Leningrad, 1952. Another wave of Stalinist repression rolled across the country. Alexey, a talented orthopedist, works in a children’s hospital and specializes in bone diseases. Ahead of him lies a brilliant career. But everything changes when the hospital receives a ten-year-old son of the all-powerful narc leader Volkov, with a severe diagnosis. Alexey finds himself in a difficult situation. His colleagues don’t want to deal with this dangerous patient and find any excuse to refuse him, yet Alexey—an expert who has taken the Hippocratic oath—cannot leave little Yura without help. There’s no turning back for the doctor.
The novel by the famed English writer Helen Dunmore, “The Betrayal,” is written following the trail of the infamous “doctors’ plot.”