Pensioner organizes a meeting of former classmates fifty years after graduating from school. Many are no longer alive, but those who came touchingly remember their distant childhood and youth, the joys and sorrows of bygone years.

The action takes place during the Great Patriotic War. Peasant Matryona Bystrova loses her husband at the front, then her eldest son goes missing. Matryona decides to save the youngest son at all costs and shelters him from being drafted into the army in the attic of the house until the end of the war. But it turns out that saving her son, she condemns him to spiritual death, and herself to torment of conscience. A private story about the mother of a deserter grows to epic proportions...

A female commissar is sent to the naval detachment, led by the anarchist Vozhak, on behalf of the Party Central Committee. She is tasked with subordinating the sailors to the cause of the revolution.

A atory about the legendary young actress of Soviet cinema Gulya Korolyova, who started acting in films at the age of four. In May 1942, having barely finished school, Gulya voluntarily went to the front and soon died heroically in a battle near Stalingrad.

On a stopover in Moscow, a young writer Volodya makes friends with Kolya, who is returning home from a hard night shift. Just as Kolya is about to take a rest, he is met by his old friend Sasha, who wants help getting a deferral from military service so that he can get married.

A young ordinary communist, Vasiliy Gubanov, was among many who took part in the construction of the most important facility for the young republic, the power plant. He did his job in a way that was beyond human ability. He could love, too, with a passion and a passion for self, but his life was cut short very early.