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A Bolshevik army officer and Uzbek who has been nursed back to health by a young Uzbek woman to whom he is now married, gains responsibility for the local village in 1929. He is urged by comrades in Tashkent to have the local women drop their chadors and veils but he is also told that he should not force this on anyone. His wife declines to take off her veil, so a 14 year old girl steps forward to set the example, over the objections of the local Muslim clergy and most of the village men. After the girl is killed, and the commissar is shot, his wife takes him to the hills to nurse him back to health once again. She begs her husband to leave the village. Instead when he decides to return, she is pressured by her father to continue to wear the veil.