The Black Tulip is what the "Afgantsi" - the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan - call the plane that carried the bodies back to the Soviet Union. Opening at a Soviet army base in Kabul, the film visits an attack helicopter squadron, a firebase outside Kabul, and a guardpost near Kandahar. Then the film moves to the monument to the war dead of WWII beside the Kremlin wall, to a Moscow cemetery filled with dead from the Afghan war, and finally, to the heartbreak of a mother of one of the dead soldiers.