Silence

Plot

In 1945, with other servicemen, demobilized after the end of World War II, 22-year-old Captain Sergey Vohmintsev, commander of an artillery battery, returns from Germany. The young soldier looks with hope to the future of peaceful life, for he began dating a girl geologist Nina.

However, Sergei's joy is overshadowed by a meeting with another ex-battalion commander, Arkady Uvarov, who left his battery to perish and shifted the blame to a junior commander who was court-martialled and killed in a penal battalion. Vokhmintsev, the only survivor of the tragedy, publicly denounces Uvarov. The conflict that arose in the restaurant ends with a fine for petty hooliganism. At the meeting of the new 1946, where Sergei comes along with Nina, Uvarov again appears. He utters patriotic toasts and offers his friendship, but Vohmintsev refuses to drink with him for Stalin and leads Nina away, leaving the guests. Uvarov, who for the second time hardly avoided publicly exposing his shameful past, did not forget this.

Three years later. Sergey studies in the Mining and Metallurgical Institute, where he went after the advice of Nina, and lives with her father and younger sister in a communal apartment, side by side with family of the artist Mukomolov, who is the author of paintings called ideologically alien by the authorities, and the unprincipled citizen Bykov, dreaming to expand his living space. Denounced either by his neighbor or by someone else, the old communist Nikolai Vohmintsev gets arrested by MGB, but he considers this to be a mistake and believes that everything will be sorted out. Sergey also believes in justice: to defend the good name of his father before the competent authorities, he needs time, and so he comes to the dean's office with a request to exempt him from the summer internship.