The series "Life and Fate" based on the novel of the same name by Vasily Grossman was released on television in 2012. Director Sergei Ursulyak and screenwriter Eduard Volodarsky in 12 episodes presented the audience with their reading of the novel, which was banned from publication in Soviet times. The plot revolves around the Battle of Stalingrad, which is directly or indirectly related to the fate of the characters in the series.
The film is set in 1942-1943. Heroes of several storylines, related by kinship, find themselves in different parts of the country, engulfed in the flames of war. And each person at this fracture of fate is faced with his decisive, fatal choice.
Scientist's Choice
In Kazan, a talented nuclear physicist, Jew Viktor Shtrum (actor - Sergei Makovetsky) works in an evacuated scientific institute. The scientist makes an important discovery that can lead to the creation of the atomic bomb. But the management of the institute is closing the project because of Shtrum's family ties with the "enemies of the people" and his nationality. Shtrum becomes an outcast and is forced to leave his job, yesterday's friends and colleagues turn away from him.
Suddenly, after a phone call in the scientist's apartment, Stalin's own voice is heard. The country needs an atomic bomb like never before: the leader wishes the scientist success, expresses the hope that nothing will interfere with the project. And immediately the former persecutors are ready to provide Shtrum as many people, funds, the best laboratory as he needs, so that he can continue his work.
Honest and conscientious Victor painfully chooses between the trampled dignity of a person and the creative impulse of a scientist. The choice is made: but returning to work, Victor feels that he has lost this battle.
Military choice
The theater of military operations is shown in the series through the eyes of Anatoly Shtrum (played by Nikita Tezin), the scientist's stepson. After graduating from a military school, the young lieutenant is sent to defend Stalingrad. In the very heat of the battle, he ends up in house number 6, which the soldiers under the command of Captain Grekov refuse to surrender to the enemy despite a direct order from the headquarters. Here an unexpected gift of fate awaits him: he meets the radio operator Katya, love flares up.
Lieutenant Shtrum is also faced with a choice - whether to give his comrades in house number 6 to the command judgment or return to them and Katya for certain death. Tolya makes the only right choice for himself - and death comes with the explosion of a German grenade. Katya dies instantly, and Tolya, waking up in the hospital, realizes that he has lost his love and refuses to live.
Lyudmila Shtrum, having traveled a long way to the hospital, hoping to find her recovering son there, cries at his grave, covering the ground with a downy shawl.
Woman's choice
Another relative of Shtrum, Evgenia Shaposhnikova (played by Polina Agureeva) also works in the evacuation in Kuibyshev. The young woman, despite the difficulties, is full of hope - she is in love with Colonel Novikov, the commander of a tank corps in the Urals. Driving through Kuibyshev to the front, Novikov proposes to Zhenya to marry him.
And here again the topic of choice in a person's life arises - Zhenya cannot afford to be happy: she worries about her ex-husband, Commissioner Krymov, who is sent to Stalingrad.
Later, when Krymov is arrested for anti-Soviet sentiments, Zhenya refuses his beloved in order to support her ex-husband in the dungeons of the Lubyanka - she cannot leave him alone with this misfortune.
It is Stalingrad, the place of the decisive battle in this war, that fuses disparate destinies into one whole - Tolya Shtrum gets into reconnaissance along with Krymov, Captain Grekov, who holds house number 6, once suffered because of Krymov's accusation. And so the fates of the fighters of Stalingrad develop in different ways - death, prison, or a happy return home, like that of Major Berezkin, who ends the film with a timid hope for the best.
