Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden is doomed to die in the dreaded Kolyma camps until, with the onset of war, he joins a penal battalion made up of murderers and criminals to fight the Nazis. They have been promised their freedom - but in order to earn this they must first shed their own blood in battle. Benya joins the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of ruffians are sent on a desperate mission which they are unlikely to survive. They charge a line of German tanks, breaking through into enemy territory. Lost behind enemy lines where Russian fights Russian and no one can be trusted, Benya struggles in a crucible of hell where renegades and traitors, Nazis, Cossacks and Italians soak the steppes with blood in the most terrifying moments in modern human warfare