Moscow, Winter 1942. Commissar Nikolai Krymov has been denounced and arrested. He's taken to the dreaded Lubyanka prison in Moscow: a place where, in the past, he has denounced others.

Meanwhile his ex-wife Zhenya arrives in Moscow, to stay with Viktor and Lyuda, and to face the consequences of her actions.

Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant star in Vasily Grossman's epic saga.

Commissar Nikolai Krymov ..... David Tennant
Viktor Shtrum ..... Kenneth Branagh
Lyuda Shaposhnikova ..... Greta Scacchi
Zhenya Shaposhnikova ..... Raquel Cassidy
Marya Sokolova ..... Harriet Walter
Nadya ..... Ellie Kendrick
Katsenelenbogen ..... Ewan Bailey
NKVD Interrogator ..... Elliot Levey

With Simon Bubb, Elaine Claxton, Jonathan Forbes, James Lailey, Gerard McDermott, Chris Pavlo, Peter Polycarpou, Carl Prekopp, Alun Raglan and Susie Riddell

Dramatised by Jonathan Myerson.

Directors: Alison Hindell and Jonquil Panting

Producer: Alison Hindell

Set against the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman's huge novel charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war and is increasingly hailed as the most important Russian novel of the 20th century. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the manuscript itself was arrested. Grossman died in 1964, never knowing that his book would be smuggled to the West and eventually published in 1980.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2011. Show less