This is a story about the battle for a hospital building in Grozny (Chechnya) in January 1995 between Russian Army forces and Chechen rebels supported by Arabian mujahideen and international mercenaries. Although the story is fictional, most of the characters are based on real-life prototypes and events are the compilation of true events during the Grozny Siege in the First Chechen War.

In 1920s Moscow, shortly after the October Revolution, a stray dog named Sharik is taken in by Professor Preobrazhensky, a wealthy and respected surgeon. The professor performs a daring medical experiment on the dog that changes him into a human being. As the newly transformed Sharikov begins to navigate life in the professor’s apartment, his crude behavior and revolutionary ideas turn the household upside down.

In a deserted tundra on the lake, a seaplane makes an emergency landing, on board of which bank collectors carry a large amount of money. A storm begins and the plane relates to the river delta. An unknown person steals money from an airplane and kills a geologist, an accidental witness. And a few days later the ship departs from the northern port for the last navigation voyage, where a recidivist hides among the motley company of passengers, and the captain begins his own investigation...

A biologist, obsessed with the idea of writing a treatise on a new kind of mouse, becomes witness to a number of bizarre and horrific events, from his son's suicide, to the S&M engaged in by respectable middle-aged men, to his own family's psychic morbidity.

Colonel Fox is in charge of a counter terrorism group that will now have the complicated mission to help the police to prevent a dangerous Chechen terrorist organization that wants to free its leader at any cost, even if it has to destroy the whole place.

The head of the Pervomaiskaya Railway, at the first stage of perestroika, having accidentally learned that they want to fire him from his job, decides to carry out an experiment he had long planned - to put a super-heavy train on the tracks...