When Zhorik moves to Kyiv, he has high hopes to improve his life. But then he encounters the mundane struggles, bureaucracy, and corruption of Ukrainian reality.

For years, Andrei Evilenko eluded the obsessive Detective Lesiev and the psychiatric profiler Aron Richter. Spurred on by his rabid fury at the gradual crumbling of his precious Soviet Union, Evilenko is a man who will live, die and kill as a communist.