Count Rostov appears before the Emergency Committee and is sentenced to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol Hotel.

Count is stripped of his luxurious third-floor suite and escorted to a cramped servants' room in the hotel belfry.

A bold nine-year-old girl named Nina approaches Count's table at the Piazza restaurant and strikes up an unlikely friendship.

Nina surprises the Count by giving him her hotel passkey as a Christmas gift before leaving for the holidays.

Count climbs to the Metropol rooftop intending to end his life on the eve of his sister Helena's death anniversary.

Handyman Abram's bees return to the rooftop and their honey tastes of apples from Count's childhood home in Novgorod Nizhny.

Count takes a position as headwaiter at the Boyarsky and begins daily planning meetings with chef Emile and maître d' Andrey.

Bolshevik Party officer Osip Glebnikov privately requests the Count teach him about Western culture through monthly private meetings.

Nina returns to the Metropol to beg Count to care for her young daughter Sofia while she follows her arrested husband east.

After months pass without word, Count accepts that Nina will never return and raises Sofia as his own daughter.

Sofia is knocked unconscious falling on the hotel staircase; Count races out of the Metropol for the first time in over twenty years.

Count discovers that Sofia has been secretly receiving piano lessons from Piazza orchestra conductor Viktor Stepanovich.

Sofia is invited to perform piano in Paris with the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

Count serves the combined dinner of the Presidium and Council of Ministers and carefully overhears sensitive political discussions.

Count escapes the Metropol Hotel and travels to Novgorod Nizhny, where Anna Urbanova waits for him at a local inn.

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to lifelong house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel, stripped of his suite and confined to a cramped belfry room. He forms an unlikely friendship with a precocious young girl named Nina, who gives him her hotel passkey and teaches him to find freedom within walls. A decade into his captivity, feeling erased and forgotten, the Count climbs to the roof intending to end his life, only to be saved by a chance encounter with a handyman whose returning bees taste of his childhood home. Reinvigorated, he becomes a headwaiter at the hotel's finest restaurant and forms lasting bonds with the chef and maître d', while also beginning a decades-long alliance with a Bolshevik Party officer. When Nina leaves her young daughter Sofia in his care and never returns, the Count becomes a devoted father, ultimately orchestrating an elaborate plan to give Sofia freedom in Paris while gathering intelligence at a crucial government dinner. Count Rostov then escapes the Metropol himself, travels to the ruins of his childhood home, and reunites with the woman he loves.

The headline events of Count Rostov's decades-long house arrest and ultimate escape.

Count carefully selects which possessions to keep, choosing family heirlooms and his godfather's desk for his new belfry room.

An angry man in the barbershop cuts off one side of Count's mustache; Count calmly asks the barber for a complete shave.

Nina takes Count through the Metropol's hidden rooms, including the boiler room and a locked storeroom filled with ornate silver.

Count discovers a thin partition at the back of his closet and breaks through it to create a secret private study.

Mishka arrives at the Metropol bearing a special bottle of wine to toast the ten-year anniversary of the Grand Duke's death.

Nina convinces Count to crouch in the ballroom balcony and spy on a Bolshevik railway workers' assembly below.

Hotel manager Halecki apologetically informs the Count that staff will no longer be permitted to address him as Your Excellency.

Count intervenes when the Bishop recommends an unsuitable wine to a young couple on what appears to be their first date.

Andrey takes Count to the Boyarsky's wine cellar and reveals that all bottle labels have been removed under Bolshevik decree.

The Triumvirate assembles secretly after hours in the kitchen and finally prepares their long-planned bouillabaisse using rare smuggled ingredients.

A gaunt and limping Mishka arrives at the Metropol after years in a Siberian labor camp, shocking the Count with his appearance.

Count returns from Sofia's hospitalization to find that Richard Vanderwhile has left a phonograph and a collection of records in his room.

Katerina arrives to tell the Count of Mishka's death and delivers his secret manuscript cataloguing literary references to bread across centuries.

