An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat.

Russian monk Grigori Rasputin rises to power, which corrupts him along the way. His sexual perversions and madness ultimatly leads to his gruesome assasination.

In Leningrad, at the end of the White Nights, young and childishly naive Nina meets a young journalist Valery. She falls in love with that genuine first love, which is only possible when you're 19 years old. She does not suspect that for such an ambitious aesthetic as Valerik, this is just another episode in an endless celebration of life. The leitmotif of the film, which became a cultural landmark for several generations of people born in Leningrad - St. Petersburg, is the natural scenery of the beautiful city on the Neva river at the beginning of the sixties.