One of the employees of a photo shop wins a huge amount of money in a lottery right before New Year celebration. But there is a problem: in order to buy the lottery ticket he silently borrowed money from a "mutual help fund" managed by himself. A hard discussion of "how to share the prize" is raised in the team. It discloses a lot of previously hidden secrets. Somebody skipped their regular commits to the fund, somebody has felt in a relationship with other's spouse, and it is even possible that the formal winner will be excluded from the persons pretending to share the prize... As in most Ryazanov's movies from the 1970's, plot is only the basis to expose personalities and their conflicts in totalitarian collectivist context.