According to Nina Krivosheina's book, Four Thirds of Our Lives.

The film describes the events of the late 1940s, when, in the wake of post-war patriotism, many Russian emigrants repatriated to the USSR. The main action of the film is set in post-war Kiev.

Russian Alexei Golovin and his wife, Frenchwoman Marie, arrived in the USSR, faced with their own eyes the terrible realities of Stalinist totalitarianism. Almost all those who arrived with them on the steamer were sent to camps or shot. With the lives of the main characters are intertwined and the lives of neighbors in the communal apartment: Olga - informant NKVD, Anastasia Alexandrovna, forced to almost forget about her noble origin and her grandson Sasha, a talented athlete-swimmer.