Using their personal and professional viewpoints, filmmaker Alexander Mihalkovich along with the filmmaker and journalist Hanna Badziaka underscore the causes and consequences of the decades-old "tradition" of brutal bullying, torture, and murder as an instrument of control over Belarusian military conscripts.
When young Nikita is sent for a mandatory military service in 2020, he comes face to face with a generations-old deadly phenomenon of post-Soviet Belarus: dedovshchina (hazing), the practice of violent abuse and bullying that supposedly turns boys into men but which has instead created generational trauma deeply embedded in the country's present-day culture and identity.
Svetlana lives with this traumatic reality every day: her son, a victim of hazing, was found hanged at an army base two years earlier, and the identities of his murderers are not revealed to this day. In this country, where sons are disposable and crimes are easy to get away with, mothers emerge as tireless fighters trying to change the status quo.
Nikita and Svetlana's stories also serve as a frame showcasing furious street protests against the state-led violence rooted in hazing, which has become the very mechanism of fear the government uses to control its populace.
Badziaka and Mihalkovich capture a snapshot of a troubled, modern-day Belarus through the real-life experiences of mothers and new conscripts, interwoven with the living voices of their predecessors, taken from their letters home.