Provincial town near Moscow. Several families live here in a large communal apartment. Each has its own worries, its own interests, its own troubles and joys. A communal apartment is not just a habitat. This is a kind of section of society. All of them are very different, members of this «communal hostel»: the intelligent Vera and the petty bourgeois Larisa, the elderly pensioners who are living out their lives, and the disabled Lira, who dreams of a happy life in distant Australia, the soulless clerk Bozhok and the young researcher Viktor, who is forced to earn extra money by tutoring . However, their destinies are inextricably linked with the events and complex conflicts taking place in the country, with a sense of instability, fear, anxious expectation: something must happen.