共青团员瓦西里主动帮助农民购买拖拉机，建立集体农庄，并成为农庄的组织者和领导者。但他的行为却招来富农们的仇视。在一个宁静的夜晚，瓦西里与未婚妻在田野上幸福的约会，之后两人相互道别回家。瓦西里内心的喜悦之情溢于言表。不料却在途中被富农的儿子科马开枪打死。人们怀着悲伤的心情为瓦西里送葬。全村人民同仇敌忾，意识上觉醒了，新买来的拖拉机推倒 小片土地上的地界，全体村民都要求加入集体农庄，杀人凶手科马则发疯了，他得到了应有的下场。

Alexander Dovzhenko’s first sound film, revolving around the construction of a giant dam on the Dnieper River, is one of his greatest, though it was poorly received in the Soviet Union when it came out in 1932. It’s only one of the eccentricities of this lyrical and monumental feature that the title refers to three different characters, and it’s telling that the father of one of them, an illiterate peasant who proudly spends his time fishing and loafing while everyone else works, is treated with considerable warmth. (A sequence in which he’s frightened when addressed by an outdoor loudspeaker evokes Chaplin as well as Tati.) As in all of Dovzhenko’s best work, the style veers closer to lyrical poetry (its opening sequence about the river) and portraiture (a later segment introducing us to various workers) than to narrative, though it’s innovative in other respects as well: the final sequence includes some striking jump cuts almost 30 years before Jean-Luc Godard purportedly invented them in Breathless.