The main character of the film is a talented and artistic, highly educated man, a true Soviet intellectual. By the will of fate he became a KGB general, not a slave to his country or a camp dust in its remote corners, as has happened to many free minds. But he clearly sees the world he serves, secretly and deeply abhorring him, constantly changing roles and masks, hoping to remain above him – untouched and unblemished. However, the karmic forces do their irreversible work, bringing together in one knot the senseless and doomed political putsch, the greedy relatives who carefully betray his subordinates, the misunderstood erotic adventures of the strange wife with whom he never intersects in the ways of this film. The collapse of the empire, which he eventually spent his life, causes him to declare his sentence.