Aleksandr Bashirov

A street mutt and a circus dog team up for training inside the Russian space program to serve as the crew for a dazzling mission aboard Sputnik V.

Late winter 1953. The lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin's hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo), finds himself a target of the "Doctors' Plot": the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era.

In a Siberian village, a Soviet tank commander must save a German girl who's been living in an old steam engine in the forest for four years.