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In 1913, Marya Kalish, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish schoolteacher in Kiev, attempts to go to St.  Petersburg to nurse her father in prison, but she cannot get a passport because of a Czarist decree forbidding travel by Jews.  After she sees a Jewish prostitute traveling with a Russian wrestler, Marya pays a brothel madam to allow her to get a yellow ticket, which enables prostitutes to travel freely, but which, she learns later, stigmatizes them for the rest of their lives.  Marya finds her father dead in the prison and vows revenge.

In a St. Petersburg park, Baron Igor Andreeff, the womanizing chief of police, stops his nephew, Captain Nikolai, from attacking Marya after Nikolai prevented a drunken orderly from molesting her.  When Andreeff sees Marya's yellow ticket, she runs away.  Later, while traveling for a perfume company, Marya meets English journalist Julian Rolfe on a train, and he protects her from a lecherous man whom train officials put in her compartment because of her yellow ticket.  Marya then provides information to help Julian write articles for British and American newspapers that expose the yellow ticket system, Russian corruption, tyranny, and the participation of the government in the massacres of the Jews.  When Julian proposes marriage, Marya, ashamed of her status, refuses.

On the night that Austria declares war on Serbia, Andreeff, who desires to muzzle Julian, but does not wish to jeopardize international good will, discovers that Marya is the source of his information.  Marya relates her past to Julian, and they plan to marry, but when Andreeff sends a police agent to bother her, Marya goes to Andreeff's office to complain.  She overhears Andreeff, on the telephone, issue an order for Julian to be sent to Siberia, and when Andreeff offers to rescind the order if she will have sex with him, she shoots him with a gun he has kept as a memento of another assassination attempt.  Julian and Marya go to the English embassy and leave just as war breaks out.  In the confusion, the police are unable to stop them.