Konstantin Malakhov

In June 1941, the Extraordinary Defense Headquarters of Leningrad, under the leadership of Zhdanov and Voroshilov, decided to build the Luga defensive line. Heavy fighting west of Pskov forced units of the front to withdraw, and on July 9, Pskov was also abandoned. The battles in the Luga direction held back the enemy. The first attacks of the Germans, intending to cross the Luga line on the move, were repulsed with heavy losses for them.

Leonid Pleshcheyev returned from the war blind. Against his will, he became a dependent. He drowns his grief in unrestrained drunkenness, thereby tormenting his wife Mariya and his teenage son Lyonka. Mariya finally decides to take her son and leave for Altai, but the boy runs away and returns to his father. So, together, they eke out a half-miserable existence until Grigoriy Shalagin, Pleshcheyev's longtime friend, returns from the army. It is he who awakens in Leonid the extinct self-esteem and pride of a soldier. Pity aside, he helps him get back to work.

A young detective is trying to find a hiding Nazi collaborationist who is responsible for deaths of a hundreds of people during WWII.

About the beginning of M. Gorky's literary activity. Arriving in the provincial town of Samara, Alexey Peshkov publishes one after another incriminating feuilletons under the pseudonym Yehudiel Chlamydia. Acquires enemies, friends, becomes a famous writer and leaves for Moscow.

A young police officer, Sergeant Nikolai Zakharov, who is simultaneously completing his studies at the University's Law Faculty, is assigned to investigate the assault and robbery committed against Alexei Severtsev, an applicant who has come from a distant city to study at a Leningrad university.