It by Sergei Ovcharov is based on the book "History of a City" by Saltykov Shchedrin, a well known parody of the history of the Russian and Soviety state. The author referred to his work as "a bureaucritic epic." Filmmaker Ovcharov proclaims in the opening credits, in a typically innocent tone which somehow reeks of sarcasm, that the film has been reconstructed from "material coincidentally found in the archive" of the Lenfilm studio. What follows from there is an experiment with the past and the present-historical events are re-enacted and intercut into a furious pastiche. Ovcharov plays with speed, lighting and muffled voices to produce a sort of false cinema verité. As key state figures appear and disappear, it becomes apparent that they are interchangeable-Lenin, Stalin, and everyone therafter are all the same person. The only thing that remains constant are the startling faces of the people. The film takes on the atmosphere of a shrill and tragic carnival which all ends in nothing-a giant IT. Ovcharov tries to explain: "Monsters populate the book. But that's contrary to real life. Sometimes the most repulsive people are outwardly very sympathetic. Which makes it even more difficult to see through them. We tried to make our heroes as sympathetic as possible, to show them not as executioners, but also as victims of themselves, of the administrative regulations, rules for living, and relationship to the people that they themselves created.