The story happens mainly around "The Old Arbat Street" in the center of Moscow, where always concentrate vendors, poor young artists and musicians. The hero of this film is a boy named Mitiya,who lives with eccentric elder friend in an apartment house on "The Old Arbat". In fact, people who then appear around Mitiya are all unique, eccentric and the space of the apartment house begins to have an unrealistic character as a miniature of unstable society in the end of Soviet Union.
In a poor provincial town, the ragamuffin boys are frenziedly drilled for combat, and at nights the local elite, gathered in a pool room, boasts of fictitious biographies, while bands of boys amuse themselves with bloody fights on trashy vacant plots… One of the most vivid staples of the postwar childhood were pigeons. They could be bought, sold or stolen. One day a beautiful white dove appeared over the town. Risking his life, Ivan caught the White. And immediately became the target of the "pigeon" mafia…