A young student comes to the community of Russian emigrants in Geneva. He is warmly accepted by then because they have received a message that he was an associate of the revolutionary who assassinated a leading official of the tsarist regime. However, nothing is what it seems at first glance.

Under Western Eyes is a story about a man who tried to sail through an authoritarian regime to have nothing to do with it, but coincidence prevented him from doing so. Is it possible to maintain a human dignity in totalitarianism without risking imprisonment, mutilation or death? Is it possible to survive in a repressive regime without being tainted by cooperation? And if the person gets into a situation where it is no longer possible to bury his head in the sand, does he have the right to send someone else to his death to protect himself? What will guilt do about the human psyche and self-evaluation? And how to survive a moral failure?