A small town in Siberia becomes the victim of a brutal police raid. Nobody knows why. The documentary film traces the reasons and outcomes of the event. It shows a conflict that is evident all over Russia today: a police state and the authorities set against a small but courageous number of citizens who defend their basic rights. When Alyosh went to have a smoke outside a club in December 2004, he could not have imagined that he would be beaten up and taken away to spend the night in a police cell. He was not alone; the night ended in a similar manner for at least 347 other inhabitants of Blagoveshensk, a city in Bashkortostan, which is an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation. They were victims of a preventive raid ordered by the Ministry of the Interior. The official reason was to reduce crime in the city. But Ludmila Alexeyeva, from Moscow's Helsinki Committee, sees it differently: at the time of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the authorities in Russia were allegedly afraid of unrest in its autonomous republics. Consequently, they attempted to nip any possible civil disobedience in the bud. Director Kerstin Nickig focuses on a Russian provincial region, where people have to fight for their basic rights. And Blagoveshensk was not the only city to suffer from an act like this. At least five other cities all over Russia were, in the last year, treated like this.