 The bohemian small time gangster Pyotr Voyd is a mystery to himself. Captured by the KGB in the midst of the 1991 military coup in Russia, he has lost his memory. While the KGB are violently trying to get out of him the whereabouts of a secret weapon, he dreams himself into revolutionary Russia in 1919, where he joins real-life Red Army hero Vasily Chapayev and his sidekick machine gunner Anna. Back in 1991, he starts to slowly remember his metamorphosis from penniless poet into a gangster in present day Moscow and how all this is intrinsically linked to the fact that he is in the hands of the KGB.