A man is caught between his friendship with a young engineer wishing to open his peat-powered electric plant and his love for a young woman, whose father owns an oil company.
In a small Tatar village during the traditional holiday of the beginning of plowing, monks appear accompanied by soldiers. Trying to convert the local population to Orthodoxy by force, the monks and soldiers meet a tough rebuff from the locals. The wife of the peasant Bulat dies, and his son Asfan is taken away in an unknown direction.
Based on the novel The Man Who Killed by Claude Farrère.
