Malcolm McDowell stars as a psychiatric patient who believes he assassinated the Tsar and his family in 1918. From his hospital bed in present-day Moscow, McDowell is taken back to the past by his psychiatrist, Oleg Yankovsky (who also plays the Tsar), in an attempt to free him of his delusion. Shot in Moscow and Leningrad in both English and Russian versions, its flaws are obvious. However, McDowell's portrait of schizophrenia is often disturbing, and the whole picture is a fascinating and gripping study of madness seen through the vortex of history.

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...