The hero of the film, academician Sergei Vasilyevich Lunin, director of the Kiev Research Institute of Informatics, is working on the implementation of the Unity project in the enterprises of a single department. According to his calculations, this global information network should significantly reduce the number of intermediate instances and, accordingly, the decision-making time. Lunin has opponents. Despite a sharp deterioration in health, the hero goes to the Novogorsk Tractor Plant and there he finds out the real reason for the downtime, and, consequently, the reason for hiding the data. Knowing that he has only six months to live, Lunin abandons the operation and does everything possible to protect his project.

Boris Zhadanovsky, a hereditary nobleman and officer who was predicted to have a brilliant military career, sides with the rebellious people. In 1905, Zhadanovsky is sentenced to death for his revolutionary activities. However, a powerful strike movement organized in response to the court's decision forces the tsarist government to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. After the revolution, Zhadanovsky joins the Red Army and dies fighting the White Army.

The life of Pavla Brus, a middle-aged, modest but principled woman, suddenly changes with a crush on a drilling foreman. Unable to restrain her feelings, she decides to cheat on her husband, divorce and leave the family. But her youngest son Kuzma, a teenager with an intelligent and piercing look at the world around him, stops her from a rash act, which is shaped by observation of Siberian nature. A philosophical attitude towards banal life processes allows the mother to reconsider her feelings for her husband Tikhon and the failed lover Nikolai.

Set in the early 1920s after the end of the Russian Civil War, Red Army soldier Nikita returns to his hometown to see his partner Lyuba, both of whom are scarred by the trauma of the Russian Empire of yesteryear.