Set in 1914 at the dawn of World War I, the film follows Vladimir Lenin, Maksim Shtraukh, during his exile in Poronin, a quiet village tucked in the Carpathian foothills on Polish lands within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lenin travels there with Nadezhda Krupskaya, Anna Lisyanskaya, and her mother Elizaveta Vasilievna, and they had previously visited Poronin two years earlier before returning in the summer of 1914 after moving from Kraków, drawn by the village’s proximity to the border with the Russian Empire. The setting, bordered by mountains and along a frontier that mattered politically, frames a life that is at once secluded and intensely scrutinized.
As tensions escalate with the onset of war, Lenin becomes a figure of suspicion for the Austrian authorities. Eight days into the hostilities, he is arrested as a subject of a hostile foreign power and imprisoned, a dramatic turn that unsettles the local inhabitants who fear mob justice and the swift reach of imperial power. An Austrian Officer, Jerzy Nowak, embodies the friction between occupation and the fragile rights of a world already tipping toward conflict.
Despite an explicit order to report to the prison in Nowy Targ, Lenin delays his departure in order to dispatch urgent telegrams to influential Austrian social democrats. The plot centers on the maneuvering of these political networks, with one notable advocate among them who works to secure Lenin’s release. Victor Adler, a parliament member who lobbied the Interior Minister, argues that Lenin poses a greater danger to the Russian government than the minister himself, a line of argument that helps tilt the balance toward leniency and eventual freedom. The film portrays how diplomacy and political pressure can collide with rigid state control in a moment when every decision feels like it could alter the course of history.
On August 19, Lenin is freed and heads toward Switzerland, a turning point that concludes a tense chapter of exile, espionage, and wartime politics. The narrative uses Lenin’s arrest and the drawn-out efforts for his release to illuminate the broader drama of the era—how a single arrest in a remote border town can ripple outward, shaping conversations inside cabinets and among activists, and offering a microcosm of the wider battles that defined Europe at the start of World War I. The movie thus remains focused on the central arc of Lenin’s arrest and the hard-fought struggle for his release, presenting a richly detailed portrait of a fragile moment when personal fate and global history intersect.
