Ivan Kachaniuk, Terence Stamp, a Ukrainian Cossack, defends his family in Central Ukraine's wheat- and sunflower-farming outskirts of Smila.
Years later, in 1932, Yuriy, Max Irons, the artist grandson of Ivan, marries his childhood sweetheart, Natalka, Samantha Barks, and studies at the Kyiv Art Academy. His family are independent Cossack farmers, "kurkuli," living off grain, sunflowers, and other crops until Joseph Stalin's collectivization campaign orders the Bolshevik Red Army to requisition 90% of Ukraine's harvest.
The State Art Institute is forced to replace art instructors with communist voices who censor Yuriy's work, condemning its expression of Ukrainian cultural identity as anti-Soviet. Yuriy storms out in disgust.
During a memorial in a pub for a friend who took his own life, a half-drunk aggressive Soviet captain insults Ukrainian folklore, music, songs, and dance, sparking a fight in which Yuriy stabs the captain in self-defense. He is then imprisoned in a brutal Soviet jail that houses scores of Ukrainian kurkuli—alongside Ukrainian nationalists and others Stalin deems Enemies of the Soviet state. From his cell Yuriy witnesses daily mass executions.
A sadistic prison commissar, Director Medvedev, demands Yuriy paint his portrait in exchange for more food and for his life, with Yuriy sensing that execution will follow as soon as the portrait is complete. In their second sitting, Yuriy kills the director by stabbing him in the throat with a paintbrush, then changes into the commissar's Russian uniform, seizes his pistol, and escapes during a blizzard while guards hunt him.
Back in Smila, Yuriy's wife Natalka and their family endure the terror of farm director Commissar Sergei Koltsov, who tries to rape her and wields food as a weapon. Natalka poisons his borscht with wild mushrooms and joins other peasant women in a Babsi revolt. Sergei survives and orders his Bolshevik troops to crush the uprising. Yuriy's family and the villagers are imprisoned in the church, now a torture chamber and prison cell.
In the northern Kyivan forests Yuriy meets Lubko, a desperately hungry boy, and the two help each other reach a cattle train stop toward Smila. That night they are joined by the Kholodnyi Yar (Cold Ravine) Ukrainian Cossack detachment. The next morning they wage a bloody battle as Bolshevik Gatling guns mow down the uprising, leaving heavy casualties on both sides.
Yuriy and Lubko slip aboard a cattle train filled with starving Ukrainian corpses and bear witness to mass starvation and death along roadsides and in pits. Nearing Smila they hijack a Soviet grain truck; a sympathetic Bolshevik soldier drives the truck and joins Yuriy's rescue mission, delivering grain to the hungry villagers. Yuriy, Natalka, and Lubko escape, while others in the family starve or are murdered by Koltsov's forces.
Chased onto another cattle train of Ukrainian corpses bound for fire pits, they race toward the Soviet border and the icy Zbruch River. They dive underwater to dodge bullets and cross into Polish-controlled West Ukraine, aiming for the city of Lviv and hoping for help from the priest Andrey Sheptytsky to trade Ukraine's vast pastures for the prairies of Manitoba, Canada.
