A story about Moscow teenagers who were born and grew up in Zamoskvorechye. They are the first post-war generation of adolescents, who also faced no small number of trials — and above all, the terrible time of the repressions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is the spring of 1956, and the first amnestied prisoners are beginning to return from Stalin's camps. Somewhere out there, in places not so remote, the father of tenth-grader Robert is still being held. The young man meets a wonderful girl named Mila, who has also known much grief in her life, and falls in love with her with his first headlong love. But the trouble is that Mila has caught the eye of the local thief Gavrosh, who lives by his own criminal "code" and has no intention of backing down…
The romance of the criminal underworld turns the heads of the young men from Zamoskvorechye, eager to prove to the whole world that reckless risk, unbridled daring, and resilience in a fistfight are nothing to them. Half-starved, impoverished, raised in the squalid world of communal apartments, they strictly observe the laws of the yard and the street. Will Robka Krokhin and his friends manage to keep themselves from the abyss, to avoid becoming thieves and criminals? What will stop them? First love, filial duty, or revulsion at the brutality of criminals, one of whose victims becomes Robka's beloved beauty Milka…