'You attempt your home-grown welfare and the results are like this. Look: drug addicts, delinquents and the dregs of society.'<BR>In a faceless city in the depths of present-day Russia a young boy dies. Women in the street are drunk, fight and demand sex. The schoolboy Maksim makes his way through this urban hell, drawn into it one moment, repelled the next. His only retreat is into a private world moulded by himself, out of which springs a final act of reckless courage.