Russia, 1917. The Russian Revolution is around the corner. Vassa Zhelenova, a wealthy merchant, has everything: money, power, influence, family. But does she have a future? In a period in which "the houses were made of stone and the people from iron," Vassa is a larger than life woman who rules over the people around her, she is "tough and right," but the bourgeois values she is trying to preserve threaten to ruin her family.