Vsevolod Sanayev

The story starts in a Siberia where world's biggest diamond was found. It is so valuable that it may not only pay off the enormous national debt, but also allow every Russian citizen to move to the Canary Islands. However, Mafia plans to steal the massive gem but a notorious thief, Vasia, ruins their plans. Mafia and militia begin chasing him, but soon Vasia learns that he has brothers as between the chase he runs into well known Jewish conductor and a gypsy baron who are triplet brothers.

Matvey Pestsov, an employee of the District Party Committee, proposes to introduce collective contracting in one of the collective farms. The administration and the chairman of the collective farm Volgin are against the experiment. But Pestsov does not give up.

A flutist in the forgotten past, at present the husband of a “big man’s” daughter and head of one of the Chief Directorate’s sections felt unwell one day: the forty-year-old man had a pain in his heart. This unpleasant incident provided an opportunity to meet a nurse named Lida. However, their stormy love affair ended, with Filimonov returning to normal life and an unloved wife.

At a meeting of the bureau, under pressure from the first secretary of the district committee of the party, the agronomist of the collective farm Boris Kholmovoy was dismissed and expelled from the party for allegedly arbitrary actions. Disagreeing with the decision of the district committee, Kholmovoy files an appeal. The secretary of the regional party committee Plotnikov, wanting to understand this complicated matter, goes to the collective farm.

Young agronomist Viktor Nozhov makes an extraordinary decision - he leaves a successful state farm and becomes the chairman of a backward collective farm in his native village...

A funny story about Fyodor - the oldest person in the village - and his three sons.

Mr. Fortescue, owner of a big company, unexpectedly dies. The autopsy shows that he has been poisoned. Nobody actually loved him, and even his family members had their reasons to kill him. But who really did it? And who is responsable for killing his young servant and his wife within the next couple of days? Of course the only person who can answer this question is Ms. Marple. And of course, the murderer is the person you least expected it to be.

Mikhail Ulyanov is the Bergmanesque protagonist of the Russian Private Life. A government-appointed factory executive, Ulyanov is reduced to quivering confusion when he is dismissed. Recovering from this blow, he decides to review and realign his life. In so doing, he discovers that there's plenty left in the world to make life worth living. Private Life was nominated for the "best foreign picture" Academy Award in 1983.

Nikolai Kurkov, a Muscovite, worked at a research institute and dreamed of defending his thesis on agrobiology, but when he arrived in one of the villages of the Non-Chernozem region, he met a childhood friend and stayed, heading a lagging collective farm...

The events that take place from the evening of one day, until the afternoon of the next, radically change the life of the family of the elderly writer Zharkov.