October 14, 1964… a young man is pulled from a Soviet prison cell – about to be executed. As, with dread, he awaits the bullet that could come from anywhere, Mika revisits his life and the strange sequence of events that brought him to this terrible moment: the Second World War (and the horrors he experienced as a Russian Jew in the clutches of the Nazis), his being saved by the Russian army, the years as an ardent young Communist, and, ultimately the woman he fell in love, married and then was betrayed by. Accused of her murder (which he hasn’t committed), Mika is sent east to a gulag (a prison without walls) where he befriends a Writer who becomes Mika’s friend and savior.

 

To keep Mika from giving up in and surrendering to utter hopelessness, the Writer tells Mika a story about a valiant Knight sent to fight the Crusades. Seeing himself as the knight and the knight’s journey as his own crusade, Mika survives and is pardoned by a member of the Communist party. Returning to Moscow, Mika finds nothing there of his old life and decides to leave for Israel. In Odessa, before boarding a boat, he bumps into his wife. Seeing that she’s alive and married to another man (betrayed by her again), Mika kills her – for real this time – and faces the execution that was always his fate.

 

Told with lyricism and a strong sense of metaphor that interweaves Mika’s story and the Knight’s, Storms of Time boldly presents Mika as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s own journey through the 50’s and 60’s – an epic struggle of individual will to survive the crush of history.