Grair Garibyan

About the early years of the life of the philosopher and writer Alexander Herzen, about his first and unrequited love, about the throwing of youth and growing up of a young critic and revolutioner. According to his father, he comes from an ancient Russian family, and his mother was a simple German woman. As an illegitimate son, he was not given the name of his father, Yakovlev. In his youth, he was fond of the ideas of freedom, for which it is not a pity to fight, which even then was close to the ideals of the revolution...

The film tells about the pioneer Andrew and his friend. They imitate the accident in front of foreign tourists on the water. The young correspondent Egor noticed this, and as a result, the portraits of the pioneer hang wherever possible, he receives an invitation to the radio, people shot a movie about him. And now, when friends wanted to retreat, they began to realize that it would not be as easy as it seems...

During World War II, the Frenchman Léon Garros and Boris Vaganov escape from the Nazi concentration camp. After 15 years, Léon, who became a journalist, and his friends came to the USSR to make a report and find Boris in the meantime. In Moscow he doesn't found, and for the sake of meeting with a friend, Garros has to travel around the country by car... The foreigners are accompanied by Nikolai, the translator, who, in turn, is looking for his brother's runaway bride, Natasha.

Tractor driver Matvey Morozov returns to his native village from the prison. And he recalls the story of his marriage, his fatal love, failed betrayal and committed reckless “crime”, in which he doesn't repent at all.

Followed by his two sons, Chuk and Gek, an engineer-explorer heads for a geologists'camp lost in the Ural white wilderness. He plans to spend New Year's Eve there with Chuk and Gek, among his fellow-colleagues. However an undetermined incident has caused the occupiers to leave the place. When, to their amazement, the three adventurers discover the empty camp, they realize that they don't have enough food to return immediately and that they will have to join forces to survive for a few days without any outside help...

During the war years, russian soldiers pick up an orphaned boy. He refuses to go to the rear and becomes a scout, and then remains with the artillery battery. When the calculation of the battery dies in battle with the German tanks that have broken through, Vanya is sent to the Suvorov School, whose students participate in a military parade on Red Square.

Woven around the daily lives of two children, nine-year-old Nastenka and five-year-old Katia, this is a story of the 17 months' siege of Leningrad and of the people and families shattered by the war, their homes bombed and destroyed, their lives in a constant anticipation of the advancing German army and air raids.