Vasiliy Grossman

The plot takes place in 1942-1943, during the defense of Stalingrad. The Jew Viktor Strum is a talented nuclear physicist working in one of the country's institutes on the creation of an atomic bomb. At this time, Strum's relatives die in Nazi camps and NKVD dungeons, and persecution begins against him. The inventor can only be saved by his scientific brainchild, which Stalin himself became interested in. The state needs such a powerful weapon as an atomic bomb. The scientist has to make a choice: to remain faithful to science and work for the "leader of the nation" or to abandon his vocation and be destroyed.

A Soviet documentary chronicling the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the turning points of World War II. Filmed on the front lines, it depicts the brutal devastation of the city, the resilience of its defenders, and the eventual Soviet counteroffensive that encircled and defeated the German 6th Army. Released internationally—with the U.S. version retitled The City That Stopped Hitler: Heroic Stalingrad—the film served both as a record of the Red Army’s victory and as a powerful work of wartime propaganda.

Klavdia Vavilova, a Red Army cavalry commissar, is waylaid by an unexpected pregnancy. She stays with a Jewish family to give birth and is softened somewhat by the experience of family life.

The film is set in old Yuzovka on the eve of 1905. After searching the Kolchugins' apartment, where money from the strike fund was hidden, the police arrest Anna Kolchugina and her lodger, the miner and revolutionary Kuzma. Anna's teenage son, Stepan, is forced to go to work in the mine. There he learns about the existence of the revolutionary underground and joins its struggle.

Locked away in the Jewish ghetto of an occupied Ukrainian town in 1941, a mother revisits her life in a last letter to her son.

The main character is Viktor Shtrum, a talented Soviet physicist who refuses to blindly follow his "comrades" by signing false documents and becoming a tool in the hands of an all-powerful state. During the war, Shtrum’s mother, Anna Petrovna, was sent to a concentration camp, but her letters continued to arrive for many years and help him remain more moral than those around him.

A band of determined Russian soldiers fight to hold a strategic building in their devastated city against a ruthless German army, and in the process become deeply connected to a Russian woman who has been living there.