On that summer day in 1937, the young commissar Boris Bibikov said goodbye to his wife and daughters and got into the black official car that was waiting for him outside the house. It was the last time his family saw him. The rising party official was arrested by Stalin's secret police and executed for a series of crimes against the Revolution. His wife Marfa ended up in a gulag as an "enemy of the people," leaving behind Lenina and Lyudmila, the new "orphaned" victims of Stalin's purges. The two girls prematurely experience the harsh side of reality.

They are caught in the whirlwind of World War II, separated and wandering in the depths of the steppes, only to reunite by chance, after some time, in a remote orphanage. Lyudmila never loses her courage. Even when, at the height of the Cold War, she sees her beloved Mervyn Matthews being deported after a dangerous "game" with the KGB's scarecrows, she persists, repeating in every difficult moment the phrase that fills her with strength: "We do not have the right to be weak. Life will crush us and no one will hear our voices."

Years later, Owen Matthews, the son of Lyudmila and Mervyn, searches for his family's roots. A thick file buried in the basement of the former KGB headquarters in Ukraine with the inscription "Boris Lvovich Bibikov" and the love letters exchanged almost daily by his parents for six years, hidden in a trunk, will help him piece together the fragments of his family history, and also sketch the portrait of Russia itself, from the rise of communism to the present day.