In the wake of the horrors of civil war, the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges, the young Jewish boxer Ilya Goldinov and his wife, Feliksa, are looking ahead to a brighter future in Kyiv. Ilya, the top heavyweight boxer of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, is primed for victory as champion of the entire Soviet Union. Feliksa, a country girl and a star athlete in track, is deep in training for a major race. Then the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941 changes everything.

The Face of Fire offers a tapestry of Ukrainian life under the brutal Soviet and Nazi regimes—all based on declassified People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) files and Oleksii Nikitin’s family archive.