When a Soviet state official attempts to coerce a celebrated poet into apologizing for a political joke he made, the official gets a taste of his own predatory medicine at the hand of the poet's vengeful wife.

In 1990s Leningrad, a Russian man prepares to emigrate, but things don't quite go as planned—twists of fate, complex friendships, and the omnipresent KGB stand in his way.

When a middle-aged German man receives a message from an old friend he knew in his youth, he travels back to St. Petersburg but cannot find him. He only finds mysterious bears wandering around the city.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a Russian man studying in the United States reconnects with his estranged, ludicrously Communist grandfather. Through letters, phone calls, and eBay, they bond over their shared experiences with death and Soviet life.

As conflict rages between Russia and Ukraine, a woman struggles to get through to her friend caught in the middle of it.

In communist Ukraine, a canning engineer reports a heating problem in his apartment to his local city hall—only to learn that his building doesn’t exist in the city registry. He takes drastic measures to restore heating to his apartment.

A Bosnian journalist visits America during the Bosnian ethnic cleansing and moves into a dirty Chicago apartment with a woman he once met and her on-and-off boyfriend. He takes on a series of humiliating jobs and tries to avoid thinking about the unknown fate of his parents.

Efforts to protect a great leader by creating doubles of him become increasingly drastic, and the true reality of the situation grows more and more unclear as the president is sheltered away in the name of protection and nationalism.

Trying to escape his Jewish past with the Holocaust, Luchinski is a Polish man who serves as a UN diplomat to an African country. He encounters people who and experiences that encourage him come to terms with his identity and past, but shows little signs of change.

A U.S state department official encounters an infatuation on his trip to Eastern Europe that ends in despair.