Like most gen­tiles in Rus­sia, Prince Dim­itri Mark­hov, a mem­ber of the Impe­r­i­al Court, cares noth­ing for Jews. But when he sees the car­nage of the East­er Sun­day pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, he won­ders what these peo­ple had done to deserve such bru­tal­i­ty. His close friend, Tsar Nicholas II, tells him that the Jews brought it on them­selves because of their innate avarice. Dim­itri meets a Russ­ian doc­tor, Katya Golit­syn, who also knows of the slaugh­ter of the pogrom. This has an even big­ger impact on Katya when she finds out that her great-grand­fa­ther had con­vert­ed from Judaism to Chris­tian­i­ty. She now feels a per­son­al con­nec­tion to these oppressed peo­ple. Dim­itri and Katya fall in love and both are trans­formed by the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment to over­throw the tsar and his autoc­ra­cy. Dim­itri comes to real­ize that tsarist rule is respon­si­ble for Russia’s mis­ery, includ­ing the pogroms. He must make a choice between his loy­al­ty to Nicholas and the rev­o­lu­tion that will bring jus­tice to mil­lions of Russians.