Former criminal investigator is falsely accused in a death of a witness. After escape from a jail he tries to find who was responsible for ruining his life.
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...
A group of young people comes to a Siberian construction site. They form a brigade, one of their tasks being cutting of a track for a power line. Different reasons made these people go to taiga and become pathfinders. One of them, a former taxi-driver Leonid (A.Kuznetsov) went to earn lots of money, Rimma (A.Zavialova) from the undivided love, the yesterdays schoolboy Constantine to find romantic appeal and adventures, and Vladimir (N.Dovzhenko) attempting to escape his shadowy past. Far away from the city fuss, in severe labor conditions and unsettled way of life, relations of these absolutely unknown to each other people gradually resume the normal course. Here many of them experience revaluation of values, others even find their love.
