Childhood friends Tommy and Tuppence meet in London after having served in World War I. Recently "demobed", short of money, and with no job prospects, they decide to become adventurers for hire. Soon, they are employed by the British Government to locate a secret treaty signed before the war.
The true story is of Ivan Sanchin, the KGB officer who was Stalin's private film projectionist from 1939 until Stalin's death. Told from Sanchin's view, the sympathetic but tragically flawed hero, squirrel, maintains unwavering faith in his "Master" despite the arrest of his neighbors and his involvement with their daughter, his wife's affair with the chilling State Security chief Lavrentii Beria and her tragic decline, and the deadly political machinations within the Kremlin he witnesses firsthand.
