Viktor Arkasov

1935. A plan is hatched at a railway depot to sabotage a record-breaking high-speed run that a young locomotive engineer, Mitya Orlov, has volunteered to undertake. The saboteurs attempt to cause a catastrophe by directing the trains of Mitya and his father, Vasily Orlov, toward each other on a collision course.

A funny story about a life of a big department store and its employees and customers.

A border guards are hunting a spy infiltrated to the USSR.

On the patriotism of Ukrainian collective farmers. Tractor driver Andrei Stozhar decides to go to the Far East instead of his brother Maxim killed on the border.

A Jewish tannery worker, Nahum Beychik, invents a machine that makes hard work easier in leather tanning. A private entrepreneur, former kulak Lopatin, tries to buy the invention and use it for his own selfish interests. Having met with a decisive refusal from Nahum Beychik, the kulak exploits the anti-Semitic sentiments of the backward part of the workers and, with the help of his accomplices, hooligans and truants, tries to kill the inventor.

A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution.