Lena returns to her home in a remote, war-ravaged Armenian village to try and persuade her grandparents to leave with her for safety in Moscow.
Knowing that he will soon pass on, elderly Valentin Grack hires private detective Stanislav to follow him around for an entire day and write down everything that he does. It is a cold day and during Grack's travels he encounters a younger woman who addresses him as professor. He then meets a prostitute who turns out to be his daughter, and finally he meets an old woman, his worried wife who has been searching eight days for him. In between meeting the women, Grack finds himself in some almost surreal situations and having flashbacks about his youth.
Late one evening in Moscow in 1937, Defence Counsel Sedov hears a knock at the door. Three women whose agronomist husbands have been sentenced to death for alleged sabotage beg him to take on the seemingly hopeless task of saving them. Sedov embarks upon a succession of encounters with increasingly powerful officials, gradually persuading them to look at the case anew. But the highest authorities are not so easily outmanoeuvered, and Sedov becomes canonised as a Stalinist zealot, with the film building inexorably to its chilling triple climax.
Filatova
At the beginning of the 1941 war, a young talented artist Igor and his theater were evacuated to Tashkent. Here he meets music teacher Olga, who is seriously ill with malaria. Igor understands that only treatment in the capital will save the girl. But they are allowed into Moscow only on special passes. And then Igor almost by force drags Olga to the registry office. Feeling responsible for the girl, Igor begins to patronize her more and more...
The whole life of Pavel Sergeevich is connected with his native village. Returning from the front, he headed the collective farm in his native village and became its permanent chairman. It was then that relations with his older brother Peter, who left for the city, deteriorated. And here is a new meeting of the brothers after many years...
Anfisa Ilyinichna Pankratova
A story about the life of a high school and a physical education teacher.