The Russian Story profiles Anatoly Rybakov, a best-selling Russian novelist. His personal life follows Russia in the XXth century, a country destroyed in Stalinist purges and in the battlefields of World War II. With Perestroika the calamities seem to have ended. Or have they? The film is structured around three major themes: Stalinist purges and the Second World War, the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, and the destiny and future of Russia. In The Children of the Arbat, first published in 1987 at the outset of Perestroika, Rybakov examines the enormous human cost the Soviet Union paid in the XXth century. The book became a symbol for freedom and openness and made possible a public debate about Stalinist crimes. Heavy Sand talks about the horrors of the Holocaust, perpetrated by the Nazis in the Soviet Union. It opened a public debate about the Jewish question in a thoroughly anti-Semitic Soviet State.