The year is 1962 and NASA are trying to put a man on the moon. In a remote corner of Siberia, a Soviet cosmonaut is heading in the other direction. Comrade Ivan Ivanovich is dropped into an extinct volcano in his exploration capsule, Little Orpheus, to explore the center of the earth. He promptly vanishes.

Three years later he emerges claiming to have saved the world. He has also lost the atomic bomb powering the Little Orpheus. He is taken to a top-secret bunker deep below the Ural mountains to be debriefed by the fearsome General Yurkovoi, a man so frightening even Stalin won’...