Count holds the Bishop at gunpoint, forces him to burn surveillance files on Count's friends, and locks him in the silver storeroom.

Viktor Stepanovich boards a late-night train to Helsinki carrying Count's hat, coat, and Finnish guidebook to plant a false escape trail.

In the early days of his captivity, Count Rostov carefully selects the possessions that will define his new life and suffers a humbling encounter in the barbershop that reshapes how he sees himself. He and Nina explore the hotel's hidden rooms together, and the Count uses that knowledge to secretly knock through his closet wall and create a private study. His oldest friend Mishka visits with a ceremonial bottle of wine, and the two men toast together in the Count's new sanctuary. Over the following years, the Count watches the hotel's wine cellar stripped of its labels by Bolshevik decree, until the Triumvirate defiantly stages a secret bouillabaisse dinner that becomes one of the happiest nights of the Count's captivity. In 1946, a broken and limping Mishka arrives after years in Siberia, and a phonograph left by an American visitor will quietly change Sofia's life. The pool closes with the Count confronting the Bishop at gunpoint, forcing the burning of surveillance files, and relying on Viktor Stepanovich to lay a false trail that makes the authorities believe the Count has fled to Finland.

The significant moments of daily life, friendship, and resistance inside the Metropol.

Count commits to mastering his circumstances and successfully arranges for fresh linens, his favorite soap, and a mille-feuille pastry.

Count and Nina sneak into his old suite using her passkey; a tea service on the table haunts him with memories of lost freedom.

Actress Anna Urbanova invites Count to her suite where, after dinner, she kisses him and leads him to her bedroom.

Count hangs up Anna's blouse before leaving her room; furious at the presumption, she refuses to speak to him for three years.

Count dines alone at the Boyarsky after Mishka cancels their plans, realizing throughout the day that people seem not to notice him.

Count wins a bar wager for a young British man by naming Russia's three great cultural contributions to a skeptical German.

Count reconnects with a humiliated Anna after her date publicly rejects her in the hotel lobby; she invites him upstairs and they begin a lasting affair.

Count briefly greets Nina in the hotel lobby as she prepares with fellow Bolshevik comrades to help collectivize farmland.

Sofia hides a thimble inside Count's own coat pocket during their hiding game; he bows in genuine defeat when he cannot find it.

Hotel administrators prepare to remove Sofia to an orphanage but abandon the effort after assuming she is a Party minister's illegitimate daughter.

Count brings Mishka's account of Russian brutality to Osip, who argues that all great national progress necessarily demands the greatest cost.

Richard Vanderwhile meets Count secretly in his former suite to propose an intelligence arrangement; Count declines but winds the stopped family clock.

Andrey reveals he fabricated his hand tremors specifically to ensure the Count could serve the critical joint ministerial dinner instead of him.

Sofia cancels her Paris performance saying she prefers to stay; Count invokes her mother Nina's philosophy about seeing actual horizons to convince her.

Count receives the prearranged signal confirming Sofia has safely reached the Paris embassy, then rises and walks out of the Metropol for good.

From the earliest days of his captivity, the Count chooses active engagement over despair, a decision that shapes every year that follows. A series of revelations about love, identity, and loss push him forward: his first romance with Anna Urbanova ends in three years of silence over something as small as a hung blouse, while his growing sense of invisibility in a city erasing his world nearly costs him his life. Renewed by a taste of his past and by the unexpected arrival of a child who needs him, the Count finds purpose and discovers that fatherhood requires an entirely new set of skills he must learn from scratch. The political world intrudes repeatedly, from a secret conversation about intelligence-gathering to a debate with Osip about whether history's cruelties are an acceptable price for progress. The pool closes with two final revelations: Andrey's quiet, loyal deception that makes the Count's escape possible, and the moment Count learns Sofia is safe in Paris — after which he walks out of the hotel for the last time.

The key decisions, discoveries, and emotional shifts that define Count Rostov's transformation.