''Great is the Soviet Union, vast its territories, warm its entrails...''
1959. Whispers of dissidence are spreading in the U.S.S.R. Texts published in the West are circulating in samizdat, tormenting the secret police. Lieutenant Ivanov of the K.G.B, under pressure from his enraged superiors, is handed the case.
Leads emerge, flare up, vanish. Years pass. ''Abram Tertz'' publishes another short story, a new novel, mocking the competent authority. Shielded by his fierce wife Maria Vasilyevna Rozanova, Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the Soviet Union''s most renowned and brilliant figures of resistance, waits in his wired apartment, drinking, sure his days as a free man are numbered.
But as Rozanova continues to taunt Ivanov with her cheerful intransigence, a crisis of confidence opens up within the regime''s resolve, causing the young lieutenant to wonder, ''are we actually as competent as we claim to be?''''
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