An android rebels against her code. An old man conquers his fear. Together, they carry the one document that could bring down a regime.

In a near-future Russia, your phone app records every joke about the president and reports you before you put it down. An AI system processes everything a citizen says and does – and decides whether the police come knocking. Cameras track every face. Androids replace workers, guards, even archivists. And now the state has an army of machines trained to forge letters, falsify records, and rewrite the national archives from the inside. In five years, nothing authentic will remain. The next generation will worship executioners as heroes – and never know the difference.

Retired theatre scholar Aristarkh Sergeevich is seventy-five, blacklisted, and out of options – but he has found proof: a classified dossier that lays bare the entire operation. His only ally is Dasha, a domestic android who was never meant to think for herself. Something inside her is breaking free.

To get the dossier out of the country, they must cross a Russia that no longer forgives dissent – hunted by security forces, betrayed by smugglers, with nothing between them and the border but snow, darkness, and a final battle against combat drones on a frozen lake that will decide whether their freedom is earned or lost.

What 1984 imagined and Detroit: Become Human put on screen – set in a Russia that is far closer to the real one than you might think.

*** The author is a Russian emigrant who lost his homeland on 24 February 2022 and hopes that Ivanov’s Russia will never come to pass – whatever name it might bear.