The paper reveals the thematic content and plot structure of the Russian short stories written in the 20th century’s first three decades. It presents part of the ongoing project aimed at a comprehensive study of the Russian short stories of this period, encompassing their thematic, structural and linguistic features. This particular period is targeted because it was marked by a series of dramatic historical events (Russo-Japanese war, World War I, February and October revolutions, the Civil War, formation of the Soviet Union) that could not but affect Russian literature and language style. Within the project, a corresponding text corpus has been created, currently containing several thousands stories and thus allowing for a wide coverage of texts and their computer processing. On its basis, a random sample has been selected, serving as a testbed to probe preliminary observations and hypotheses. It is used in the paper to identify prevailing themes, both major and minor, manifest and latent, as well as characteristic narrative structures and to trace the way they kept changing over the three decades. This helps to pinpoint certain features and tendencies which may be of interest to literary theorists and other scholars.