Uma história pungente e trágica sobre eventos dos quais o próprio conde Liev Nikolaevitch Tolstói é um participante. O tenente da capital, Grigory Kolokoltsev, inspirado por ideias avançadas, é enviado para servir em um regimento de infantaria, no qual ocorre um crime de guerra. O soldado, sobre cujos ombros recai a culpa, enfrenta um tribunal militar. Kolokoltsev pede ajuda ao conde Tolstói, que decide proteger os inocentes. Uma história comovente sobre a complexidade das escolhas e a lealdade aos próprios ideais. Baseada em eventos reais.
Director Andrey Kalistratov is making a multi-part television film about the literary life of Petrograd after the Civil War, about the House of Arts, which was created by the Bolsheviks to control the creative intelligentsia. Modern Petersburg and Petrograd of 1921 are intricately intertwined in the director's mind. The cruel, bloody, but romantic world of the first years of the revolution and the artistic and everyday environment of modern cinema coexist in one space. The main characters of the film that Kalistratov is shooting - the poet and former officer Pyotr Versilov, his girlfriend Olga, the French documentary cameraman Etienne Faberge and his wife Francoise - are as real to the director as the people around him-the film's producer Semyon Mikhailovich, the film crew, actors, friends, acquaintances, relatives. Despite the demands of the producer to be "simpler" and "more economical", Kalistratov wants to make a real historical film, not a standard TV series "soap".
