Years of Bolshevik coup. A Soviet plane crashed in one of the sectors of the western front. Before his death, pilot Peluzin managed to reveal the secret of his invention to air observer Andrei. The dying man asked him to finish what he had started — to build an aviation oil engine. After a long search, Andrei managed to find the blueprints, which Peluzin's former flight engineer, Bogdan, was also hunting for...

A 1945 Soviet war film which, along with the second part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible was harshly criticized by Andrei Zhdanov and banned. A version of the film, released in 1956 during the Khrushchev Thaw, was disowned by director Grigori Kozintsev because the reediting was done without his participation.

In a provincial town on the Volga River, the young and sensitive Katerina marries Tikhon, a violent drunkard, and thus enters the crude milieu of greedy salesmen, the "dark kingdom". Her mother-in-law, Kabanikha, rules the family with an iron fist and endlessly harasses Katerina. One day, when Tikhon is away, she meets Boris, a man who embodies everything Katerina is longing for.