A demobilized Red Army soldier returns to his village. Inspired by the spirit of collectivism, he plows a field so that the kulak's portion now belongs to the community, and sows it with grain confiscated from the 'philistines'. His father, a man of traditional world outlook, lives in a pantheistic world of the Ukrainian ethos, where sin has a physical dimension. He does not believe that the stolen grain will sprout on the stolen land. When the grain finally sprouts, the old man admits that his son was right; for the sake of building a new world, the old laws of the universe should be broken.