The film is set during the Russian Civil War in the period of the Red Terror. In a provincial Cheka (the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) office in an unnamed small town, a routine bureaucratic work is taking place. Every day, a Cheka troika tribunal made of director Srubov and his assistants Pepel and Katz reads out a long list of all kinds of real and perceived counter-revolutionaries and class enemies. Those arrested are always immediately found