In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks’ defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side and then the other.

Former fighter pilot turned provincial schoolmistress Nadezhda Petrovna struggles to adapt to peacetime, having internalised military ideals of service and obedience.

In the aftermath of World War II, a Hungarian teenager, captured by Soviet troops, forms an unlikely bond with a Russian soldier in a remote prison camp.