An operetta based on M. Sholokhov’s «Don Stories». The Don Cossacks lived as their grandfathers and fathers had lived: they worked themselves to exhaustion and kept their women in strictness. But then Nastya arrived in the хутор and began teaching the local Cossack women about a new life: that a woman is not just a wife, but a person. The Cossacks, however, have their own truth: a wife is like a horse—if you don’t beat her, she won’t pull. And so the хутор split into two irreconcilable camps: a women’s commune and a men’s artel.