Valentin Abramov

During World War II, earnest young Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is rewarded with a short leave of absence for performing a heroic deed on the battlefield. Feeling homesick, he decides to visit his mother. Due to his kindhearted nature, however, Alyosha is repeatedly sidetracked by his efforts to help those he encounters, including a lovely girl named Shura. In his tour of a country devastated by war, he struggles to keep hope alive.

It is the New Year's Eve and the employees of an Economics Institute are ready with their annual New Year's entertainment program. It includes a lot of dancing and singing, jazz band performance and even magic tricks. Suddenly, an announcement is made that a new director has been elected and that he is arriving shortly. Comrade Ogurtsov arrives in time to review and disapprove of the scheduled entertainment. To him, holiday fun has a different meaning. He imagines speakers reading annual reports to show the Institute's progress over the year, and, perhaps, a bit of serious music, something from the Classics, played by the Veterans' Orchestra. Obviously, no one wants to change the program a few hours before the show, much less to replace it with something so boring! Now everyone has to team up in order to prevent Ogurtsov from getting to the stage. As some of them trap Ogurtsov one way or another, others perform their scheduled pieces and celebrate New Year's Eve.

For many years, Sasha Lvova has been waiting for the return of her lover, pilot Aleksei Astakhov, refusing to believe in his death at the front. And he really returns to her and his son after captivity, but this is a completely different person, rejected by society, expelled from the profession. It is difficult to say how Aleksei’s fate would have been if it hadn’t for Sasha’s love, her ability to survive in the most difficult circumstances.

A small vessel is caught in a storm at sea. With no fuel and no radio, Boatswain Pukhov — an amateur pigeon breeder — sends two pigeons carrying a message about the tugboat’s dire situation. One of them, named Pilot, reaches land. The crew is rescued, and Pilot is given to a schoolboy from Moscow who took part in this difficult voyage.

Autumn 1941. German tank troops are making another attempt to break through to the Uritsk and Pulkovo Heights. During heavy fighting, Soviet troops managed to stop the offensive of fascist tanks one and a half kilometers south of the Pulkovo Observatory. The 900 days of the blockade and the incredible courage of the Soviet people were approaching ...

Three Novels from the Life of the Factory.

A comedy about young lieutenant Ivan and his all-girls air defense unit adventures during WWII.

A portrait of the era of "Red Terror" during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, The Seventh Companion offers a character study in General Adamov (Andrei Popov), a law professor in the tsarist army, who is incarcerated by the Bolshevik secret police along with many other members of the bourgeoisie. Finally released into the new world of the Soviet Union, the resigned officer finds that he has lost everything from his old life except a mantel clock that he carries through the night from place to place, until he ends up back where he started.