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The German invasion begins, his unit forgets him, and he moves in with Nyura, the village postmistress. When the district NKVD sends men to arrest him as a deserter, Chonkin and Nyura capture and hold them at rifle-point. Rumor turns this into 'Chonkin's gang', and a full army regiment is deployed against one confused private and a woman.
A surveillance system organized around finding enemies cannot read an unexplained person as a clerical oversight. It must read him as a hidden design. Each level of the hierarchy reports upward in threat language to justify its own vigilance, so a forgotten soldier grows, report by report, into an organized enemy force. The size of the response is set by the apparatus's need for enemies, not by the facts on the ground.
Chonkin never rebels. He keeps carrying out his last order, to guard the plane until relieved, because nobody relieves him. A system that runs on improvisation, forgetting and hypocrisy is exposed and disrupted most thoroughly by the one person who takes its instructions at face value. In a dysfunctional hierarchy, simple-minded loyalty can look exactly like defiance.
The village self-taught breeder Gladyshev tries to cross the potato with the tomato to create a miracle plant he names after the road to socialism. He pursues it with slogans, manure and faith rather than evidence. The episode satirizes Lysenko-era agronomy, where a result counted as valuable because it fit the political narrative, and failure was blamed on saboteurs instead of on the method.