The film is based on the feuilleton of the same name by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. A writer named Moldovantsev delivers a thrilling Soviet‐style Robinson Crusoe adventure on deadline, only to have his editor insist on adding a local party chairman, freed ex‐members, an activist collector, a housing committee and even a meeting table, bell and ledger washed ashore. Reluctantly he complies, so far that he jettisons Robinson himself as an unjustified weakling, transforming his novel into an absurd manifesto of bureaucratic excess.

US - Vaudeville dancer Marion Dixon is with her German manager von Kneischitz on tour in Moscow. Her act includes a gun shooting her to the trapeze, the stage director there wants a copy of this act for the USSR. She falls in love with a Soviet enginer, but von Kneischitz blackmails her with her dark spot in her life, she has a colored baby, to leave Moscow.