Ostap Bender is alive again, after somehow surviving the assassination in the previous book. This time he hears a story about an underground millionaire, Alexandr Koreiko. Koreiko has made millions, a truly enormous sum, by living on 46 rubles a month, through various illegal enterprises, taking full advantage of the widespread corruption in the New Economic Policy period. Living in a city by the Black Sea, and working as an accountant for a government office in charge of economic management, Koreiko keeps his large stash of wrongly acquired money in a suitcase, waiting for the fall of the Soviet government, so that he can make use of it. Together with two associates, two petty criminals, and an extremely naive and innocent car driver, Bender finds out about him and starts to collect all the information he can get on Koreiko?s business activities.