The characters, while reminiscing about their individual role in the gradual building of the Communist empire from the Revolution onwards, and the tragedies they had to endure along with growing disillusionment with the Socialist dream, plot to kill the new up-and-coming personality in the Politburo and thus stop his Stalinist political vision meant to ensure social immobilism for all the Eastern bloc.

The first characters of the novel are introduced: a young, unnamed French student, and Evgeni Golozov, a Ukrainian polyglot born in 1918 who is a member of the Central Committee and the de facto personal secretary to Vasili Aleksandrovič Čevčenko.

Čevčenko, an old paralyzed man who lies in bed in the next car reading the Pravda, is the Éminence Grise behind the whole novel: born in 1895, he has fought in the Revolution of 1917, has met Lenin and Stalin and has been an executive of the Cheka and the GPU.

The guests board a motorcade and depart towards Strzyżów, to Tadeusz Boczek's country estate, a large mansion evidently expropriated from wealthy landowners during the Communist takeover of Poland.

Since then, Strojanov has had a recurring nightmare: a hideous monster-beast with sharp teeth, gray, stonelike skin and breasts similar to a female animal's mammaries, rising over a snow-covered landscape along with a red star.

The conversation is interrupted by Schütz, who coolly disapproves of his comrades' "puerile idealism" and proudly reminds them he voted against Kafka's rehabilitation from charges of "bourgeois pessimism".