Just the Plague

A freezing night in 1939, two years after the height of Stalin's Terror. A train pulls towards Moscow. Among the passengers, Rudolf Maier, a leading scientist summoned, reluctantly, to give a report on his research into bubonic plague. Within hours, it becomes apparent that Maier has been accidentally infected, and everyone he has encountered on the journey must be traced and quarantined. The wheels of the state machinery begin to turn with terrifying efficiency as the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, rounds up dozens of people. Black vans scatter across the city. Against a background of political surveillance and arrests, is this a paradigm of routine oppression, or a necessary operation to contain a potential outbreak of the plague? Based on real events, this taut, gripping fiction from one of Russia's most celebrated and important living writers poses profound questions about the balance between individual liberty and repressive state power during a pandemic.