Ivan Franko

During the agrarian collectivization process in the Soviet Union, Vasyl, a peasant member of the youth division of the Communist Party, gets a tractor with the help of a local party organization and plows private boundaries on kulak fields. However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists. The story of the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising at the Arsenal factory in Kyiv by the Central Council troops.

The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.

The year 1929. A “shock worker” from a tractor plant visits a film studio premises and is furious to see fake stage designs for a kitsch production about a Soviet life. He refuses to help the crew with his tractor, but is happy to ask one of the cameramen to go with him to visit an actual Soviet village. There they witness the birth of the kolkhoz and the dekulakization of wealthy villagers. Then they are transported to the future, to the year 1932, when the first five-year plan is done and the commune-sovkhoz is established. Movies can move faster than time, but the pace of change in Soviet society is even faster than that.