Moscow, 1996. Andrey Rubanov, a young and enterprising banker, has a wife, Irma, and a small child. And also — more than a million dollars for two with my friend Misha. Seeing themselves as the future elite of the new state, the oligarchs, they fit into a major deal, but it turns out that their friends were involved in a large-scale scam to steal billions from the treasury. After his arrest, Andrei finds himself in an overcrowded communal cell at the Matrosskaya Tishina, a purgatory where he will have to become a different person in order to survive and return to his familiar world.