Alexander Ivanov, commander of a search detachment, is on another expedition in the Smolensk region. Unexpectedly, fate “puts them face to face” with a longtime friend—his army buddy Ravil Yakupov—and memories crash down on him like an avalanche. The whirlwind of events pulled from his past throws him back there, to that distant 1993. The storyline runs through a chain of events that fell to the lot of those very nineties. Starting with the collapse of a great empire, the war in Chechnya, unemployment, and disorder, the narrative returns to the present—back to a camp of trackers, carrying their unchanging Watch of Memory into the impenetrable depths of the Smolensk forests.