In October 1961, the KGB went to the writer Vassili Grossman to seize the manuscript of his novel "Life and Destiny." Built on the model of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", this book traces the fate of a family during the war. From Moscow to the ruins of Stalingrad, from the Ukrainian ghettos to the gulag, it is a great Russian epic written at the height of men, populated by ordinary heroes and tyrants, historical figures and anonymous people. Grossman bears witness to the darkest hours of Stalinism. It exposes the cogs of the implacable totalitarian machine and denounces the perversion of the ideal of 1917.