Moscow, 1996. Young and enterprising banker Andrei Rubanov has a wife Irma and a small child. And more than a million dollars between them with his friend Misha. Seeing themselves as the future elite of the new state, oligarchs, they sign up for a major deal, but it turns out that the friends were drawn into a large-scale scam to steal billions from the treasury. After his arrest, Andrei ends up in an overcrowded common cell at Matrosskaya Tishina, a purgatory where he must become a different person in order to survive and return to the familiar world.