The story is set in a prisoner-of-war camp in November 1920, in the Crimea, after the Evacuation of the Crimea (1920), with several thousand of White officers left behind on the peninsula. The officers are unaware of their impending doom, waiting for their fate to be decided by the Red Army officials. One of them — an unnamed poruchik (Mārtiņš Kalita) — is haunted by the memories of a dramatic and brief love affair occurred in 1907, and tries to understand how the Russian Empire fell apart and who is to blame. His musing comes to an end when all the White officers board an old barge, which the Reds take down in the Black Sea, and all officers perish.