialist thought, and work to organize their fellow workers.
The story of a writer who accidentally stumbles across the elixir of immortality and in doing so encounters the small group of immortals who have jealously guarded this secret for centuries. Once the writer has knowledge of this elixir, called 'Mafussalin', the group of five immortals give him a stark choice: either join them, with the price of admission, being a duel to the death between the immortal who accidentally gave the secret away or death at the hands of the group. As the writer makes up his mind, sometimes aided and at other times opposed by the ever shifting alliances from within the group, we discover how the other immortals became this way, their true ages and what they have done with this 'gift'.
The setting is the east shore of the Caspian Sea (today's Turkmenistan) where the Red Army soldier Fyodor Sukhov has been fighting the Civil War in Russian Asia for a number of years. After being hospitalised and then demobbed, he sets off home to join his wife, only to be caught up in a desert fight between a Red Army cavalry unit and Basmachi guerrillas. The cavalry unit commander, Rahimov, "convinces" Sukhov to help, temporarily, with the protection of abandoned women of the Basmachi guerrilla leader Abdullah's harem. Leaving a young Red Army soldier, Petrukha, to assist Sukhov with the task, Rahimov and his cavalry unit set out to pursue fleeing Abdullah.Sukhov and women from Abdullah's harem return to a nearby shore town. Soon, looking for a seaway across the border, Abdullah and his gang come to the same town...
