Engineer Dukalsky arrives from Moscow on the instructions of an underground anti-Soviet center to the Baltic Shipyard in order to take possession of the blueprints of a powerful ship engine. The pest meets the author of the project - a young and incorruptible self-taught master Ivanov. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to buy out or steal the drawings from the author, Dukalsky decides to take Ivanov with him. Criminal Investigation Officers will attack the trail of criminals.

Central Asia during the Civil War. The Jarkent battalion of the Red Army, located in the Verny (now Alma-Ata), receives an order from Frunze to go to the Fergana region to fight the Basmachi. A group of kulaks, with the support of local merchants and beys, incites the unconscious, wavering mass of the Red Army to revolt. The anti-Soviet agitation of counter-revolutionaries, demagogically exploiting the mood of war weariness, provokes an open mutiny in the battalion.