"Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko) brings his wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie) and two children for a trip to his childhood home in the countryside. The tranquillity of the countryside is broken when Vera tells Alex that she is pregnant and that the baby is not his. The riff between the couple grows but the two try to keep up appearances in the presence of their children and the old friends that visit them.
Alex is unsure about what to do and turns to his brother Mark (Aleksandr Baluyev) for advice. On the way to meet Mark at the train station, Alex's son Kir (Maksim Shibayev) reveals that Alex's friend Robert (Dmitri Ulyanov) was at their house one day while Alex was away for work. Alex concludes that Robert is the baby's father.
Vera feels that they have become estranged and is afraid of what Kir will turn into due to the criminal nature of Alex and his brother's work. In the film's opening scene, Mark comes to Alex's house for help removing a bullet from his arm.
In the end, Alex makes the decision to have an abortion. While the children are at a friend's house, he gets Mark to find a doctor to perform the procedure. The abortion goes wrong and Vera dies. Alex and Mark rush the funeral formalities as gossip spreads quickly in the countryside. After returning home from the funeral parlour, Mark has a serious heart attack. Against the advice of the doctor, he attends Vera's funeral but dies before they return home.
Alex returns to the city alone and goes to Robert's house with the intention of killing him. Alex falls asleep in his car outside the house and is awoken by Robert who invites him in. As he retrieves the gun from the glove box, he finds an envelope containing the results of Vera's pregnancy test and a letter written by Vera on the back.
The film cuts to a flashback of the time Robert came to Alex's home while he was away. It is revealed that the day before, Vera attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on pills but is saved by Robert. The next day, Vera finds out she is pregnant and confides with Robert, revealing that she never had an affair and that the baby was in fact Alex's, even though she says it felt like it wasn't his." (bron: wikipedia)
"In het pre-perestrojkatijdperk verbeelden een impotente ex-militair en een atheïstische professor zo’n beetje de twee uitersten van het oude Sovjetrijk. Hun dronkenmangesprekken gaan over god, het leven, moedertje Rusland en vadertje Stalin. Het noodlot zit ze op de hielen en alles werkt toe naar die nietsontziende finale waarin Balabanov korte metten maakt met elk nostalgisch verlangen naar de goede oude tijd. Niks back to the USSR. En ja, parallellen met het door kapitalistische gangsters overheerste heden zijn er, zoals in elke goede historische film, in overvloed. Meer over de plot verklappen zou zonde zijn. Wees gewaarschuwd voor een flinke dosis horror, necrofilie en humor." (http://www.budakortrijk.be/FilmDetail.aspx?filmid=465)(vrij naar NRC Handelsblad)