Alexander Chernyavskiy

A Duma deputy and his wife have been murdered. While investigating the crime, Major of Criminal Investigation Anatoly Topol encounters an unusual phenomenon — the so‑called “secret red mercury”. Red mercury has all the properties of a typical synthetic substance, but its energy content is many times greater than that of plutonium. Who is developing this mysterious “weapon” and for what purpose, under conditions of the strictest secrecy? Solving this mystery leads Anatoly to very high levels of power...

August 1941. The commissar, fearing for the life of the German anti‑fascist communist Rettel, sends him and his son Otto in an ambulance train to the rear. During a raid, Rettel is killed, and the eighteen‑year‑old boy ends up with the combat crew led by Senior Sergeant Zhigarev, who has received an urgent order to hold the position — or, in the worst‑case scenario, to blow up the bridge. Zhigarev clearly doesn’t trust the young German...

Boris Zhadanovsky, a hereditary nobleman and officer who was predicted to have a brilliant military career, sides with the rebellious people. In 1905, Zhadanovsky is sentenced to death for his revolutionary activities. However, a powerful strike movement organized in response to the court's decision forces the tsarist government to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. After the revolution, Zhadanovsky joins the Red Army and dies fighting the White Army.

“The Afghan” - the first film of the dilogy - tells about the difficult fate of the “Afghan” warrior Ivan Koval, who fell into the souls and experienced all the horrors of captivity ... They captured him during transportation from the guardhouse to the base, and he was shone for 15 years in prison for the murder of a confessor, from whose house their armored personnel carrier was fired. He tried to escape, he was caught ...