On behalf of the fire

At the center of Alexei Nikitin''s new novel "In the Face of Fire" is the story of a Kiev Ukrainian-Jewish family. Ilya Goldinov is a boxer, dynamo, Ukrainian heavyweight champion. In the first months of the war Ilya commands a platoon of a partisan regiment, later fights in an infantry division of the Red Army, gets captured, finds an opportunity to be released. In February 1942, he is sent to Kiev on a mission of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR. His wife Felix evacuated to the Urals, but in November 1943 with the advancing troops, she returned to the city to find out the fate of her husband.The novel uses materials from various archives, including documents of the First Department of the NKVD USSR from the archive of the SSU, declassified in 2011.