Expecting to find a socialist utopia, people immigrate abroad to the Soviet Union. Especially Finns move in hopes of getting a better life.

A Finnish detective, who has been detained in the Solovetskyi prison camp, faces the first steps that the Great Purge takes. The hunt for so-called gulags, property owning farmers, starts, and impacts especially Ukraine.

Finnish congressman Juho Perälä witnesses first hand how stalinistic terror intensifies in the Soviet Karelia. Ethnic violence starts with denunciations.

Germans and Polish are sentenced to camps or to death, starting the purge of ethnic minority groups. When Stalin's persecutions are at their height, operations follow seemlessly each other.