科里亚（Nikolai Batalov 饰）与瓦洛加（Vladimir Fogel 饰）是一同参加红军的战友，后来分别做了建筑工人和印刷工人。科里亚与妻子柳达（Lyudmila Semyonova 饰）生活在莫斯科一间狭小的居室内，乐天的科里亚不曾留意妻子的琐碎不满。适逢瓦洛加奔赴莫斯科寻找工作，一时没有落脚之处，科里亚在离家施工的前夕收留了瓦洛加，安排瓦洛加睡在沙发上。在科里亚离家的日子里，瓦洛加同柳达发生了关系，获悉此事的科里亚拂袖而去，但家的舒适回忆让他最终返回并占据了沙发。两个男人和好如初之后，柳达发现自己怀孕了，但胎儿的父亲此时却无法确认，柳达选择了堕胎……

Coming as it does from the depths of the Stalinist regime, the Russian Road to Life is a remarkably optimistic film. A host of nonprofessional children are cast as Moscow street kids, left homeless by the Bolshevik revolution. They get into all sorts of melodramatic scrapes until they're rounded up by kindly, altruistic Soviet functionaries. The children are reformed (in the nicest possible way) and made useful members of society. Road to Life is simplistic in its solutions to society's problems, albeit no more so than the usual Hollywood product from the same period.